Renewing the Sacred Published!

First I am grateful to all those who have followed this blog.  I am very happy to announce that the long promised book, Renewing the Sacred, is available for purchase.  You can order it  right now.  Just click on the following link---http://tinyurl.com/cr8lu78  
If you wish to write a review of the book for Amazon, I would be grateful.  While obviously a book on education inspired by the Baha'i Writings, Renewing the Sacred is not a Baha'i book or a book only for Baha'is.  It is a book about education.  I hope that you readers will  recommend Renewing the Sacred to your friends, schools, teachers, etc.  Announce it through Facebook and Twitter.  Bookstores such as Barnes and Noble, can order it if you ask them.  Libraries and all commercial book outlets, and all Bahá’í bookstores can also purchase it.

Renewing the Sacred is my first book-length solo publication, though not the first book that I have written.   In my last post I stated that two other books were in the process of being written.  But there is actually a third, which I have been writing for a few years now, and it will be first out the door--hopefully before the end of the year.  I decided to bring this one out first, because of the terrible economic situation humanity is in.  It is an application of some of the principles of Renewing the Sacred.  It is titled Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together: A Spiritual Context for Prosperity. 

The book argues that prosperity is never about producing material goods, making money, or any other indicator of material well-being, unless every member of the human family has sufficient material means to live in some measure of comfort and security.  This can only happen if there is a moral transformation among those who have over-accumulated, and thereby thrown vast numbers of their fellow family-members into dire want and penury. Their private self-concern is backed by a social system that is built upon values that justify exploitation and greed because it legitimates the notion of an unbridled profit motive.  It is this system that has brought us the popular characterization of the 1% and the 99%.  The system is unjust and immoral.  The system will not change unless people change it.  And people will not change it unless there is spiritual education.

The Universal House of Justice stated, I believe, the four pillars of this spiritual education.  In a letter written in 1974 to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Italy the House wrote: “It is not merely material well-being that people need. What they desperately need is to know how to live their lives — they need to know who they are, to what purpose they exist, and how they should act towards one another; and, once they know the answers to these questions they need to be helped to gradually apply these answers to everyday behaviour.  It is to the solution of this basic problem of mankind that the greater part of all our energy and resources should be directed.” 

Each of these questions—Who are you?; What is our purpose?;  How should we act towards one another?; How do we apply the answers to the first three questions?--is given a full chapter in the new book, after an introductory essay sets the tone and context for this discussion.

Part Two is a discussion of what I like to call a sociology of the spirit.  The first chapter of Part Two traces the unfoldment of three social conditions, peace, unity, and justice, from their potentials within the collective human reality.  One small part of this discussion showed up in a blog post here October 2, 2011, that I titled Light and Dark.  These potential conditions of society are first spiritual potentials that exist as a hierarchy within the soul, and unfold in sequence opposite to their importance.  That is, the deepest aspect is the most important and last to appear: the modern day equivalent to Christ’s statement of spiritual rank, that the last shall be first and the first last.  Peace is the ultimate state, but it is dependent upon unity being established which, in turn, depends, upon social and economic justice reigning in collective human affairs.  Justice is the Best-beloved of all things in the sight of God.  And it is no surprise that the real name of the local governing Baha’i councils is the Local House of Justice.

The word economy means household.  There are actually three economies.  First and smallest and least important is the material economy which we all know about and which school says that it is there to help us get into.  But larger and greater than the material economy is the social economy, the public household which is our human and social relations.  But deeper than these two and educed by proper education is the moral or spiritual economy, the Divine Economy that finds its pattern and nucleus in the operations of the divinely ordained Bahá’í Administrative Order.  As I did with Renewing the Sacred, posts for the several weeks will be from this new book.  

To My Readers,

           My deepest apologies for not posting these past three months.  So much was going on that the book that I have been working on was not moving forward with any speed.  So I put much on hold so that I could finish it.  It is finished, and on its way to the publisher.  With any luck it should be available from Amazon. com in a couple of weeks. 

