Varieties of Human Experience

            In this blog and the next two blogs I want to focus on three kinds of experience (i.e pleasurable, engaging, meaningful) that researchers in the field of Positive Psychology say that human beings generally seek. Each of these experiences is important for a Joyful Education.  The topic of these experiences is taken up in more detail in my forthcoming book, Renewing the Sacred.  This blog will briefly present thoughts on pleasurable experiences. 

In the teacher’s consciousness the child has been sent to the telescope to look at the stars, in the child’s consciousness he has been given free access to the glory of the heavens.

Alfred North Whitehead: The Aims of Education

           In children of my grandchildren’s age ( four and three) pleasurable experiences, engaging experiences, and meaningful experiences are very much the same thing. Often adults close off or get closed off from the second and third tier of experience, as our lives become smaller and more concretely factual and, therefore, harder to change. That is partly because many adults have lost the child's sense of wonderment and awe. This difference in consciousness between child and adult is brilliantly captured by Whitehead in the quote above. What a difference between looking at stars and perceiving the glory of the heavens? How much more engaging and meaningful is this experience? How much more pleasurable? Small children are always engaged, time flows for them in that state that can only be called the eternal present, and they are ever involved in meaningful learning activities and thus are full of pleasure. So they laugh a great deal.
          As we grow older, these three types of experience can get separated out into the hierarchy of stages that I just listed, but that is because we have enough “negative” or painful experiences to know that there is a real and not just a momentary difference. But also as one moves up the ladder of these stages nothing essential is lost. I mean that there is little chance of engagement without it also being pleasurable and there is no meaning without real engagement, because meaningfulness is created: it is not usually given or manufactured from thin air. Thus all the elements become consciously reintegrated into one experience, so that, an engaging experience is also pleasurable, and a meaningful one is often, but not always, both pleasurable and engaging. More to come on this in the next posts.
          By pleasurable experiences I mean all the usual pleasures we understand--i.e. not only sensory pleasures, but also the pleasures we associate with words like fun, amusement, relaxation and the distractions provided by an omnipresent entertainment industry. But the “happiness” experienced with amusements and entertainment ends when the amusement ends. So if our lives have no enduring real pleasures we seek more of these immediate pleasures. There are diminishing returns with seeking such pleasures. All thrills diminish over time because it takes more to get the same result. Psychologists call this merry-go-round the “hedonic treadmill” and addiction of some sort is often the unhappy outcome. Thus the search for happiness is, at this level, really fueled by great unhappiness. This stems from confusing “feeling good” with being happy. But the pursuit of happiness is really to hide one’s unhappiness--signers of the Declaration of Independence take note. Aristotle said: “A virtuous life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement.”
          School is, often, a frustrating and joyless place where students are to do what they are told and have few ways and opportunities to participate in decisions that affect their lives or to fully use their talents. There is little pleasure in the classroom, whatever may be happening in other parts of school and at other times of the school day. Teachers often try to counteract this situation by making lessons fun—meaning amusing or recreational. Whatever short-term benefits reside in this approach, and there are some, in the long-run this is a mistake. The mistake is not in the attempt to make learning fun, which is laudable, but in thinking that fun is enough to turn the tide.
          To say that learning should be pleasurable is not to confuse education with entertainment. The difference is this: good education, like good art, should change you in some way. It should leave you with something you did not have before the encounter. It should improve you, provoke you, stir you up or confound you, enlarge your mind and heart in some way. It should bring forth what is inherent in the spirit, not deprive you of it. But it cannot leave you unchanged. Entertainment does not pretend to change, though great change could be the result. But I mean that the intent of entertainment is not to change you, but to amuse you, to relax and divert the mind for a time.
          Thus, good education is not about getting a little humor into the classroom—though the more of that the better. Children do not need more entertainment. Children and youth do not long for amusement, for they are sated by it. If they long for anything it is to shake off the lethargy that society imposes upon them to keep them docile and passive. Passivity is bred into them. Passivity distorts human nature and thought. It is only when the original nature is subverted by false programs of development that the result is distorted and abnormal. It is this terrible environment that fuels the search for pleasure as a kind of opiate to dull the pain of the inauthentic life.
          What good teachers do is make lessons engaging and meaningful. There are strategies to accomplish this that I will share next post. Share some of your ideas before the next post.

