As I start to think about this year’s classes one of my chief excitements is meeting new students and learning more about the students I’ve had before. Working with students is an endless process of discovery, each a new source of knowledge. I often say that every person is a library, with different subjects in different areas housing the knowledge from personal experience. There’s a physical movement area, one person plays tennis, and another can’t get off the couch. Tastes and experiences in food vary widely. One might have been in and out of the hospital with serious medical problems. Another may research world affairs and agonize over injustice. Educational background tuned certain priorities. The personal mental life has a path all its own. The trail of choices each person makes in the cyber-realm, through phones, game consoles and computers, reflect what a person cares about and craft a highly individuated point-of-view and network of connections. And then there is a philosophy about being I can sense in a student’s art, that may have an intellectual or emotional history and cultural background that reveals a way of responding to the world. This perspective is the truth from a particular place in larger being.
Understanding that everyone’s perspective can add to our own, and that “gaining perspective” is always considered a good (even when it hurts) offers a way to have constructive discussions with people of widely differing views, appreciating what each has to offer our common understanding.
The competition to have the right idea is a construct of linear verbal thinking. Visual thinking can be cooperative because its hallmark is perspective. Building perspective is a goal that increases wisdom. In a wonderful talk by Dave McCandless on “The Beauty of Data Visualization” (http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html) he points out how well designed charts of information can reveal importance and meaning far better and quicker than other methods of presentation. It’s an idea that’s time has come. The word “infographics” is starting to pop up in general conversation. We’re grateful when someone combs through mountains of data and designs it in an understandable form on a single page like McCandless did with health supplements. Amounts can be shown as size and instantly compared. Understanding is led by our sense of proportion, similarity and difference. Huge advances in the understanding of world problems could begin with visualizations of information about the most complex issues. Our visual skills are there to be tapped. Multiple maps within our brains record our personal history so we instinctively understand the one-to-one correspondence in terms of location. We can be shown what something means and point others’ attention to what we think needs it. We’re on the threshold of a visual revolution that will provide the necessary tools to navigate an increasingly complex world.
And in my personal world I’m looking forward to a new landscape of ideas created by the different views of a range of new students and what each has to offer our common understanding.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Envisioning
Anyone who doesn’t think of themselves as imaginative has only to look at the content of their minds when they worry. A big component of worrying is visualizing bad outcomes, from minor elements out of order to large-scale disaster. Worst-case scenarios are part of planning, whether intentional or of the self-doubt variety. On the positive end we daydream, and try out pleasant situations and invent new relationships. Clearly both are creativity at work. This capacity to project ourselves into the future and invent scenarios that develop the events that are currently unfolding is a triumph of evolution. A person who worries about the worst that can happen doesn’t think of it as creative, but the combination of future awareness and multiple possibilities is pure imagination. A certain amount of worry is an important aspect of planning. We need to visualize complex tasks and prepare for what’s needed. When we worry too much, we’re using our highest human powers to torment ourselves. I’ve read that excessive worrying is connected to superstition, reflecting an underlying belief that to think obsessively about a situation in advance can somehow deflect the adverse outcome. Though superstition is considered a thoughtform left behind in the course of mental evolution, its patterns persist under new names. We express our fears in mental images. My sister-in-law said she envisioned the worst so that whatever happened if it wasn’t the worst would seem good, and if it was then she’d be prepared. This is just one way we are always tempering, treating and modifying our emotions with images in our mind. Many modes of therapy have been developed that utilize this capacity, focusing on producing positive and healing images. What we see in our mind’s eye can have as powerful affect on the body as actual experience.
Imaging information aids intellectual understanding as well. I recently heard a woman on the radio who made her living fishing in the Gulf of Mexico call into a show about testing fish for oil contamination. She asked if they would publish where they’ve tested on maps, putting it “in layman’s terms”. Looking at a map one can see in an instant which areas have been declared safe. The endless stream of numbers that had been published so far did not make the overall situation clear. Since knowledge is mapped by location in our minds, seeing is understanding. I’ve heard visual thinking referred to as common sense. It’s the day-to-day life intermingling of the images in our head with the images in our surroundings. Plotting a new route to work when the regular road is blocked, sensing when an argument between friends is about to get out of hand and shifting their attention to other things. We can retrace our steps to find something we’ve lost because we have the space of our lives envisioned within us. Our ability to hold many relationships in our mind at once depends on locating them together in images.