            The book is titled, Renewing the Sacred: A New Vision of Education.  It is my model of spiritual education.  Spiritual education educes the spirit and not just trains the mind and body.  Though much of it has appeared in the blog these past 18 months, much of it is also new.  The book brings it all together in one coherent—I hope—package.  While the book is Baha’i-inspired—no surprise, there!—it is for educators of all stripes and colors, even for public school teachers and administrators anywhere, but especially here in the United States.  I will let everyone know when the book can be purchased.

            Also, to let you know, I am working on several other projects.  There are two more companion book-length studies to Renewing the Sacred in the works.  Some of the material for these studies has also appeared in the blog.  Here is a preview.  The first, tentatively titled, The Coordinated Vision: Religion, Art, Science, discusses religion, art and science as humanity’s three main ways to generate and encode knowledge, and, through the kinds of knowledge they generate, to relate to the different dimensions of the world.  An academic curriculum that wants to “educate” the whole person should have all three, for each one helps us create and interpret our experience: religion is our primary means of relating to the spiritual world; art is our primary relation with the human world; science is our primary relation with the natural world.  Of course all three—religion, art and science—are involved in all three worlds, but each has its primary relation that the other two support.

            The other study I am calling Connecting Cosmos and Consciousness: The Structured Forms of Human Spirituality.  This will be an historical examination of such levels and forms of human consciousness as religion, myth, art, poetry, philosophy, and science.  It will also have chapters on the origins of humanity's two main languages, words and numbers.  It will examine them all as the unfolding manifestations in symbolic structures of a series of great spiritual impulses.  That is, it will attempt to connect these various symbolic structures of human knowledge with divine revelation.  There will also be discussions of the relation of the unconscious to the conscious mind; the mutual influence of heart and mind, the development of human subjectivity, all built upon a notion that humanity is moving out of the realm of mind into the realm of spirit, just as, starting about 6,000 years ago with Adam, we moved out of the realm of body into the realm of mind.  This coincides with ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s statement on the three kinds of education: physical, human, and divine.  A full system of divine education is being built.  It will take centuries, of course, but a powerful start, especially with Ruhi, has been made.  

            I will also have a place on the blog where interested readers can go to download some of my other essays on various topics.  These essays will be FOR FREE!

            So, how to do this?  That is where you come in.  You will see some additions to the blog.  As an experiment, I am now running some ads.  Also there is a donations button and a place where you can go directly to Amazon.com to order your copy (ies) of Renewing the Sacred when it is available.  Friends, I am attempting to live Baha’u’llah’s statement in The Hidden Words: “The best of men are those that earn their livelihood by their calling.”

If you like Renewing the Sacred please recommend it to your friends, your children’s teachers, your school board, home-schoolers, or anyone else.  I hope that the book can be a small contribution to a new social discourse on education and that discourse can lead to some social action.  Buy it for gifts—Christmas, Ayyam-i-Ha—or get a study group going.  If you want to donate to a worthy cause, look no further than the right of the page.  It is easy to do.

Finally, my sincerest thanks for all your support until now.  I am glad to be back on the radar.  I look forward a long and happy continuation of our blog connection, especially to reading your comments

Bill

Seismic Shifts

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writing an inexhaustible mine of suggestion…

(Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality p. 39

That we are in the midst of a tremendous upheaval in all aspects of human life, including education, is no secret at this point.  With all such seismic shifts education itself undergoes profound changes in nature and structure, and new treatises on education abound in such times.  Studying past upheavals and education’s innovative response to them is instructive.  One such shift occurred in ancient Greece.  What happened?