  

Science, Play and Joyful Education

            One can find information on almost any topic on the internet.  This week I came across two articles related to my explorations into a new joyful foundation for education.

            The first was from The Huffington Post January 18, 2011.  It is by Joe Robinson, author of the book, Don't Miss Your Life: Find More Joy and Fulfillment Now.  I have not read the book, but his article, The Key to Happiness: A Taboo for Adults?, provides a kind of foretaste of the book.

            Mr. Robinson’s article is about the beneficial effects of play, especially for adults.  He writes: “Adults are oblivious to what they knew as kids -- that play is where you live.

Grownups aren't supposed to play. We have problems. We're too busy. We have important things to do. It turns out, though, that there are few things more important to your happiness than frequent doses of play. As a study led by Princeton researcher Alan Krueger found, of all the things on the planet, we're at our happiest when we're involved in engaging leisure activities. Why not do more of that?”

            I agree wholeheartedly with this thought, and I discussed the same in my booklet, Joyful Education.  Here are some other good quotes from the article:

 

“We live in a culture obsessed with wringing an external result from everything we do. Play doesn't operate on that metric. It's not about the end but the experience. This has made play one of the last remaining taboos, an irrational deviation from gainful obligation. What we don't realize, though, is that it's precisely the lack of a quantifiable result that allows play to tap a more meaningful place that satisfies core needs and reveals the authentic person behind the masks of job and society.”

           

“Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that the fixation on making everything productive and rational cuts us off from the world of the spontaneous that is home to real knowledge. Wisdom, Bateson believed, is to be found in the realms outside intentionality, in the inner reaches of art, expression and religion. "The whole culture is suffering from overconscious intentionality, overseriousness, overemphasis on productivity and work," psychologist and cultural explorer Bradford Keeney told me. "We've forgotten that the whole picture requires a dance between leisure and work."

“Studies show that play reflects more of who you are than your work. When you're engaged in activities of "personal expressiveness," ones that are self-chosen and that reflect intrinsic goals, you're operating from the "true self," says Alan Waterman of the College of New Jersey.” 

“Play is 100-percent experience.  It's done for the intrinsic pleasure, for the participation.”

“This tonic we write off as trivial is a crucial engine of well-being. In its low-key, humble way, play yanks grownups out of their purposeful sleepwalk to reveal the animating spirit within. You are alive, and play will prove it to you.”

            I think we can all benefit from more true play.  There are many ways to do this.  When I was teaching I would often ask students to discuss or write short essays on topics such as: What would you do if you didn’t have to ‘work’?  Another set of questions was: What is your dream?  What do you need to achieve it?  Got some good answers, too.  With the dream questions, though, I learned there was a third and most important question.  Only to focus on achieving one’s dream is the “they lived happily ever after” scenario.  But life goes on after the story ends and the book is closed.  The real question turned out to be: What do you do after you achieve your dream?  Answering this question brings you out of dream and into higher vision.

            The other article, by Judy Willis, a former neurologist and currently teaching at Santa Barbara Middle School, is titled, The Neuroscience of Joyful Education.  See what I mean about finding any topic on the internet?  It starts out with the statement, “Brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too.”  She goes on to use her training in neuroscience to generate insights into learning, teaching methods and curriculum organization.  For example, “The truth is that when we scrub joy and comfort from the classroom, we distance our students from effective information processing and long-term memory storage. Instead of taking pleasure from learning, students become bored, anxious, and anything but engaged. They ultimately learn to feel bad about school and lose the joy they once felt.” 

