Friday, December 24, 2010

May Peace Prevail On Earth- A Near Death Experience

May Peace Prevail On Earth

(I (Kevin) will be telling this story, since I was the main character of this incident.)
We (Will, Amanda, Charlie, Anjel, and myself (Tina is a town ahead)) left Garberville, California around noon. There was a very light drizzle coming from the clouds and we started climbing a hill on our bicycles. We were traveling on the 101 Highway going south. The five of us were riding a bit spread out, but all within a half mile of each other.
I was going over some thoughts in my head about plans for the winter. I gave my daily thanks for all the amazing people and experiences I have on a daily basis. I also have a semi-spiritual practice of thinking about death and impermanence, which I do almost daily. I said to myself, “Today is a good day to die.” In saying this I feel at peace with my current life and the possibility of it disappearing. Little did I know that I would have a direct test of this practice in the next five minutes.
I was cruising along about two feet to the right of the shoulder line. I have become completely acclimated to cars whizzing by, so I don't flinch when I hear them. BOOOM! Time stood still. I saw a luminescent white light which engulfed me very briefly. Then I looked up from the ground. I knew I was about to die. I saw Charlie jogging over, but it was in slow motion. I was in a complete state of peace. I said to Charlie, “Tell everyone I love them. Its all good.” He was in shock. I literally felt like I was just a raindrop merging with a vast ocean. I said smiling, “Put all my money into buying people Eckhart Tolle books. That's all I want.”
A bit of time passed, and I looked down at my body and saw that I could wiggle my toes. “Wait I'm not dead?,” I thought. I immediately started sending chi (life-force energy) throughout my body. I learned from Eastern medicine that the faster you send chi to an injury, the better the chance it has to heal. More people came over and huddled around me, and I asked them all to please send chi to my body. The woman who was driving the car which struck me came over to me. She was hysterical, and apologizing. I was still in a state of peace. I told her, “It's OK, please don't worry, just send me good energy.” I gave her several hugs while laying on the ground.
I could feel that my body was injured, but I didn't interpret it as pain. The paramedics showed up and asked me, “What's your biggest complaint?” I said smiling, “Well my book hasn't been published yet.”
I glanced down and saw that my knees were covered in blood. It seemed like my knees took most of the impact. I continued to send chi throughout my body,was “Om”-ing, and my friends did the same. I feel that this practice (similar to Reiki) vastly reduced my injuries. I had a copy of A New Earth By Eckhart Tolle amongst my gear and it had landed nearby. Will read a little excerpt to me and everyone and that helped me feel more relaxed amidst this chaotic seen. The paramedics then took me on a stretcher to the ER.
I got checked out by some nurses and a doctor and they bandaged my knees. Instead of getting immediately stitched up, I requested that I first meditate for an hour or so to heal myself from the inside out. My friends arrived a bit later and did some massage and energy work on my injured body. Up to this point I had not cried at all and was just feeling happy to be alive, and so wishing everyone a happy Thursday. As my friends gave me tender loving care, I was overwhelmed by a wave of emotion. My whole body began vibrating intensely. What came next was an extremely profound experience.
I thought of how I could literally be gone from this world right now. I thought of all the silly things we worry and stress about, and how futile they all are. I became keenly aware of the immense suffering currently on this planet. I felt the truth of the teachings in Eckhart Tolle's books and also in The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein. I cannot describe these truths here in this blog, but I feel it is my duty on this planet to share them. Both authors write and speak of “the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible.” While laying in bed I viscerally felt that a more beautiful world is indeed possible, and we are the ones who will create it. I believe that this is happening through a transformation in human consciousness. I simultaneously felt the profound beauty of all life on Earth as well as the intense suffering of so many beings on this planet.
Directly after being struck by the car, I told Charlie to put all my money into sharing books like these, because that is what I believe to be truly important, not all the frivolous distractions and worries which drain so much of our time and energy. I felt the wrongness of western culture which has gotten completely confused on what is important in life.
Western culture values profit over people, products over natural spaces, and money over well-being. I saw that this is not how life has to be. At the peak of this experience I felt like a bubble of pure energy. I kept repeating "May peace prevail on Earth." After returning into my normal state I feel the only thing worth doing is to work for peace.
I believe that two ways towards peace are the books I mentioned:The Ascent of Humanity is available free online in audio and text at ascentofhumanity.com . Eckhart Tolle's books are in most bookstores.
As far as my health goes, I have no broken bones, and I have been walking around today, and will be at full health in a couple of weeks. I am very grateful to still have the gift of life. Thanks for reading, and please cherish the wonderful gift of life that you have every moment of every day. Peace, Kevin