Northrop Frye states: “In the Athens of the fifth century BC, a momentous step in human consciousness occurred when the rituals associated with Dionysus developed into drama and the great evolution of what we now call literature out of mythology took a decisive turn.” (The Double Vision: 43)  Julian Jaynes, in his book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind, puts his finger on the mechanism for this step from mythology to literature in human knowledge.  First, he posits that: “The coming of consciousness can in a certain vague sense be construed as a shift from an auditory to a visual mind.” (Origins:269)   This shift began when the bicameral mind was mortally weakened by writing around 2500B.C.  This development evolved into the art of phonetic writing, which had profound effects on the encoding of human thought, seen mostly clearly—or at least studied most thoroughly--in the shift that occurred in Greece. 

That is, here on the cusp between classical Greek culture and Plato’s time an irreversible change takes place in language in the change from a predominantly oral culture to a written one.  All writing is the fixing of thought in space, but phonetic writing is also the translation of sound into sight as McLuhan most famously demonstrated.  This is another way of describing James' shift from an auditory to a visual mind.  This change in the encoding of knowledge changed thinking and consciousness, putting it on a new conceptual level.  In his germinal work titled Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock notes that “just as poetry itself, as long as it reigned supreme, constituted the chief obstacle to the achievement of effective prose, so there was a state of mind which we shall conveniently label the ‘poetic’ or ‘Homeric” or ‘oral’ state of mind, which constituted the chief obstacle to scientific rationalism, to the use of analysis, to the classification of experience, to its arrangement in sequence of cause and effect.  That is why the poetic state of mind is for Plato the arch-enemy and it is easy to see why he considered this enemy so formidable.” (Preface to Plato:46-47) 

            What is this momentous shift exactly?  In one sense, it begins a shift from memory to thought as the basis of education.  We hear Socrates in the Phaedrus complain that books will destroy the memories of students, which was the primary repository of knowledge in an illiterate, pre-Plato Greece.  This is also a shift from a practical and tactile grasp of things to a more abstract conception.  Havelock writes that in an oral culture before writing: “Kantian imperatives and mathematical relationships and analytic statements of any kind are inexpressible and also unthinkable.  Equally an epistemology which can choose between the logically (and therefore eternally) true and the logically (and eternally) false is also impossible.  This temporal conditioning is an aspect of that concreteness which attaches itself to all preserved Homeric discourse….Hence all ‘knowledge’ in an oral culture is temporally conditioned, which is another way of saying that in such a culture ‘knowledge’ in our sense cannot exist.” (Preface to Plato: 182)

With writing, especially phonetic writing, the development of abstract concepts through the manipulation of symbols to reveal laws of nature and thought itself can take place.  Thus not the poet, like Homer, but the philosopher becomes the most learned of the day.  Plato does not invent the idea of philosopher; rather, he attempts to identify the qualities of that kind of person.  Havelock believes that Plato “is trying for the first time in history to identify this group of general mental qualities, and seeking for a term which will label them satisfactorily under a single type.  We might almost say he is inventing the idea of the intellectual in society….In so doing, he, so to speak, confirmed and clinched the guesses of a previous generation which had been feeling its way toward the idea that you could think, and that thinking was a very special kind of psychic activity, very uncomfortable, but also very exciting, and one which required a very novel use of Greek.” (Preface to Plato:283-284)  

The first school for the systematic inculcation of knowledge was, perhaps, Plato’s Academy, although Pythagoras had set up a school about one hundred years earlier.  The curriculum which Pythagoras arranged for his pupils is instructive, as was its purpose.  Pythagoras’ curriculum led up to the hieros logos, i.e. the sacred teaching, the preparation for which the students received as mathematikoi, i.e. learners, or persons occupied with the mathemata, now known as mathematics, considered the "science of learning."  The preparation for this was, in turn, that which the disciples underwent as akousmatikoi, "hearers", after which preparation they were introduced to what was then current among the Greeks as  mousike paideia, “musical education", consisting of reading, writing, lessons from the poets, exercises in memorizing, and the technique of music. 

