Positive Emotions in Education

Positive emotion is, I believe, so abundant in young children because this is such a fundamental period for broadening and building cognitive, social and physical resources.  Positive emotion accomplishes this in several ways.  First, it directly generates exploration, which in turn allows mastery.  Mastery itself produces more positive emotion, creating an upward spiral of good feeling, more mastery, and more good feeling.  Your little daughter then becomes a veritable broadening and building machine, her initially small bank account of resources growing mightily.  When experiencing negative emotion, in contrast, she is building a fortress that falls back on what she knows is safe and impregnable, at the cost of locking our expansiveness.
(Martin E.P. Seligman: Authentic Happiness: 210)

           

There is a growing body of evidence documenting the power of positive emotions to influence biological and social connections.  Science has demonstrated what every group of friends and every close-knit family knows: that one person's emotions can influence another's; laughter can trigger guffaws in others; seeing someone smile can momentarily lift one's spirits; that feeling and knowing that one is loved will empower a person to overcome almost any obstacle; that misery doesn’t really love even its own company.

Through both biological and social "nerve" pathways, we humans seem capable of almost automatically tuning in to what is going on with those close to us.  Long married couples often experience a retuning into one composite nerve system, even taking on similar facial features.  Parents, perhaps especially mothers, and their children can have a sixth sense of mutual awareness.   Even pets and their owners experience a melding.  Knowing the power of positive emotions can vastly improve an education situation.  In the next few posts I want to make some general remarks about the power of positive emotions in education, especially their role in creating a nurturing classroom community.  This post will discuss love and happiness.

            Love is a dynamic state of consciousness and action not simply a romantic attraction resembling a flaming meteor.  I have called love the fundamental substance of the universe.  This universal energy affects the attractions and repulsions of things, from atoms to galaxies, and these currents are mirrored in the human soul.  In human growth love is essential in many ways, of course.  Maslow points to one of them when he writes: “Not only does love perceive potentialities but it also actualizes them.  The absence of love certainly stifles potentialities and even kills them.” (Toward a Psychology of Being:98)

            Love is the feeling environment within which exploration takes place, discoveries shared, and collective identities formed by a network of people who rely on each other to be fully present in each others lives.  Love orchestrates the harmonics of our emotional life, for it is the master emotion.  Emotions form a complementary field of heart awareness to the information networks of the mental field, as Candace Pert has shown in her book, Molecules of Emotion.  The chemical signatures of emotion link the individual mind and heart through the sympathetic, parasympathetic and autonomic nervous systems as the peoples of the earth are connected through the global electronic nervous system we call the Internet.  Human DNA has been called a biological internet that is superior in many respects to the artificial one.  But loving communion can have a powerful neurological effect on any two people engaged in meaningful communication.

            During extended and meaningful conversation, the brain activity of both people come to look remarkably similar, especially when the two are really understanding each other, a process scientific researchers call "neural coupling", and what folk wisdom calls “heart-to-heart communication.”

            Neural coupling occurs so well because it seems that there is a great deal of commonality between the process of producing speech and comprehending speech.  The more coupling there is, the more the speaker and the listener are using similar mechanisms.  Brain scans further show that in some areas of the brain, coupling occurs at the same time the speaker is talking, while in other areas, the coupling lags. Sometimes, brain activity in the listener's brain comes before the activity in the speaker's brain, suggesting the listener may be anticipating what the speaker is going to say.   Such mirror imaging may aid in comprehension—yet another support for the idea that we are literally hardwired to connect. 

            Brain scans of those who seemed to have the most nuanced understanding of each other showed the most complete neural coupling.   But even between those meeting for the first time, good neural coupling can almost instantly occur, possibly hinting at why some people click during conversation and some don't.  This neural coupling showed up as a strong correlation between how much of the listener's brain matched the speaker's brain and how well the listener understood the other.    

            Neural coupling is yet another term for the resonant harmony that is created between those engaged in distinctive and meaningful conversations, a harmony manifest in a synchronicity of hearts that matches the synchronicity of the mirror neurons in an observer's brain firing in the same sequence as those of the person he  is observing.  Perhaps this synchrony between one's own heart and brain and between the hearts and brains of those experiencing neural coupling occurs because more than half of the heart is actually composed of neurons of the same nature as those that make up the cerebral system. 

           If love and communication between family and friends are important not only at the meaning and feeling level, but even down to the level of neurons, in regards to building community, it becomes very important what is being communicated and how far that influence extends.  Perhaps the most important emotion to communicate is happiness. 