We aren’t able to evolve this powerful capacity because, not happening in words, it goes unnoticed. A student said to me with assurance, “All conscious thought is in words.” But these mental images are conscious and affecting. We understand the meaning a situation has for us through the images we produce in relation to it.
The dominance of verbal language is diminishing as our connection to the cyber realm of information becomes more visual. Linear menus shift to sitemaps because a sitemap shows the relationship between the options – and seeing is faster than linear processing. Looking at art should be part of visual literacy. Since so much of the instant assessment we make with our eyes has to do with the feeling of things – what’s harmonic or off-kilter- attention to art will sensitize us to deeper levels and larger archetypes than we get from commercial media. Every one of us has a powerful imagination we’re using all the time. Cultivating it is a crucial part of developing minds that can cope with the future.
Imaging information aids intellectual understanding as well. I recently heard a woman on the radio who made her living fishing in the Gulf of Mexico call into a show about testing fish for oil contamination. She asked if they would publish where they’ve tested on maps, putting it “in layman’s terms”. Looking at a map one can see in an instant which areas have been declared safe. The endless stream of numbers that had been published so far did not make the overall situation clear. Since knowledge is mapped by location in our minds, seeing is understanding. I’ve heard visual thinking referred to as common sense. It’s the day-to-day life intermingling of the images in our head with the images in our surroundings. Plotting a new route to work when the regular road is blocked, sensing when an argument between friends is about to get out of hand and shifting their attention to other things. We can retrace our steps to find something we’ve lost because we have the space of our lives envisioned within us. Our ability to hold many relationships in our mind at once depends on locating them together in images.
We aren’t able to evolve this powerful capacity because, not happening in words, it goes unnoticed. A student said to me with assurance, “All conscious thought is in words.” But these mental images are conscious and affecting. We understand the meaning a situation has for us through the images we produce in relation to it.
The dominance of verbal language is diminishing as our connection to the cyber realm of information becomes more visual. Linear menus shift to sitemaps because a sitemap shows the relationship between the options – and seeing is faster than linear processing. Looking at art should be part of visual literacy. Since so much of the instant assessment we make with our eyes has to do with the feeling of things – what’s harmonic or off-kilter- attention to art will sensitize us to deeper levels and larger archetypes than we get from commercial media. Every one of us has a powerful imagination we’re using all the time. Cultivating it is a crucial part of developing minds that can cope with the future.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Sixty Today
A commercial I saw yesterday had a guy saying “I know sixty is the new forty” then going on about how young he felt inside. What bothers me about this is the clear underlying assumption that younger is better. I found myself thinking back to a conversation with friends when I was a young adult where we speculated about the age we felt we were inside. Most were saying younger or a little older, but I found myself saying sixty. Maybe I’d always felt older inside but there was also the feeling that it would take me a long time to do what I wanted to do (not that I had any idea of what that was). I’d read that philosophers didn’t come of age until their sixties, so that seeded the belief that some aspirations took longer than others. My grandfather was my favorite person throughout my youth, and age seemed to be a part of the radiant equanimity I admired so much in him. Gaining in years led to the achievement of a state of mind and approach to living that couldn’t be rushed.
The claim to feeling young is a tacit agreement that young is better. I feel energetic, excited about life and more full of love than I ever was when young. Not only was young not better, young was being lost in the woods. It puts unfair pressure on young people who are supposed to be having the “best years of their lives” before they “waste their youth”. In such a complicated world, we might expect that the necessary skills for living would take time to acquire.