            She goes on: “My own experience as a neurologist and classroom teacher has shown me the benefits of joy in the classroom. Neuroimaging studies and measurement of brain chemical transmitters reveal that students' comfort level can influence information transmission and storage in the brain.  When students are engaged and motivated and feel minimal stress, information flows freely through the affective filter in the amygdala and they achieve higher levels of cognition, make connections, and experience “aha” moments. Such learning comes not from quiet classrooms and directed lectures, but from classrooms with an atmosphere of exuberant discovery.”

            She shows scientifically what good teachers throughout history have known, “that superior learning takes place when classroom experiences are enjoyable and relevant to students' lives, interests, and experiences.”

            All good teachers know that an overload of stress and negative emotion interferes with learning because it lowers cognitive performance.  Through brain mapping and charting chemical flows she provides some interesting clinical evidence of the inhibiting effect of stress and negative emotion and, conversely, the heightened effect on learning of positive emotion and lower levels of stress.

            “A common theme in brain research is that superior cognitive input to the executive function networks is more likely when stress is low and learning experiences are relevant to students,” she writes.  “Lessons that are stimulating and challenging are more likely to pass through the reticular activating system (a filter in the lower brain that focuses attention on novel changes perceived in the environment). Classroom experiences that are free of intimidation may help information pass through the amygdala's affective filter. In addition, when classroom activities are pleasurable, the brain releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter that stimulates the memory centers and promotes the release of acetylcholinem, which increases focused attention.”

            So how can teachers create environments where anxiety is low while providing enough challenge and novelty for suitable brain stimulation?

            The first thing she suggests: “Make it relevant.  When stress in the classroom is getting high, it is often because a lesson is overly abstract or seems irrelevant to students. Teachers can reduce this type of stress by making the lesson more personally interesting and motivating. Ideally, students should be able to answer the question, “Why are we learning about this?” at any point in a lesson.

            Another is: “Give them a break.  Just like adults, students can reduce stress by enjoying hobbies, time with friends, exercise, or music. Even though schools are shortening recess, physical education, art, drama, and even lunchtime to add more time for core subjects, teachers can give students a three-minute vacation to reduce stress. Any pleasurable activity used as a brief break can give the amygdala a chance to cool down and the neurotransmitters time to rebuild.”

            Thirdly: “Create positive associations.  Eliminating all stress from students' lives is impossible. However, even if previous classroom experiences have led to associations that link certain activities, such as memorizing multiplication tables, to a stress response from the amygdala, students can benefit from revisiting the activity without something negative happening. By avoiding stressful practices like calling on students who have not raised their hands, teachers can dampen the stress association.”

            There is a lot more to these articles than I can include here, though they are not long.  But both point to the need to transform education, making it more joyful, creative, engaging and meaningful, so that schools  will produce people capable of transforming the world for the better.  Classrooms can be laboratories of transformation.  Both science and play will aid in that wonderful process.

            To find the article by Joe Robinson, google Joe Robinson The Key to Happiness: A Taboo for Adults?  For Judy Willis’s article, google  The Neuroscience of Joyful Education.  Would love to hear of other articles and resources.

The Wonderful Heart

              Daniel Goleman in his great book, Emotional Intelligence, talks quite a bit about the heart as our emotional mind.  I believe that the heart has its own intelligence, language and field of awareness that is much more than emotion.  If we wish to use a single word it is better described by the word feeling.  The heart is, obviously, associated closely with religion and other supposedly non-rational ways of thought, which makes us, in this age of science and reason, ambivalent about its powers and capacities.  Hence even Goleman can write statements such as: “Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in the vernacular of the heart.” And: “This logic of the heart—of the emotional mind—is…the logic of religion and poetry, psychosis and children, dream and myth.” (Emotional Intelligence: 294)  Linking poetry, psychosis, religion, dream, myth, and children together in one sentence is a striking example of the kind of ambivalence many hold the heart and its intelligence in. 

            What do I mean by the heart?  Obviously, I am not talking just about the meaty pump rhythmically beating away in the middle of the chest.  This is the physical heart, and it is where we point when we say we feel something.  But as the brain is the seat of the mind and the power of thought, is the physical heart also the seat of some spiritual organ of intelligence and spiritual power?  I believe so.  This aspect of heart experiences what Maslow termed “the transcendent emotions.”        