            A widely-publicized study from 2008 in the British Medical Journal reported that happiness in social networks may spread from person to person along cultural nerve pathways that mimic those within the body.  Researchers followed nearly 5000 individuals for 20 years in the long-standing Framingham Heart Study and found clusters of happiness and unhappiness tended to spread through close relationships like friends, siblings, spouses, and next-door neighbors, but that happiness spread more consistently than unhappiness through the network. Moreover, the structure of the social network appeared to have an impact on happiness, as people who were very central (with many friends and friends of friends) were significantly more likely to be happy than those on the periphery of the network. When one person in the network became happy, the chances that a friend, sibling, spouse or next-door neighbor would become happy increased between 8 percent and 34 percent, the researchers found. The effect continued through three degrees of separation, although it dropped progressively from about 15 percent to 10 percent to about 6 percent before disappearing.  Overall, the results suggest that happiness might spread through a population like a virus.

            Happiness, then, sends a kind of ripple effect through social networks.  If someone changes from unhappy to happy in a network of friends others in the social network will become happy too, without necessarily knowing why.  A well-liked next-door neighbor’s joy will probably increase your own sense of happiness. 

            Even further, happiness is so contagious that it can ripple through clusters of people who might not even know each other.  While one’s emotional state would depend primarily on your own choices and actions and experience, it also depends on the choices and actions and experiences of other people, including people with whom you are not directly connected, lending support to calls to “commit random acts of kindness.”  One person's happiness can affect another's for up to a year, researchers found, and while unhappiness can also spread from person to person, the "infectiousness" of that emotion appears to be far weaker.

            There is, then, little doubt, scientific or otherwise, that good human relationships are the most important ingredient in human happiness, especially if you can see or contact your friends and family often. Yet the competitive, me-first materialistic culture we live in tells people to sacrifice social relationships to get other things that likely won’t make them as happy, such as money.  Relationships are far more important to happiness than anything else.  Educators can build on this.    

Connecting Cosmos and Consciousness

Instead of narrative method, we may now use mythical method.  It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art…”

(T. S. Eliot: Ulysses, Order and Myth)

Myth is more than an early and discarded stage in the odyssey of the human mind.  Neither is myth today just strange stories set long ago or in an imaginative world of Avatars populated with beings that think and act remarkably like ourselves, whatever their physical appearance.  Myths are the founding and perennial stories.  No doubt, myth is humanity’s earliest consciousness, one bearing the closest likeness to the world, so close to it as to be separated from it by only a thin and porous membrane of objectivity.  It is pre-rational rather than irrational, for one must first be rational before irrationality is a possibility.  But what myth most definitely is NOT is a fiction.  Why?  As Cassirer writes: “Myth is not a fiction, for that is the work of individuals who abandon themselves to the free activities of fancy.  On the contrary, everything in it is a necessity imposed on us not from without, by the existence of ‘things’, but from within, through the nature of consciousness.  This consciousness is the real ‘active subject’ of mythology.” (The Problem of Knowledge v. 4: 298) 

But today myth is also an artful method of telling stories that is different from narrative. It is a way of coordinating our levels of understanding.  That is its importance for the adult world.  In a seminal 1923 essay, “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, which examined James Joyce’s “novel” Ulysses, T. S Eliot wrote: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. [....] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”  This new method of coordinating the panorama of human experience, of ordering and giving shape to a perspective, had, as Eliot remarks, “the importance of a scientific discovery.”  Joyce did for literature what Freud and Jung did for psychology, and at about the same time, namely, open up and illuminate the labyrinth of past human thought for retrieval and renewal by modern thought. 

Myth as a literary form overrules narrative in favor of symbolic structures, making past and present, particular and cultural, part and whole aspects of a single vision.  Joyce’s book, with its continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, between Bloom’s daily wanderings in early twentieth-century Dublin and Ulysses travels and trials through the ancient Mediterranean, drew together past and present narratives as manifestations of a single, trans-historical consciousness that demonstrated how “myth” is a perennial part of the human situation. The mythic method refuses to resolve into a single focused point of view, or even a single narrative line. Rather it moves continuously between conscious and unconscious points of view.  That is, it is symbolic.

For humanity’s mental odyssey, the basic principle of mythical structure and coordination is ontogeny sort of recapitulates phylogeny; that is, the individual human being repeats in his or her own mental forms of experience what the whole race has already passed through, much as the growing fetus in the womb is supposed to pass through the forms and stages of the lower kingdoms before being born in human form.  But there is this difference.  The mind returns to those forms that best fit its situation, for all past forms remain accessible, both subjectively in the mind and objectively in culture and often spontaneously manifest in both “places.”  This process of accumulation as one passes through stages of growth is, for me, the various stages of the unfolding rational faculty, the sedimenting of the layers of subjectivity which, said another way, is the expanding world of human subjectivity and increasing self-knowledge as it accumulates knowledge of the world and itself. 