Our culture creates fear of age with terminology of loss as a marketing tool. When people are convinced that aging means losing something, their attention is focused on what will give it back. It’s a strategy that debilitates people’s attention to the actuality of their present life and the new experiences and meaning of the moment. Running after youth is a form of regression, not growth. The cultural view of aging focuses on what’s lost, as though the natural fading of some faculties is something to be fought rather than something that can be learned from and understood in an entirely new way. To me the losses are minor compared to the gains. I look at aging as a process of accumulation. Everything we’ve been is still there and available to us as past experience. Like the rings on a tree record the history of the tree, and the tree grows wider and stronger and taller, our memories and accumulated knowledge make us stronger, enable us to rise, to gain perspective through our increased experience. This helps me feels more comfortable and at ease in the world. I’ve increased my “clearing is the forest” in the words of Joseph Chilton Pierce and understand myself more as active patterns in the world than as material being.
So today I come of age. Maybe I’m a real late bloomer, but it’s taken me this long to begin to synthesize what I’ve learned into some coherent ideas, and twenty years of meditation to calm the tangle of anxiety that characterized my youth. I’m excited about the possibilities I’ve prepared for myself and rejoice to see my grandfather’s attitude toward life coming into reach. I’m happier and more engaged than I’ve ever been. What could be better than to be here now?
The claim to feeling young is a tacit agreement that young is better. I feel energetic, excited about life and more full of love than I ever was when young. Not only was young not better, young was being lost in the woods. It puts unfair pressure on young people who are supposed to be having the “best years of their lives” before they “waste their youth”. In such a complicated world, we might expect that the necessary skills for living would take time to acquire.
Our culture creates fear of age with terminology of loss as a marketing tool. When people are convinced that aging means losing something, their attention is focused on what will give it back. It’s a strategy that debilitates people’s attention to the actuality of their present life and the new experiences and meaning of the moment. Running after youth is a form of regression, not growth. The cultural view of aging focuses on what’s lost, as though the natural fading of some faculties is something to be fought rather than something that can be learned from and understood in an entirely new way. To me the losses are minor compared to the gains. I look at aging as a process of accumulation. Everything we’ve been is still there and available to us as past experience. Like the rings on a tree record the history of the tree, and the tree grows wider and stronger and taller, our memories and accumulated knowledge make us stronger, enable us to rise, to gain perspective through our increased experience. This helps me feels more comfortable and at ease in the world. I’ve increased my “clearing is the forest” in the words of Joseph Chilton Pierce and understand myself more as active patterns in the world than as material being.
So today I come of age. Maybe I’m a real late bloomer, but it’s taken me this long to begin to synthesize what I’ve learned into some coherent ideas, and twenty years of meditation to calm the tangle of anxiety that characterized my youth. I’m excited about the possibilities I’ve prepared for myself and rejoice to see my grandfather’s attitude toward life coming into reach. I’m happier and more engaged than I’ve ever been. What could be better than to be here now?
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Current Choices
The action of selection is what we call “free will”. Riding multiple currents beyond our control, we are constantly making choices that determine the nature of the ride. Choices about direction are as simple and automatic as where we look in any given situation, what gets our attention. Once engaged we choose among the potentials of that situation as it unfolds. This is where self-awareness comes in handy and increases the available choices. If you’ve been paying attention to your patterns of reaction and the situations that result, you can choose a path that is not the automatic one of the past.
The new mammalian layer of the brain flows into the neocortex, so named because it’s the newest. It is where the perception of the future begins, and with perception of the future comes anxiety. There are two ways we handle anxiety. One is retreat into older layers of the psyche that deal with fear. This means withdrawing or defending. The other is to do something—anything- to move forward. As Alfred Adler said, the important thing is to get moving. That’s why exercise alone will improve general mood and mental function. But a bigger group of connections to the pleasure center is from our most human powers, the prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain. Evolution has built in an appetite for challenge and novelty, more reward response as we move the mental energy toward to front of the brain. We’re meant to use and develop our capacities, whatever they are, to grow as individuals. It’s the growing that feels good, extending our abilities, without thinking of the outcomes or results. Envisioning the future shapes the goals, but getting too attached to the outcome disconnects us from the process- being present to what’s happening at the time. And the current of time includes plenty that we can’t envision in advance so attention to the actual is a very important first choice.