            The authors of the brilliant study, HeartMath, go further: “Moving beyond what we’ve been able to prove through science, our theory is that the heart links us to higher intelligence through an intuitive domain where spirit and humanness merge.  This intuitive domain is something much larger than the perceptual capability the human race has yet been able to grasp.  But we can develop that perceptual capacity as we learn to do what sages and philosophers have asked us to do for ages: listen to and follow the wisdom of the heart.” (The Heartmath Solution:xvii)   

            Later the authors claim that “the heart is a major conduit through which spirit enters the human system.  The qualities of spirit—love, compassion, care, appreciation, tolerance, and patience—all create increased coherence and order in the heart rhythm patterns.” (HeartMath:261)  Thus they believe: “The heart isn’t mushy or sentimental.  It’s intelligent and powerful, and we believe that it holds the promise for the next level of human development and for the survival of the world.” (HeartMath:5)

            Many do have some awareness of this higher function of the heart’s intelligence, but are confused about it—though most indigenous peoples are not--and are not sure if they should trust it.  The heart often understands through mysterious ways of knowing which we label intuitive, hunches, inspirations, etc.  The confusion can be eliminated to some extent if we know that the heart, like the mind, is in two states or aspects, but we have only one word for it, heart.  There is no ready verbal distinction, like brain and mind, for the two aspects of heart.  There is only “the heart.”  So, I am going to use the terms “heart” and “soul” to distinguish the emotional from the spiritual intelligences of the heart, for the soul of things is not only its heart, but also implies a higher intelligence, a spiritual power, an inner faculty, the intelligent “heart” of every human being.             

            The heart’s intelligence being sympathic, empathic and intuitive, implies that the psychic distance between object and subject that is characteristic of intellectual knowing is eclipsed and one can know “things-in-themselves” through direct perception, knowing from the inside out rather than the outside in.  Hence we also say that the heart is more certain.  It accesses “information” more quickly, in whole patterns or gestalts, than does the “rational” mind which must laboriously build to its conclusions. 

            Another reason for this confusion regarding the heart’s lower and higher functions is that the “soul” can be in touch with the sacred dimension of creation and this dimension is everywhere at once.  It is holy.  It is simultaneously “lower” and “higher” than human reason, the center and apex of human intelligence, the source and goal of human thought and aspiration, the alpha and omega of life, because it surrounds and therefore comprehends human reason.  The heart is the organ of intelligence that puts us in touch with this transcendent power and intelligence which is both pre-rational and super-rational: pre-rational in history, but super-rational in essence and thus always available as the perennial source of human transformation.

            The heart longs for the beautiful and the transcendent.  When the heart touches these it is filled with love and it tries to convey this spiritual experience in words or pictures.  The heart’s language is symbols.  Symbolism is the primary tool for the communication of multiple meanings and divine mysteries, a bridging device linking the concrete and material with the intangible and spiritual.  Symbols are mediums of spiritual truth and vehicles of the ultimate power of life.  Trying to convey the experience of transcendence makes the heart’s expressions “seem” irrational and overly-emotional to the “rational” mind.  But, too, the mental faculty most closely connected with the heart is imagination, that boundary-busting, symbol-forming fount of creative picture-making that always seems to people like Plato to on be the verge of perverse behavior. 

             Children have the heart’s intelligence in abundance, but schooling, by and large, either completely neglects it or trains them out of it.  Yet Jesus may have had something like this intelligence in mind when he said: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew:18:3)  He is not saying be converted to his religion, but, rather, if one wishes to understand spiritual truths one must be converted back to that childhood mind we brought into the world with us. The union of heart and mind results in what I call ecstatic reason.  We need joy to approach the sacred, or the vibrations of its visitation will break us apart.  The Bahá’í Writings assert that: “The one true God, exalted be His glory, hath ever regarded, and will continue to regard, the hearts of men as His own, His exclusive possession.” (Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah:346)

            Our “educational” system lacks heart, whatever it may possess of the wonders of intellect.  Without heart the universe may be a fantastically interesting place to study and delight in, but we do not belong to it, we do not identify with it.  With the heart we no longer exist in a universe, but joyously live in a creation.