The highest grade of Plato’s educational system, outlined in his Republic, its pinnacle so to speak, was philosophy, which Plato calls dialectic.  Dialectic for Plato was no mere exercise in logical reasoning, as we know it, but signified the science of the Eternal as ground and prototype of the world of sense. The progress to dialectic is the work of our highest cognitive faculty,  the intuitive intellect.  Plato had a three-tiered basis for the sequence of his studies, namely: sense-perception, reflection, and intellectual insight.  The Platonic idea that we should advance gradually from sense-perception by way of intellectual argumentation to intellectual intuition is by no means antiquated, but is in fact the same kind of the curriculum for spiritual education today.  And, like Plato, while sense-perception is the first stage of learning, the eternal is the spiritual ground of all. 

This curriculum of Pythagoras and Plato evolved into the medieval academic curriculum composed of the trivium and quadrivium, what I have labeled the tool subjects of language and number.  The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. These followed the preparatory work of the trivium made up of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In turn, the quadrivium was considered preparatory work for the serious study of philosophy (sometimes called the "liberal art par excellence") and theology. Together, the trivium and the quadrivium comprised the seven liberal arts (based on thinking skills), as opposed to the practical arts (such as medicine and architecture.  These "liberal arts" denoted those subjects of study that were considered essential for a free person to master in order to acquire those qualities that distinguished a free person from slaves - the latter of whom formed the greater number of the population in the classical world.

            As this one example shows, powerful new theories and technologies of learning always upset the applecart of established formal education, as do important innovations in learning theory and educational purpose.  Education is always changing, and we must push it forward for our children’s sake so that they may be properly educated—brought forth.  We cannot be afraid of innovation and change.  But we must possess the spirit of the pioneer, the discoverer, the trailblazer and the voyager.  Education needs a new Plato.

Fields of Light

There are two kinds of light. There is the visible light of the sun, by whose aid we can discern the beauties of the world around us -- without this we could see nothing.  Nevertheless, though it is the function of this light to make things visible to us, it cannot give us the power to see them or to understand what their various charms may be, for this light has no intelligence, no consciousness. It is the light of the intellect which gives us knowledge and understanding, and without this light the physical eyes would be useless.  This light of the intellect is the highest light that exists, for it is born of the Light Divine.  The light of the intellect enables us to understand and realize all that exists, but it is only the Divine Light that can give us sight for the invisible things, and which enables us to see truths that will only be visible to the world thousands of years hence.  It was the Divine Light which enabled the prophets to see two thousand years in advance what was going to take place and today we see the realization of their vision. Thus it is this Light which we must strive to seek, for it is greater than any other.

 (Paris Talks:68)

We often think of human consciousness through the metaphors light and sight: the light of consciousness, the brilliant thought, etc., and couple this image with words like insight and vision to differentiate physical sight from something intellectual.  But as there are three kinds or strata of light, according the statement from ‘Abdu’l-Baha above, (i.e. visible light, light of the intellect, Light Divine) there are, also, three kinds of "seeing"—looking through the eyes; looking intellectually with the mind; God looking through us by our spiritual faculty which is true vision.  This last one is possible because Baha’u’llah says: “Thy hearing is My hearing, hear thou therewith. Thy sight is My sight, do thou see therewith…”(The Hidden Words, Arabic 44)

From the other side, each of these modes of “seeing” must possess a locus or seat.  I mean that if there exists a spiritual faculty to perceive Him, then it would have both a biological and a psychological seat and mechanism, namely, the eyes and the intellect.  Many biologists would give precedence to the material seat, or rule out any other seat altogether.  But to say there is a biological seat doesn’t mean it is only biological, or that biology is the foundation of either the mental or the spiritual.  There is a separation, of course, but to think consciousness is all biological is separation gone pathological.  The equally pathological view is that all is either spiritual or psychological.  Consciousness is con-scious, or sharing knowledge.  It is never a thing, but always at least two "things" in relation.  Every field is an immaterial mediator, but it is also physically real. 