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

2012, Return to Quetzlcoatl; Quantum Realities

While working at a Swiss patent office a century ago, the physi­cist Albert Einstein proposed, in his theory of relativity, that space and time were not separate domains, but deeply interre­lated. He discovered that the gravitational force of physical objects actually curved space and bent time as well, and laid out this hypothesis in ele­gant formulae that contradicted the core of the Newtonian worldview, in which space and time were conceived of as absolute dimensions, with no connection to each other. In place of Newton’s “absolute space” and “ab­solute time,” Einstein defined a four-dimensional space-time continuum,in which no perspective is privileged. According to the physicist Mendel Sachs, “Relativity theory implies that the space and time coordinates are only the elements of a language that is used by an observer to describe his
environment.” The shock of this discovery was quickly compounded by other shocks.

The roots of physics can be found in the thought of the ancient Greeks, who made inquiries into “physis,” the essential nature of things. As modern physicists developed the analytical and experimental tools to probe deeper into the fundamental building blocks of matter, they were surprised— at times, appalled—by what they found. They found that matter was largely composed of empty space. If you were to blow up an atom to the size of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, the neutron at its center would be the size of a grain of salt. The electrons whizzing around that neutron cannot be considered objects in the traditional sense of the term. They do not exist the way matter exists, but only evince “tendencies to exist.”

At this quantum level, physicists discovered that their attempts to meas­ure the phenomena they were studying affected that phenomena, which led them to realize that consciousness had to be integrated into their un­derstanding of matter. The perceiving subject could no longer be separated from the objects under investigation. The physicist Werner Heisenberg codified this understanding in his Uncertainty Principle: With quantum objects such as photons and electrons, it was impossible to determine both their position and their momentum. If the scientist chose to observe mo­mentum, the quantum object appeared as a wave. If the scientist chose to determine position, the quantum object appeared as a particle. But in ac­
tual fact, it was neither, or both at the same time—or it could be consid­ered a transcendent “wavicle,” only existing in the Platonic realm of ideas. “The path of the electron comes into existence only when we observe it,” wrote Heisenberg. According to the physicist Niels Bohr, “Isolated mate­rial particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observ­able only through their interactions with other systems.”

Physicists discovered that the quantum world seemed to disregard the rules of classical physics in a number of startling ways: As probability waves spreading through space, photons and electron “wave packets” are found at more than one place at the same time, only manifesting or collapsing to a particle when an observation is made. The physicists were also confronted with “quantum jumps”: electrons vanishing from one point and appearing at another, without passing through the space in between. Experiments also
established quantum nonlocality or Action at a Distance: Once-correlated quantum objects remain linked even when separated by vast distances. If the probabilistic wave of one object is collapsed to make a particular obser­vation, the other object is affected as well. The change happens immedi­ately, with no time lag for a message to be transmitted through space, indicating that the objects are connected through a transcendent domain.Bohr once declared: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.” In the world of “quantum strangeness” revealed by quantum mechanics, time, space, and consciousness are intimately interrelated and inseparable, and there exists a
higher dimension, outside our perceptions of space-time, in which every­thing is interconnected.

According to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as an observer: “‘Participant’ is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the ‘observer’ of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can’t be done, quantum mechanics says it.” That consciousness is embedded in the processes it perceives, continually chang­ing them while it is changed by them, was an insight conveyed to me, and many others, during psychedelic trips.