The Spiritual Intelligence

             In 1983 Howard Gardner proposed his theory of multiple intelligences.  It was ground-breaking psychological research.  His seven intelligences--now eight, I believe--certainly did much to open the way to considering intelligence as composing a much wider array of mental abilities than just verbal and mathematical ability.  Pedagogically, multiple intelligences implied that the teacher must be aware that students have different learning styles, and instructional methodologies must reflect the different ways that human beings learn.  This means there are as many ways to build human knowledge as there are learning styles, each builds something unique but each is also connected to other ways.  Teachers should strive to identify and match the individual interests and personal aptitudes of each student and allow the student to build knowledge in his or her own best way, and to connect with others doing the same thing. But I think that matching is not like putting a round peg in a round hole.  I see it as more like putting the right key in the door so it may open: or better, it is what physicists call a “resonant fit”: the finding of harmony by tuning the vibrations of the subject to the vibrations of the thought of the student.  This experience of attunement is one of the most important experiences of Joyful Education.       

            But though Gardner’s taxonomy was brilliant and comprehensive, I believe there is one “intelligence” missing.  I call it the spiritual intelligence for it is capable of recognizing the sacred and holy in its appearances.          

            The spiritual intelligence, as I see it, is different from Gardner’s Intrapersonal intelligence, which has to do with introspection, deciphering one’s feelings and motivations and obtaining a deep understanding of the self; what are one’s strengths/ weaknesses, what makes you unique.  Neither is it identical to Gardner’s existential intelligence, which is the ability to contemplate phenomena or questions beyond sensory data, such as the infinite and infinitesimal.           

            The Spiritual Intelligence is an intelligence composed of what Rudolph Otto in his brilliant book, The Idea of the Holy, names a "numinous consciousness."  It operates through a religious faculty resident in the spirit, with an organ of intelligence, the heart, and which uses specific spiritual powers—faith, vision, creativity, reflection—to bring the invisible into the visible.  This intelligence is not taught, but evoked in encounters with the sacred.  I have explored all this in my upcoming book, Renewing the Sacred. 

            I realize the imprecision of these terms at this point.  What do they refer to?  These terms may be only different names for the same thing or, what is the same thing, metaphors for each other.   

            But the imprecision stems, too, from the belief that we are in a different realm here, for the spiritual intelligence is not first a cognitive and rational intelligence.  Rather the spiritual intelligence is a different order of intelligence than rational intelligence because, as Otto states the “numinous informs the rational from above.”  It starts to life in the heart’s feeling for the transcendent, in the yearning to identifying oneself with the sacred and divine.  It does not originate in the desire to know, but in the desire to be known.  It is not irrational, but other and higher rational.

            Because it is not a cognitive intelligence of the mind, the spiritual intelligence is hard to find and grasp intellectually.  I mean that the experience of the transcendent, the sacred, cannot be taught, because conceptually the sacred is a negation. The best that rational statements can do in these matters is to say what the sacred in its essence is not.  It is “not rational.”  It is “illogical.”  It is “not intellectually comprehensible.”  But these are negative attributes of it.  Sacred knowledge transcends the grasp of conceptual thought, for we can conceptually grasp only that which is human or natural.  It is conceptually presented as a mental space where the sacred enters human intelligence.  Though the rational and the moral are essential parts of the sacred they are not the whole of it.  There is an unfathomable mystery about the sacred, which is evoked within human intelligence and experience and transforms them.  Thus so powerful are these experiences that Maslow wrote: “A single glimpse of heaven is enough to confirm its existence even if it is never experienced again.”  David Hawkins, in his book, Power vs. Force, says of higher states of consciousness that “these higher states are so powerful that once they have been experienced, they are never forgotten, and therefore, are sought ever after.”  

            I would love to hear any reactions to these thoughts, especially any encounters of the sacred which you may have experienced.