Trust in Play.

I seem to be on an education/creativity kick recently. Here's another TED talk about creativity and productivity, quick on the heels of this one, itself following this post about schooling vs. education.



The most interesting thing of this all, I think, is near the end, when he says that an environment of trust is necessary for play, which I can't agree with more. I would link this idea to the fact that as one becomes more and more centered and identified with their consciousness, their attitude often becomes much more playful. Ken Wilber has used the analogy of a dream. When one is in a dream, one's attitude towards the surroundings is often anything but trusting, quite the opposite. When one becomes lucid in a dream (an experience I think most people have had at least a few times) one is given the freedom to play. You know it's a dream, so there's the trust that nothing can go wrong, and it becomes seriously fun. When one realizes enlightenment or has a satori, the world is seen for what it is, and life is free to be fun.

This also speaks to why children with supportive parents can grow up to be emotionally successful people. They trust their parents (and with good reason) and so are able to experiment and play around with who they are and what they can do so that when they are adults it is easier to face any sort of circumstance.

What's the shift when large groups of people across the planet start to experience the universe as being fundamentally benign? We're beginning to see, in fits and starts.

Trust in play. Trust in Creation.

Fully interactive data world.

This is way too cool.

I don't usually put something up here unless I have something to say about it, but this is just too cool. Imagine, instead of having to go to a computer, that computers, the internet, etc, were simply transposed over the world we live in, like living simultaneously in a computer and in the real world.

Dope.

The Silent Gap

An important part of Integral Theory, in short:

Reality is unified (A-dual,) mind creates duality. This can be experienced, and is the gateway to all esoteric knowledge.

A good introduction to this as a meditation here. The music is a little iffy, and the guy also kind of funny, but if you do what he says, you ought to figure out what's being talked about.

While most people identify with the voice in their head, they don't realize a) there are usually at least two competing voices, especially about anything important and b) you are not these voices, but the observer of them. The more and more familiar with the stance of the observer, the more and more you identify with it and disidentify with the voices in your head, the more rich and full your life will be, and the easier it will be to see just how insane and unreal the mind is on a day to day basis.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Close on the on the heels of a post about schooling vs. education, a wonderful and funny talk from Sir Ken Robinson on TED about the same issue.



Advocating an open-ended approach to education that fosters creativity as being just as important as literacy for a world which fundamentally changes every five years or so, Sir Robinson talks about many things I've noticed here in China, specifically, that children aren't afraid of being wrong, that is, they'll have a go at it, whereas by the time kids are adults, they're terrified of giving the wrong answer. Even young children here won't take a stab at something if I haven't already told them the answer, something that frustrates me to no end. I'm not just saying wild stabs in the dark, but also having all the tools to put the answer together but without the answer itself, kids are extremely reluctant to try and figure out what the answer might be, especially in my first few classes with them.

"We are now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make, and the result is that we are teaching people out of their creative capacity."

This is a feature of bureaucracism, subject of another recent video on TED, from Barry Schwartz, which hits many of the same notes, but from a moralistic standpoint. When people are not allowed to be individuals making decisions, but are handed lists to teach/ do in a rote manner, society, in the long run, is much worse off. "Three Strikes You're Out," is such an example, but so is much of what Robinson is talking about with "No Child Left Behind." You prevent disasters, perhaps. But you also prevent any real sort of progress and personal energy, which I can attest to firsthand, living and teaching in the birthplace of bureaucracy.

Thanks to Cyriac for the heads-up.