Myths represent human consciousness in continual change and transformation, undergoing strange and dramatic metamorphoses and instant happenings.  As such they are an essential part of education because: “Perhaps the oldest of educational ideas is that of the dramatic transformation of the mind, the sudden entry into a new plane of reality.” (Northrop Frye: On Education: 151)  But transformation can occur because any new manifest plane of reality was already within the essential human reality. 

Myth makes things happen via  imaginative causality, which is very close, both psychologically and physically, to the kind of non-local causality science is now exploring in Chaos Theory and Complexity science, and popularized in productions like The Secret and What the Bleep.  This should not surprise us.  As Oswald Spengler wrote:  "Every physics is a psychology."  These new sciences are sciences of process not of state, of becoming not being, as is myth an imaginative statement of process and metamorphosis.  Sciences like Systems Theory are also sciences of the global nature of things, the universal behavior of complexity, the fractal patterns that appear and reappear on different scales at the same time because of the inescapable consequence of the way that small scales intertwine with large ones, where change often occurs from a sensitive dependence on initial conditions which can end in catastrophic consequences, as the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends as the typhoon ravaging Japan.  These are sciences where nonlinear equations rule, where seemingly divergent movements actually circle around vibrating patterns called strange attractors, those bizarre, infinitely tangled abstractions, those goblins of the mind, that nevertheless yield simple, structural patterns at their core.  The appearance of an attractor signals on one level pure disorder because no point ever recurs, but this disorder is the entry to a new kind of order, like breaking the sound barrier in a plane.  These are sciences where infinite instability ends in stability and randomness morphs into order through a sort of self-organization.  Non-periodicity is unpredictability, but the whole is still there, because both chaos and order spontaneously arise in systems.   

But, perhaps, these are sciences of process and not state, because we are in the process of moving out of one state of humanity into another, and the sciences and arts, poets and philosophers, are all simply registering in their respective domains the stages of this universal process that moves from cosmos through chaos into a new creation, a new cosmos generating a new cosmology: a process accelerating by several orders of magnitude and complexity every decade, as the effects of a new revelation pass through them.  It is the universal birth of humanity into the spiritual state, and new forms of being always birth new ways of thinking.  Once we get better grounding in our new state, then sciences of that state will start to appear.  But it is, too, the old way in new form—the strange juxtaposition of twilight with the dawn’s early light without any intervening night.  A new ratio is everywhere emerging.  But the past myths, arts, and sciences in their respective though smaller transitions provide useful analogies and examples to this “organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.” (World Order of Baha’u’llah:43)  .  

Antiquity is Modernity

One view of the evolutionary trend is that physics is returning to the holistic assumptions of the magical era.  But there is an important difference.  The post-modern view no longer lacks the explanatory power of the first era.

(Dean Radin: Entangled Minds: 244)

Despite the scientific conceit expressed by Dean Radin above, “the holistic assumptions of the magical era” were just as explanatory as are the unholistic (unholy?) assumptions of modern science.  But the two traditions use different mental powers to explain.  Lets return to the teachings of Hermes to explore this.

The principles of Hermes teachings were the foundation of alchemy and most other occult arts around the world.  I don’t mean that everybody learned directly from Hermes, but that, given the similarity in the thought and vision of the seemingly different alchemical traditions, European, Indian, Chinese, it seems that this is a level of human consciousness activated and released into the world by Him, as the spirit of faith was activated and released by Abraham’s test of faith. 

Ancient cosmologists of both east and west believed there were two universal realities in relationship, the One Mind, which was the Universal Mind, and the One Thing, or primal, elemental matter, the basic substance of the universe.  Mind and Matter were, to use the latest term, entangled, making a same but different structure and interaction.  Mind in-forms, or puts form into, matter which at its most fundamental level of the prima materia is the repository of all past and future physical configurations. That is, active Mind energized its recipient Matter, giving it life and form and purpose.  The two universal realities were both in the visible world and in the unseen world which was nevertheless intelligible. The difference between the two worlds was determined by which universal Reality predominated, Mind or Matter.  These realities were considered to be interlocked, interconnected and interrelated.  Whatever appeared in one had its counterpart in the other, whatever happened in one effected the other. 