Thought is the invisible field that constitutes visible light, where light is the movement through a substance called the ether.  Divine thought is higher than human thought and is the field of consciousness that constitutes human thought.  It sets the boundaries of the knowable for any age, as Baha’u’llah says: "Knowledge is all that is knowable; and might and power, all creation."(The Kitab-i-Iqan:185)

            It is divine thought that creates the universe through the Creative Word.  “Praise and thanksgiving be unto Providence that out of all the realities in existence He has chosen the reality of man and has honored it with intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in either world. Through the agency of this great endowment, He has in every epoch cast on the mirror of creation new and wonderful configurations. If we look objectively upon the world of being, it will become apparent that from age to age, the temple of existence has continually been embellished with a fresh grace, and distinguished with an ever-varying splendor, deriving from wisdom and the power of thought.

This supreme emblem of God stands first in the order of creation and first in rank, taking precedence over all created things. Witness to it is the Holy Tradition, "Before all else, God created the mind." From the dawn of creation, it was made to be revealed in the temple of man.”(Abdu'l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization:1)

            Within the universal field of the physical creation itself there are smaller fields, like the electro-magnetic fields and the gravitational field.  The goal of the Unified Field Theory of physics is to mathematically unite all four forces in the atom in order to get a complete conceptual understanding of physical phenomena. But this requires that we also understand how the laws of human thought effect the physical universe.  This will be extraordinarily difficult to do because quantum physics proves that human observation irreversibly modifies the thing observed.  But understanding human thought, in turn, requires some grasp of divine thought—which is today the revelation of Baha’u’llah. This is so because every interconnection of fields changes a more elementary union of order/disorder into the need for a greater organization and coordination that we call transformation. 

Now, interestingly enough, both higher and lower orders of light and understanding are perceived as darkness.  The animal’s intelligence is dark to us, and: “The animal cannot conceive of the power of thought.” (Baha'i Scriptures: 364)  Likewise, God’s thought, the divine Light suffused throughout the creation, is dark and impenetrable to us.  Traditional theology calls this darkness of understanding the darkness of God—and T.S Eliot mentions it in his poem East Coker.  And when we are in a state of disbelief scripture calls it “darkness.”  The universe appears mostly dark to us.  But modern physics says that dark matter and dark energy are far more plentiful than what we see of matter and energy, these latter making up less than ten percent of known energies.  If we looked spiritually all would be light!  “Light,” writes physicist Arthur Young, “is the first kingdom, the first stage of the process that engenders the universe.” (The Reflexive Universe: xxvii)

Light connects space and time, Planck’s constant being their measured connection, for a universal constant bridges two realms that seem incommensurable.  Likewise universal Revelation brings humanity and Divinity into relation.  Electrons are not individuals, but instances of universals, as every human being is an unique configuration of all human qualities.  A particle of light is a holographic manifestation of the whole physical universe, as any one thought is the manifestation of the complete field of human thought.  One metaphor in Revelation is a manifestation of the entire field of Divine thought.  Elementary particles of physics possess an identical nature, for in the beginning matter was one and gradually evolved forms through the impact of Divine thought.  The electron field co-exists with those manifestations which are its individual electrons in different states.  These electrons and other quanta are manifestations of a deeper level of reality—what David Bohm calls the Implicate Order or the quantum fields of reality.

In thought, paradox is the midwife of new vision.  Like Planck's constant, it is the middle term of coordination linking realms of perception.  In language the same connection is via the symbol.  Sacred symbols are lights of spiritual knowledge, each a nodal point or nexus of power in the field of supernal Light, as the physical stars are concretions of the universal field of natural light, and ideas are revelations of the light of the human intelligence.    

A magnetic field is a torus shape.  Its center is the original place or habitation out from which radiate lines of force, both spiritual and organic, for all created things have these two origins.  Lines of force are the result of the new radiance encountering the constraints of the existing surrounding medium, and this generation and restraint throws the system into a state of polarization that structures the field.  Entering the field of opposites transforms that which is transcendent into polarized energies.   Resonance and interference together reflect a shared but hidden third reality. 