Wheeler was responsible for one of the most mind-bending explorations of this new realm: the “delayed choice” experiment. Wheeler utilized mir­rors to split a beam of light into two paths that crossed each other, and cre­ated an apparatus that could register the photons as particles that take a single pathway, or as probabilistic waves that travel both routes at the same time. Once the light beam had passed the point where it split into two, ex­perimenters made the decision whether or not to measure the wave aspect.
This choice seemed to have a retroactive effect on the nature of the beam, which still revealed itself either as wave or particle, depending on the sci­entist’s choice. The experiment demonstrated that quantum phenomena exist only in potentia, until a decision is made, by conscious choice, as to how they are to be perceived—even if this choice is made retroactively. Al­though this immediate and nonlocal effect happens beyond the speed of light, Heisenberg realized it does not violate the laws of causality because no signal can be transmitted in such a way. “May the universe in some sense be ‘brought into being’ by the participation of those who participate?”
Wheeler wondered.

The existence of a four-dimensional space-time continuum means that what we perceive as the linear direction of time is only an illusion created by our particular perspective. As the physicist Arthur Eddington put it, back in the 1920s, “Events do not happen; they are just there, and we come across them.” Elaborating on this concept, Louis de Broglie wrote:

In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc. . . . Each observer, as his time passes, discovers, so to speak, new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world, though in reality the ensemble of events constituting space-time exist prior to his knowledge of them.

Such a perspective is identical to the mystical or shamanic understanding of reality. It matches the Hopi perspective on time, in which “All time is pres­ent now,” and events unfold according to a preset pattern. The model of space-time presented by relativistic physics is a “timeless space of a higher dimension,” wrote Fritjof Capra, who found this idea echoed by many mystical traditions. “All events in it are interconnected, but the connections in it are not causal.” Instead of causal connections, the model of events in quantum mechanics is probabilistic and discontinuous, defined by the per­ceptions of a conscious observer.

Only a few Western philosophers had made the daring leap to such a perspective, rejecting materialist dualism and linear causality for a world created by our participation in it, among them Nietzsche:

In the “in-itself” there is nothing of “causal connections,” of “ne­cessity,” or of “psychological non-freedom”; there the effect does not follow the cause, there is no rule or “law.” It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, for-each-other, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we project and mix this symbol world into things as if it existed “in itself,” we act once more as we have always acted—mythologically.

As Wheeler put it bluntly: “There is no space-time, there is no time, there is no before, there is no after. The question what happens ‘next’ is without meaning.” As if anticipating Wheeler, Nietzsche also wrote: “Every power draws its ultimate consequences at every moment.”

After my father’s death, I inherited his life’s work as well as his library. Among the books on his dusty, homemade shelves were many on art his­tory, philosophy, and physics—these last including a number of once­-popular titles comparing the findings of quantum mechanics with the basic concepts of ancient spiritual traditions. These included the 1974 bestseller The Tao of Physics by the physicist Fritjof Capra, and Mysticism and the New Physics (1983) by Michael Talbot. Despite its concern with “the essen­tial nature of things,” the subject of physics had always seemed abstruse to me, and I had never pursued this area of inquiry. The modern fragmentation of knowledge into many disciplines, each with its own specialist discourse, gives us the belief, or illusion, that we cannot attain an integrated understanding of our reality. As the poet Wal­lace Stevens put it, “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.” I as­sumed that the concepts of physics, based on complex equations and experiments with super-accelerators, could not be reduced into ordinary language, made sensible to a generalist such as myself, without deforming them. I knew, however, that these concepts had exerted a powerful effect on my father’s vision, taking permanent hold of his imagination. His early works depicted simple rectangles on a flat picture plane, calling to mind the early nonobjective explorations made by Russian Suprematist painters such as Kasimir Malevich. In his later work he was obsessed with volume and mass, painting gigantic menhir-like shapes of shimmering color that curved and fused with the fields around them. He was seeking to capture the space-bending effects of gravity, the interpenetration of diaphanous forms suggesting energy in constant transformation.

In The Tao of Physics, which developed out of the author’s initial in­sights during explorations of psychedelic “power plants,” Capra explores various concepts in Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism and correlates them
with the worldview implied by the discoveries of quantum physics. He finds that these ancient traditions reflect the quantum understanding of in­terrelated and inseparable phenomena, of the centrality of consciousness to the world, and the unity of all appearances in a domain that transcends space-time. Although Hinduism describes a pantheon of gods, all of these gods are ultimately expressions of a single principle, Brahman, the unitary consciousness that pervades everything, “the one without a second.” In Hinduism, the world of appearance in which we live is “lila,” the divine play of the gods. “Brahman is the great magician who transforms himself into the world and he performs this feat with his ‘magic creative power,’” Capra writes. This “magic creative power” was given the name “maya” in The Rig Veda, one of the most ancient Hindu scriptures. “The word ‘maya’—one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy—has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the ‘might’ or ‘power’ of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of any­body under the spell of the magic play.”