Many fields of action influence our position in the current. The circumstances of work, family, friends, are each unfolding in a location alive with patterns. Our connections through computer networks, the moods and health of our mind and body all are factors in the place we find ourselves and from which we navigate via the selections we make about where we’re going. We adapt to the changes in the current or it wears us down. When conditions are bad the only choice we may have is the attitude we can take, but we can keep the energy in the evolved intelligence, the front of the brain if we’re looking for what’s to be learned and how we can use that knowledge. When Viktor Frankl was working at forced labor in horrible conditions, he envisioned himself standing in front of an audience giving a speech about how he survived. Imagination into a future that makes use of the current lesson created a brain chemistry that stimulated his ability to survive.
Increasing our freedom in the realm of ideas depends on having more possibilities from which to select and construct our own. The battle of right and wrong ideas is about who has the power to impose their ideas on others, the power to limit the scope of ideas.
Every time you hear someone cut off a topic of conversation as beyond discussion they are trying to assert power over what we’re allowed to think, but it is only through discussion and the hybrid thoughts that grow there that we can gain perspective and break free of the limitations of rigid, right/wrong categories and the anxiety that comes with them.
Helpful ideas spread from all parts of the globe. I’ve been enriched by Tai Chi and Lao Tzu, yoga and my neti pot, France (the country), and philosophers and thinkers from everywhere. The range of perspectives allows me to see more patterns and create a personal view that depends on having that many choices. If we drop the stultifying barriers inherent in fixed ideologies and allow the full range of the human mind to influence us, how could we not evolve as a species.
The new mammalian layer of the brain flows into the neocortex, so named because it’s the newest. It is where the perception of the future begins, and with perception of the future comes anxiety. There are two ways we handle anxiety. One is retreat into older layers of the psyche that deal with fear. This means withdrawing or defending. The other is to do something—anything- to move forward. As Alfred Adler said, the important thing is to get moving. That’s why exercise alone will improve general mood and mental function. But a bigger group of connections to the pleasure center is from our most human powers, the prefrontal cortex in the front of the brain. Evolution has built in an appetite for challenge and novelty, more reward response as we move the mental energy toward to front of the brain. We’re meant to use and develop our capacities, whatever they are, to grow as individuals. It’s the growing that feels good, extending our abilities, without thinking of the outcomes or results. Envisioning the future shapes the goals, but getting too attached to the outcome disconnects us from the process- being present to what’s happening at the time. And the current of time includes plenty that we can’t envision in advance so attention to the actual is a very important first choice.
Many fields of action influence our position in the current. The circumstances of work, family, friends, are each unfolding in a location alive with patterns. Our connections through computer networks, the moods and health of our mind and body all are factors in the place we find ourselves and from which we navigate via the selections we make about where we’re going. We adapt to the changes in the current or it wears us down. When conditions are bad the only choice we may have is the attitude we can take, but we can keep the energy in the evolved intelligence, the front of the brain if we’re looking for what’s to be learned and how we can use that knowledge. When Viktor Frankl was working at forced labor in horrible conditions, he envisioned himself standing in front of an audience giving a speech about how he survived. Imagination into a future that makes use of the current lesson created a brain chemistry that stimulated his ability to survive.
Increasing our freedom in the realm of ideas depends on having more possibilities from which to select and construct our own. The battle of right and wrong ideas is about who has the power to impose their ideas on others, the power to limit the scope of ideas.
Every time you hear someone cut off a topic of conversation as beyond discussion they are trying to assert power over what we’re allowed to think, but it is only through discussion and the hybrid thoughts that grow there that we can gain perspective and break free of the limitations of rigid, right/wrong categories and the anxiety that comes with them.
Helpful ideas spread from all parts of the globe. I’ve been enriched by Tai Chi and Lao Tzu, yoga and my neti pot, France (the country), and philosophers and thinkers from everywhere. The range of perspectives allows me to see more patterns and create a personal view that depends on having that many choices. If we drop the stultifying barriers inherent in fixed ideologies and allow the full range of the human mind to influence us, how could we not evolve as a species.
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