EXPANSIVE EMOTIONS

Be the change you want to see in the world.

(Mohandas Gandhi)

           

I want to end the exploration of the role of emotions in education by giving some general remarks about optimism, humility, and spirituality.

            Optimism is the expectation that life will be mostly good, that things will work out.  Ideally, happiness and optimism go hand in hand—but not necessarily. We can feel blue or blah yet recognize it as a passing mood. We can be dissatisfied in our work or relationships but believe that better times lie ahead. We can acknowledge a painful situation without concluding that the universe is permanently against us. That is, we can be momentarily sad, but remain optimistic.  But optimism has many benefits.

            Optimism enhances well-being because it leads to greater engagement with life.  Engagement is a key factor.  Better mental and physical health is tied to efforts expended to realize goals, so long as they are internally motivated.  A large circle of friends, higher education, and greater socioeconomic status play a part in fueling optimism and are, in turn, fueled by it.  These all result from the priorities you set and the actions taken to achieve them.  

            Optimism's real power, however, might lie not so much in what it does for us but in what it compels us to do.  Optimists not only trust that the future will be mostly good, but they also believe their actions shape their destinies. This may be why optimists are more likely to eat right and exercise and are less likely to smoke or engage in other risky habits. When an optimist does get sick, he or she is more apt to research and seek the best medical care and actively participate in treatment—all of which may improve the prognosis.  Medical literature is full of stories of people recovering from some terrible illness simply by believing that healing will occur.  Seeing the glass as half full rather than half-empty is not “factually” more correct, but acting like an optimist can bolster your body, mind, and spirit.  Too, greater religious involvement is positively associated with more positive feelings and emotions.  Optimism can help spiritualize your life.

            Spirituality is brought out with engagement in the meaningful questions of human existence.  Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center and the Pew Organization conclude that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being "very happy" than the least religiously committed people.  Strong religious commitment has also been linked with a lower risk of depression and drug abuse and fewer suicide attempts, and a greater sense of well-being and self-esteem and lower levels of hypertension and clinical delinquency.  Overall, religion is a positive contributor to mental health; religious people, in general, have less psychological distress, more life satisfaction, and better self-actualization.  

            Faith is one of our most powerful endowments, certainly the one most capable of bringing a new reality into our lives, for imagination gives the future shape and faith shapes an uncertain destiny—again, the link to optimism.  The more an assumption is repeated the more permanent the neural structure becomes, the more we see “reality” that way.  Thoreau said: ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.  Live the life you have imagined.”  Such statements make the darkness shine.  Daily persistent repetition of “affirmations” can also awaken spirituality.  Constructing one’s reality is based on the principle that what is “out there” points to what is “in here”, and what is “in here” points to what could be out there.  If we understand this relationship we will be well. But what is understanding?  It is linked with humility.

            Literally, understanding means to stand under.  It is to put oneself in a lower place, to stand under him or her, so one may understand.  The House of Justice encourages the Baha’is to “adopt a humble posture of learning.”  This is to stand under, not to seek leadership or domination or authority, but opportunities of service and knowledge. 

 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá was often likened to an ocean, not just because He seemed bigger than any situation, but also because His deep humility made Him put Himself lower than everyone else and thus serve them.  All waters flow to the ocean for it is at the lowest point, yet the ocean is also the fount of all life.  Humility is not such total self-effacement that one feels unworthy to do anything.  Humility is an attitude that seeks out service; that always wishes to help.  It should be the chief quality of the leaders of humankind.