The space-time reality we perceive from our limited perspective is lila, manifested through maya, the magical power of the gods. The transcendent consciousness, beyond all conceptualization, outside of space-time, the source of space and time, is Brahman. In the 1920s, Arthur Eddington was one of the first physicists to propose that Relativity Theory suggested “the stuff of the world is mind stuff,” and that this “mind stuff is not spread out in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived
from it.”

Enlightenment or awakening, in the Eastern traditions, is the individ­ual’s experience of reconnecting with this ultimate ground of being, the “suchness” (Thathagatta) that supersedes all dualisms. As the Buddhist sage Ashvaghosha put it two thousand years ago: “Suchness is neither that which is existence, nor that which is nonexistence, nor that which is at once existence and nonexistence, nor that which is not at once existence and nonexistence.” Capra points out that such paradoxical descriptions sound identical to the physicist’s attempts to grasp the slippery essence of quantum objects, which are neither wave nor particle, do not exist yet do not not exist.

Capra found it interesting to follow the “spiral path” of Western sci­ence’s 2,500-year evolution, from the mystical philosophies of ancient Greece, to a materialistic dualism and mechanistic worldview that was in sharp con­trast to Eastern thought, and now returning to the integrated perspective of the ancients: “This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.” The left-brain rationality of modern science, based on objective experiment, had confirmed the right-brain in­tuitions of mysticism, based on subjective experience.

Materialist critics of Capra’s perspective argue that quantum effects are limited to the submicroscopic quantum level, and that “macro objects,” the stuff we see in our world, continue to obey the rules of Newtonian physics. This, however, is not really the case. The laws of quantum physics, its quirks and quarks and discontinuous breaks, also govern the macro level. Macro objects obey the wave equation for matter, discovered by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, their size reducing the probabilistic spread of quantum
effects to an unnoticeable amount. The Newtonian equations still maintain their effect on the macro level, as a “special case” of the new relativistic physics, but they are fuzzy approximations. The world we live in is funda­mentally a quantum one.

In our daily lives, do we experience quantum effects such as nonlocal­ity, action at a distance, and so on? Is that what the statistical evidence for psychic phenomena—such as telepathy, remote viewing, and precognition—indicates? Is it possible that synchronicity is also one of these effects, reveal­ing a deep-buried interrelationship between time, space, and consciousness? Is consciousness itself a quantum phenomenon?

In Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind (1987), the physi­cist F. David Peat makes this argument. “Synchronicities are the jokers in nature’s pack of cards for they refuse to play by the rules and offer a hint that, in our quest for certainty about the universe, we have ignored some vital clues,” he writes. A one-time collaborator of the physicist David Bohm, who developed the “holographic universe” theory, Peat finds, in his study of synchronicities, a link between physics and psychology. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in his 1951 essay on the subject, defined synchronicity as an “acausal ordering principle.” He noted that these episodes multiplied in his own life, and the lives of his patients, dur­ing periods of intense psychic transformation. In Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he recalls numerous such episodes—such as awakening from a startling dream in which a bullet passed through his head, to learn the next day that one of his patients had committed suicide by shooting himself in the head during the night. Elaborating on the con­cept, he wrote:

Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated pro­cesses; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.

Studying these events, Jung found it probable that mind and matter were, ultimately, “two different aspects of one and the same thing.” For Peat, synchronicities give us glimpses into the deeper patterns of nature, indicating an organizing intelligence underlying the seeming chaos of daily events. They are a part of an order of psychic reality that we rec­ognize, intuitively, when they occur to us, as profound glimpses or sudden revelations of the nature of mind: “Synchronicities, epiphanies, peak, and mystical experiences are all cases in which creativity breaks through the barriers of the self and allows awareness to flood through the whole do­main of consciousness. It is the human mind operating, for a moment, in its true order and moving through orders of increasing subtlety, reaching past the source of mind and matter into creativity itself.”