There was yet a greater life energy common to both realities that acted as their means of communication and brought the two realities into relation.  The life energy, or spirit, of the individual was the same as the life energy of the planet; the macrocosm of the universe was reflected in all its grandeur in the microcosm of the human being.  Things were known and related by “spiritual” means. 

Modern science is likely to use terms such as information and energy for the alchemical Mind and Thing, or Matter.  But the process of creation science presents is essentially the same as myth presents—the union of energy and form, whatever we wish to call these.  Baha’u’llah, in the Tablet of Wisdom, calls this creative relation “the glorious structure” and it is built on the Hermetic principle: “these two are the same, yet they are different.” (Tablets of Baha’u’llah:140)   

Thus all cosmologists explore the same thing, the universe.  But whereas alchemy and other ancient investigations took primarily an imaginative/experiential look at it, science takes a conceptual/experimental look at it.  The ancients tend to see aspects of the same thing while we moderns tend to see the aspects as separate things.  But new science is using a more imaginative approach, so it is more holistic and conceives the various levels of known energy as manifestations of one Energy.

 The resurgence of the imaginative and mythical is manifest in a whole shelf of books bearing titles such as The Tao of Physics, Science and the Akashic Record, The God Theory, and Why God Won’t Go Away, and sub-atomic experimental physics pursues the God particle.  From the other side of modernity, books like Sacred Science, describing the “science” of ancient Egypt, and Symbols of Sacred Science by the modern day philosopher Rene Guenon, stress the symbology of the ancient teachings and their hermeneutical usefulness for today’s thinking.

While differences of approach remain, these may only reflect differences of terminology which are converging.  The ancient names of ether and the akashic, for example, from the classical Greek and ancient Hindu traditions, seem to name the same fundamental power and intelligence underpinning the physical universe.  Quantum physicists use terms like the Zero Point Field and the Quantum Vacuum to describe the same entity, with “ether” making a sort of comeback after being banished by the famous Michelson/Morley experiment that seemed to rule out its existence.  There is also the M theory of the string theorists, a theory that will contain, they hope, everything.  The Grand Field Theory of physics will be the scientific story of all things, following all the poetic stories of all things, those epical, encyclopedic poems such as Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Other fields include the Morphogenetic field of Rupert Sheldrake to account for the continuity of life forms in a species, a field through time not just in space, and the Intentional Field of Wayne Dyer, to designate the purposeful thought of the Universal Mind. 

Old Alchemy and New Science converge and are reuniting, a great B and E experience is occurring, so that knowledge is becoming one: antiquity is modernity.  Another eminent scientist, Dr. Robert Becker, nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, wrote: “Medicine has come full circle, from the mysterious energies of the shaman-healer to the scientific understanding of the life energies of the body and their relationship to the energies of the environment.  This scientific revolution has simultaneously enriched the concepts of technological medicine and supported the ideas of energy medicine. What is emerging is a new paradigm of life, energy and medicine.” (Cross Currents:81)

Today in the same collective mental “space” where mythical demons and goblins snarled, and fairies and sprites played and danced, holographic models and implicate and explicate orders are seen, and quantum events take place.  There are many other names and parts to this great universe we are trying to find our way around in conceptually and know the nature of experimentally. 

Perhaps the mythical is making a strong comeback because of the chaotic times we live in.  In such situations the mythic always returns.  Why?  Eliade explains: “Every myth shows how a reality came into existence, whether it be the total reality, the cosmos, or only a fragment—an island, a species of plant, a human institution.  To tell how things come into existence is to explain them and at the same time indirectly to answer another question: Why did they come into existence?  The why is always implied in the how—for the simple reason that to tell how a thing was born is to reveal an irruption of the sacred into the world, and the sacred is the ultimate cause of all real existence.

Moreover, since every creation is a divine work and hence an irruption of the sacred, it is at the same time represents an irruption of creative energy into the world.  Every creation springs from an abundance.  The gods create out of an excess of power, an overflow of energy.  Creation is accomplished by a surplus of ontological substance.  This is why the myth, which narrates this sacred ontophany, this victorious manifestation of a plentitude of being, becomes a paradigmatic model for all human activities.” (The Sacred and the Profane: 97-98) 

It is not that the mythical cosmology is truer than the scientific, or vice-versa, (which is the fallacy of literalism in any shape or form) except as a matter of preference, imaginative or conceptual.  It is that this process of symbolizing coming out of ancient Egypt with Hermes/Idris is how creative thought gets up and going at all.  That is, it has something to do with how human thought works creatively at any level.