Business consultant Steven Covey writes: “You can’t have a oneness, a unity, without humility….The great servant leaders have that humility, the hallmark of inner religion.” (Principle-Centered Leadership:92) 

I choose these emotions mostly because they allow us to empathize and tune in harmoniously to one another.  They are part of creating healthy relationships between people, to achieve a “resonant fit” between teacher and student, of transforming the negativity the world is spewing out in torrents into a healthy inner spiritual environment, sort of like cleaning up a polluted river.  Best of all, the various building blocks of a positive outlook, such as optimism, gratitude, mindfulness, and spirituality, are “infectious” as a good belly-laugh is.  In fact, they are more infectious than are the negative emotions of fear, anxiety, anger, depression.  Thus, we must demonstrate these emotions and encourage students to develop them.

            Young people who strove for authenticity with their parents, teachers and peers developed stronger bonds and were less troubled by depression or self-esteem issues later in life.  Those who chose to hide their true feelings from their parents and teachers -- or were too shy or worried to share them -- risked being depressed by their lack of openness. People who feel insecure in their relationships or avoided getting close to others appear to have a greater risk of developing several chronic diseases.  But extra attention and emotional support from family members seemed to help diminish some of the feelings of depression.

The phrase “avoidant attachment” has been coined to show the association between people who feel unable to get close to others or have others depend on them and chronic pain, such as frequent or severe headaches.  Another term, "anxious attachment" -- a tendency to worry about rejection in relationships, feel overly needy and find that others are reluctant to get close -- was associated with a wide range of health problems, including heart-related diseases, such as stroke, heart attack and high blood pressure. Anxious attachment was also linked to a higher risk of chronic pain and ulcers. 

            It takes no great leap of imagination to see that avoidant attachment and anxiety attachment are two expressions of a single set of behaviors.  Those who avoid intimacy and authenticity in their relationships may do so from the anxiety that if they do the person they want to be intimate with will leave them.  Better not to get involved and set up the possibility of getting hurt.  These avoidant behaviors are most likely based on traumatic childhood experience. 

            Early experiences with caregivers shape a child's core beliefs about self, others, and life in general. Experiences of the baby and young child are encoded in the brain. Emotional experiences of nurturance and protection are encoded in the brain's limbic area, the emotional center. Over time, repeated encoded experiences become internal working models - core beliefs about self, self in relation to others, and the world in general. These core beliefs become the lens through which children (and later adults) view themselves and others, especially authority and attachment figures. Core beliefs serve to interpret the present and anticipate the future.  Changing core beliefs is quite challenging, because core beliefs are rigid, automatic, and associated with self-protection and survival. Yet without change, negative core beliefs formed early in life remain fixed into adulthood, with severe social, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual consequences.

Peaceful Emotions: Mindfulness and Gratitude

Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data in this book coms from a massive survey of parents and teachers and shows a worldwide trend for the present generation of children to be more troubled emotionally than the last: more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive.

(Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence: xiii)

            Mindfulness, or focused attention, is both the glue that keeps us intimately connected to events and others, and that gives us detachment to see the world and ourselves clearly.  It is how we use our psychic energy.  How we choose to direct that energy is intensely meaningful.  Not all our scars can be seen.  Some are deep within the psyche.  These emotional and spiritual wounds create a distorted self-image which, in turn, makes the world look like one of those distorting funhouse mirrors.  This can create anxiety and a sense of disconnection.  Since our actions depend upon what we think is true, if what we think about ourselves is not true, we cannot perceive either others or the world accurately.  There is a prayer that says: “O God, help me to see the world as it is.”  That is mindfulness.

            Mindfulness does not permit the mind to spin out of control about the negative what if's and could be’s of life.  Mindfulness doesn’t focus on the things one can’t control, rather it focuses on what can be controlled, and this, more often than not, is our own thoughts and feelings, actions and reactions, to life’s events.  You can choose to focus on what can do to make any situation better, or you can focus on how it is overwhelming you.  Within a strong social network of caring friends positive focus is much easier, because, as I wrote in the last post, our friends emotions, especially their positive emotions, influence how we feel.