Peat wondered if these episodes, instead of occasional reaches into a different order of cognition, could become a continuous flow of synchronic phenomena, experienced collectively. If that was the case, synchronicities would suggest “an intimation of the total transformation that is possible for both the individual and society.” In such a shift—which Peat equated with the “ending of time” described by various spiritual traditions—different “time orders” would be experienced simultaneously; spontaneity, syn­chronicity, and creativity would become the rule, rather than the rare ex­ception. The old model of linear and mechanistic causality should give way to one more accurately based on “transformations and unfoldings.” In Mys­ticism and the New Physics, Talbot similarly concluded: “We may suspect a slow and continual change of axis from causality to synchronicity.” He quoted the Rig Veda: “Without effort, one world moves into another.”

My personal exploration of psychedelics and shamanism had attuned my sensitivity to such episodes—and this seemed to lead to an exponential increase in their frequency. I found this, at first, to be bizarre and destabi­lizing. From my previous mechanistic or materialist worldview, in which all events were accidents of physical processes colliding over time, I found my­self catapulted into a realm of occult correspondences where signs seemed to multiply endlessly, suggesting the possibility of a schizophrenic break, in which the mind collapses from an overload of signifiers and uncanny signals—from an oversaturation of meaning.

According to Peat: “It is as if the formation of patterns within the unconscious mind is accompanied by
physical patterns in the outer world. In particular, as psychic patterns are on the point of reaching consciousness, then synchronicities reach their peak; moreover, they generally disappear as the individual becomes consciously aware of a new alignment of forces within his or her own personality.... It is as if the internal restructuring produces external resonance, or as if a burst of ‘mental energy’ is propagated outward onto the world.”

If consciousness somehow cocreates such events, it is only through the subjective perspective of an individual that the episodes can be observed and correlated. Like a quantum object that can be registered as either wave or particle, such temporally resonant phenomena exist only through our activity of conscious discrimination. It is our psyche that determines if an event reveals a deeper order of significance, or if it is ignored as part of the quotidian flux. I found that attuning myself to synchronicities, learning to separate signal from noise, required the development of a kind of intuitive skill, and revealed an aesthetic dimension. Meaningful synchronicities, ones that suggested some new pattern forming, seemed to occur just beyond the thought or idea I was currently holding, and were accompanied by a psy­chic sensation akin to a key turning in a lock. Some of these synchronici­ties involved conjunctions between personal episodes and world events that seemed to me both numinous and inexplicable.

Letter to Northeastern: Creativity and Education

As I sit here watching snowflakes thud to the earth outside the window and thinking about what I want to communicate in this proposal to create an alternative “educational path”, I am continuously reminded of how my experience with the education system (with university as well as the preceding 12 years) has failed me, and how modern education in the Western world continues to fail us all. Two salient questions then, as they relate to my proposition and future experience here at Northeastern, are: “How and why is education failing us,” and, “What can be done to change the existing educational framework to achieve what students themselves feel is important in this process?” The primary reason for writing this proposal is to elude the uncompromising rigidity of this system’s academic curriculum with the hope of shaping my experience to accommodate my goals, my needs, and my ambitions; expecting anything less would shatter our true potential as human beings and undermine the essential nature of education, which, contrary to our present notions, is more than the crass meritocracy that dictates who ‘succeeds’ and who ‘fails’ based upon certain assumptions about what ‘learning’ is. The Latin root of the word education, ‘educere’, means to ‘draw out from within’, or to ‘lead forth’, and refers to the vital, engaging process that it’s meant to be- a process of unearthing and discovering who you are, what your true gifts are, and how you can most joyfully use these gifts to participate in the world around you.

 And so, I want to begin this ‘communiqué’ with a discussion revolving around some possible answers to the “two salient questions” above, as I believe it will present a fitting introduction to my academic proposal (which only peripherally involves education), as well as expose an interesting perspective as to how this all plays out in a ‘real-world’ context.

___________________

Here is an important question that is often asked by education reformer Sir Ken Robinson: How can children/students be prepared to take their place in the economies of the 21st century, given that we can’t even anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week? I would modify this question to read: How do we prepare our children to live in the 21st century, given that we can’t even anticipate what the world will look like in 5 years time? Forget the economy. Rivers, oceans, and watersheds are being poisoned (in the U.S. alone, 40% of waterways are undrinkable; 75% of fisheries fished at or beyond capacity), forests and arable land are being annihilated to make room for cattle ranches, oil drilling facilities, and parking lots (80% of the world’s forests are GONE; in the U.S., less than 4% remain intact; in the Amazon, 2000 trees are cut down every minute), and unabated patterns of consumption are continuously eroding the ability of ecosystems to sustain life. From listening to mainstream media in this culture, you’d think that the economy was more real than the natural world. If the ecological crisis weren’t so real, I’d feel jaded and apathetic incessantly focused on such a ‘hackneyed’ talking point (only because of the lack of concern shown on the part of people in this culture, as if our wellbeing has nothing to do with the health of the so-called ‘environment’).  With the unprecedented explosions in population comes unprecedented drain on the Earth’s ‘resources’ and carrying capacity, as well as unprecedented demand for innovation, fresh thinking, and revolutionary ways of helping people connect with themselves and have lives of purpose and meaning.

Nota Bene:

Although I tend to view the ecological crisis as a kind of crux or focal point of a broader convergence of crises- social, political, economic, etc.- I feel as though none of these issues is separate from the other. I believe that these crises are inevitable products of how we’ve constructed our worldviews, cosmologies, belief structures, and understandings about the nature of reality, which are the raw origins of our social systems. My proposed study track will be an examination of these cosmologies, and how a possible “shift in consciousness” can help us access new realms of thinking and being, new internal dimensions of spirituality, imagination, creativity, artistry, and wisdom. It will be a revival of archaic values and animistic appreciation for life’s beautiful interconnectedness- a restoration of both indigenous erudition and deep ecology with a modern technological underpinning. I will discuss this later in more detail.

So, returning to the subject of modern educational paradigms, the point I’m getting to is this: our school systems are trying to meet this extraordinarily unpredictable future with what they’ve done in the past. As John Taylor Gatto eloquently argues in his books, the current system of education was designed, conceived, and structured for a different age- in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution. With the exception of a few alternative school programs like the ‘Waldorf’ pedagogy (created by Rudolf Steiner), the paradigms of Western education have remained relatively analogous since their inception, when they were modeled on the interests of industrialism. “Schools are pretty much still organized on factory lines,” says Ken Robinson, “with the ringing of bells (obviously doesn’t apply to university), the specialization into separate subjects. We still educate children in batches; we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? It’s like their most important thing about them is their date of manufacture.”

Well I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines. Or at different times of the day. Or better in smaller groups than in large groups. Or sometimes they want to be on their own. If you are interested in the model of learning, you don’t start with this production line mentality. It’s become increasingly about conformity, especially when you look at the increase in standardized testing and curricula. We’ve spent years at school being told, ‘There’s one answer, it’s at the back of the book. And don’t look. And don’t copy, because that’s cheating. Outside of school this is called collaboration.’

I am intimately familiar with the protocols of the public school system, having been a victim of its ruthlessly rational standards and criteria for 12 years. I agree completely with Sir Ken when he argues that as children progress through this system, they are educated out of their creative capacities. There was a study done in the book, Break Point and Beyond, about ‘divergent thinking’ – the ability to think “laterally” about questions, to interpret questions in multiple ways, and to see lots of possible answers- in which different age groups were asked, “How many different uses can you think of for a paper clip?” If you scored above a certain level (by perhaps theorizing, ‘What if the paper clip were 200 feet tall and made of foam rubber?’), you were considered a ‘genius’ at divergent thinking. In the first group of kindergarten students, 98% scored above genius level. In the next group, students between the ages of 8 and 10, 32% scored above the mark. Only 10% of the 13-15 age group qualified for ‘genius level’, while less than 2% of adults older than 25 qualified. While divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity, it is certainly an essential capacity of it, and we see that, particularly in public schooling before university, children are being subjected to distorted assumptions about the nature of learning while being stripped of what the world needs most at this turbulent time- creative and innovative ways of thinking.