            Another aspect of mindfulness is: Forget your failures.  If you have had one of those days when nothing went right, lessons bombed, kids acted up and you resembled a screaming banshee or angry thundergod, or a contentious faculty meeting went spiraling out of control, try to let it go.  Also, as we used to say as kids, “If you mess up, ‘fess up.”  Seeing things directly, without a haze of self-justification or through a fog of rationalization, will help to put a bad event behind you and you are then free to concentrate on doing the next thing right.  Reframe!  After a bad day, to prepare for the next day, remember your past successes.  This will encourage your creativity.  Trying to fix weaknesses won't help; rather, incorporating strengths such as humor, originality and generosity into everyday interactions with people is a better way to achieve success.  These are all situations to act out in your imagination in order to act them out in public.  According to the Buddha, "Mind is the forerunner of states of existence. Mind is chief, and (those states) are caused by the mind. If one speaks and acts with a pure mind, surely happiness will follow like one's own shadow!"

            The authors of The Good Society remind us that: “Mindfulness is valued because it is a kind of foretaste of religious enlightenment, which in turn is a full waking up from the darkness of illusion and a full recognition of reality as it is.” (Good Society: 255)  No doubt, this is the reason that many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to be here now.

            In an important study, two Harvard researchers, Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert, conducted a study based on an iPhone web application that allowed gathering 250,000 data points on 2,250 subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.  The volunteers were contacted at random intervals and asked how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.
            The subjects reported spending 46.9% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they were doing, and this mind-wandering actually made them unhappy. Killingsworth and Gilbert said that “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”
            Lives pervaded by the non-present are not often happy lives, but are filled with anxiety, boredom, and dissatisfaction.  Mind-wandering, not mind-engagement, seems to be a better predictor of people's happiness, though in a reverse correlation.  I mean that the more often the mind wanders the less happy people seem to be.  On one level, mind wandering was not a consequence of being unhappy, but the cause of it. 

To increase mindfulness be grateful.  Gratitude is an emotion connected with joy and happiness, both feeding them and being fed by them.  The grateful person always feels he has enough, he is thankful for what he has, he expects little, so he feels able to handle pain and is not bitter about it.  What he gets is always a reward.  That his neighbor has more is not a cause for envy and covetousness, but rejoicing.  Gratitude, being mindful of blessings, develops that sense of inner security that is essential to prevent the mind from wandering into unhappiness.

            A Bahá’í is encouraged to “bring yourself to account each day.”  This is no mere bookkeeping exercise.  I think that to develop a good sense of gratitude, every night remember the good things that happened to you that day—as the early Baha’is did with each other while in the prison of Akka.  Gratitude visits — looking up someone who has taught or mentored you and thanking him or her — are important in positive psychology.  Such visits, studies show, bring the largest increase in happiness to everyone.  Find things in your life to be grateful for.  Count your blessings.  Gratitude boosts happiness and social well-being and health.  In his book, The Hidden Messages in Water, Masaru Emoto ranks gratitude higher than even love.  

Another aspect of spiritual accounting can be seen when we recall that “grace” is the root of “gratitude”, so that we should be grateful for the grace given to us in the form of innate talents and abilities.  Gratitude is an active power drawing to us the good pleasure of God, the first attracting the second.  Gratitude works for prosperity by establishing relations of trust.

            Finally, ‘Abdul-Baha wrote: “There is a cordial thanksgiving, too, which expresses itself in the deeds and actions of man when his heart is filled with gratitude. For example, God has conferred upon man the gift of guidance, and in thankfulness for this great gift certain deeds must emanate from him. To express his gratitude for the favors of God man must show forth praiseworthy actions. In response to these bestowals he must render good deeds, be self-sacrificing, loving the servants of God, forfeiting even life for them, showing kindness to all the creatures.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 236.)

            When we perform these actions as services for others, we not only show our gratitude to God, but also this increases everyone’s feelings of love, happiness, and feeling secure and positive, embraced by love, increases mindfulness.

             Both of these emotions or practices, along with love and happiness discussed in the last post, will go a long way toward reversing the situation described by Daniel Goleman in the opening quote.           

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.