Although there is a great leap of difference between the public school system and university education structure, I believe that Northeastern, and most mainstream university systems, are still operating under fundamentally flawed presumptions about society, intelligence, ability, economic purpose, and above all, what people need. Every year, enormous sums of green pieces of paper (money) are spent on education, yet academic performance is decreasing [the prime example being ‘No Child Left Behind’] and dropout rates (especially in college) are skyrocketing. But there’s a noteworthy theme running through this, that also permeates the university setting, and that is: we are educating from the outside in; we are asking, ‘What does the economy need,’ ‘What does the university need to streamline its efficiency and turnover rate’, ‘What do teachers need to make their jobs easier,’ ‘What kinds of policies can we enact to keep everyone in line with our agenda,’ and making students conform, rather than building an educational model around the richness of imagination and the unique learning sensitivities of each child. One of my criticisms of Northeastern is that it seems the academic process has become more about ‘earning’ a degree and joining the job market than the ‘drawing out from within’ of human potential and self-awareness. It’s more about progressing through the system following arbitrary, standardized benchmarks of achievement (grades, tests) than cultivating the innate creative capacities of each student. Learning is not a mechanistic procedure of uniformity and homogenization, but rather an organic, delicate process that depends upon feelings, relationships, motivation, value/self-value, identity, community, and purpose.

As part of this proposal, I am asking for a ‘Pass/Fail’ mode of grading to be implemented for all of my classes. I feel that the conventional letter grade system has profound implications and consequences within the sphere of learning, which fiercely restrict the potential of students to fully grasp and explore the realms of their minds and those available in academia. I think this is rather important to discuss a bit further, as it carries supreme relevance to the idea of thinking differently about human capacity.

In the Spring of 2010, I took Peoples and Cultures with ________, whom I think is a shrewd, perceptive, and gifted scholar, not to mention an all-around great person with whom to just chat and discuss ideas (in spite of the near impossibility of tracking him down). Our class curriculum consisted of three ethnographies (studying the Ju’hoansi, Sioux Native Americans, and the Rastafarian movement), and three exams (on each book/ethnic group). Here is the everyday drill for students: wander into class hall half-asleep with Dunkin’ Donuts coffees and iPods; open notebooks and mechanically begin copying _____’s words as they come out of his mouth (an occasional raising of a hand to ask, ‘Will this be on the test?’ followed by a return to vigorous note-taking); on the nights before exams, tirelessly memorize copious notes (____’s words) to regurgitate them onto a piece of paper the next day; remain after class to discuss with ____ grades, tests, and ‘performance’ in the course; then promptly exit the building to return to an apo-academic life that usually has little to do with what’s going on inside the classroom.  Is this not true? We have very little time outside of school (homework, classes, etc.) to wrap our heads around the material in a way we can relate to, as ‘extracurricular’ activity is normally dedicated to leisure- to get on with the business of life: enjoying ourselves. Rarely do professors ask, “What do you guys think about this?” or, “How does this relate to what you want to achieve?”

Now, I realize this was an introductory Anthropology class with 150 students, but, as I communicated to ____ on several occasions, this is the predominant model of this system, which I don’t think is conducive to true, authentic learning. I really enjoyed the ethnographies, and I extracted a lot of valuable things that I felt were important as they related to my interests, my goals, and my opinions about the material’s significance; however, I did not take notes (it’s not very difficult to remember concepts if you actually want to remember them- for yourself, not to pass a test), which were the basis for exams [if you were to record Alan’s lectures and allowed to use it during exams, you would not miss a question]. My exam grades were as follows: C+ (Ju’hoansi), D (Rastafari), A- (Sioux). I would have received a C had I not elected to petition for the ‘Pass/Fail’ option. But all that matters in this system- all that students have to show for to smack on resumés- is this omnipotent ‘letter’, as if your total achievement (intellectually, existentially, experientially, how this affects your growth as a person, etc.) is encapsulated in this arbitrary symbol. I learned an extraordinary amount from reading the ethnographies and listening to Alan: how spirituality and animism form integral parts of indigenous culture; how most older cultures outside of Western civilization possess remarkable, ‘deep ecological’ values; how an intimate connection to, and knowledge of, the Earth can create beautifully simple and sustainable patterns of living and being. Are these realizations worth a C+? Can anyone (or any institution) tell you the value of your achievement?

I doubt we’d be very concerned about these grades, class ranks, and test scores if this external evaluation didn’t have such a significant influence on our paths and decisions (I know I wouldn’t!); in fact, I think we’d be exploring the world with a lot more purpose and energy if this desensitizing method of assessment were discarded. But it’s more complicated than that. The educational structure is so securely fastened to the foundations of our competitive economic/social systems: many of the underlying tenets of Capitalism- the ruthless, aggressive notions of Social Darwinism- are neatly embedded within the very fabric of modern education. At a very young age we’re pitted against one another as the fulfillment of this broader story of a barbarous, unforgiving, dog-eat-dog world- that is really a vicious myth about the nature of human social systems and the fictitious cultural beliefs that form the bedrock of Western industrial civilization. One consequence of this, as it relates to education, is that millions of brilliant children think they’re not, because they’ve been judged against these spurious assumptions and values. Another consequence (as it relates to grades and test scores) is that by the time we’re adults, we’re so frightened of being wrong that we’ve completely lost the capacity to be creative. Now, this isn’t to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but, as Sir Ken Robinson says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, then you’ll never come up with anything original.”  If you’re not prepared to be wrong. We run both our companies and education systems like this- stigmatizing mistakes- and it results in systematic damage, both on an individual and societal scale.

When I first mentioned the idea of a ‘Pass/Fail’ grading system to _________ of the Interdisciplinary Studies department (via email), she replied bluntly, “The letter grade system will be applied to all courses.” Why? Why must we always put these burdensome limits on the way we grow, and decline unflinchingly when someone questions these limits? Perhaps one concern would be that the ‘Pass/Fail’ model would lower academic standards; I am absolutely certain of the contrary (at least as it applies to me). I’m reading several books at the moment: Original Wisdom: Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing by Robert Wolff, On Nature and the Environment by Jiddu Krishnamurti, The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein, and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, which I am constantly re-examining. I don’t need any authority figures assessing, evaluating, and mandating that I read these books because I want to read them. I love reading them, and I love contemplating ways of ending the tremendous suffering that’s inflicted on the Earth and its inhabitants every day by ‘modern industrialism’ (and the vulnerable, egoic minds that run it). My point is this: people do their best when they’re doing what they love… when they’re in their element. Just as children don’t need to be persuaded to run or play or sing or shout, and just as adults don’t need to be coerced into making love, people don’t need to be convinced to explore the world; one doesn’t need to be convinced to pursue one’s passions. It’s just a matter of providing and cultivating environments in which these passions can burst forth into existence. Grades are created to either, a) cajole people into doing things they’d rather not do by transporting ‘value’ and ‘achievement’ to arbitrary, external standards for the university’s convenience, or b) support the economic systems by filtering students into certain categories of ‘qualification’ for job markets. I wonder what percentage of working adults would do their jobs for free. I’d guess less than 10%. Maybe less than 5%. When the primary motive for ‘work’ is to earn green pieces of paper [mainly to spend as ‘consumer capital’ and entertainment instead of investing in land bases and sustainable living practices], you are no longer connected with yourself, no longer living with purpose.

We, as human beings, are gifted with the incredible capability of imagination- to bring into mind things that aren’t present, to hypothesize about things that have never been- and to strip this extraordinary talent from us is to plunder our very humanity. Creativity and innovation require certain conditions to blossom. Thus far, we’ve done a terrific job of smothering these roots of inspiration and imagination, but they still lie dormant under the surface as seeds of growth, waiting for the appropriate ethereal ethos in which to explode into being! What’s beautifully stunning about it is that no one knows what these conditions are: each person contains his/her own uniqueness and unparalleled capabilities. This is the elegance of the sublime subjectivity of the world- it flows in organic patterns of distinctiveness and unpredictability, which naturally conflict with the rational, mechanistic, analytical premises of our culture (and education systems). We continually fail to confront the aforementioned crises (ecological, social, political, economic, educational) because we are not fundamentally changing the underlying assumptions of the culture. These assumptions, if we look closely enough, are far from the central truths of reality that governments, lawmakers, and scientists espouse, but rather reveal themselves as malleable ideologies that are created within our minds. It’s just a simple matter of changing our lens through which we view the universe. And so, changing our culture (and educational systems) is not about reinforcing the old model of outdated conceptions of what is, but reconstituting our sense of self and synergizing it with a new vision of the more beautiful world we all know is possible in our hearts.