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.

The Coming Great Reboot

This talk, from Juan Rodriguez via TED Talks, is pretty fascinating, as a rational account of the coming crash and post-crash, which he calls a re-boot.

It is interesting to compare and contrast different versions of the coming reboot, to see how it's interpreted in different metaphors, especially considering none of them are going to be a hundred percent right. (That is, the future will lie somewhere between all of them.)

His idiom is fairly close to what I'm fairly sure is going to happen: in the short term, we're going to have a huge SNAFU. But we will emerge an entirely different animal, in a very different world. I do not share Juan Rodriguez's marriage to the objective sciences, however, and so I put the emphasis on a leap in consciousness, which you can find evidence for all over the web (click on this Peter Russell talk to see an example of what I'm talking about- it's quite clear and talks science, so don't be afraid.) Science is, of course, part of the future. It's just not the whole story.

People in enough numbers are starting to directly experience adual reality, that is, they are coming into direct contact with the ground of being, that pretty soon there should be a tipping point.

Bioengineering, coupled with robotics, has become sophisticated enough that we are coming to a tipping point.

The similarity in these two, the thread that ties them together, is that we're entering an age of conscious control of our reality. Now, control is a sticky word, and I don't mean by it what a ten-year old would, it is a much more detached control, one that requires a relinquishment of the smaller and petty identification of self that we usually think of as being "controlling." In any case, hold onto your butts. Things are already starting to get interesting. Aren't they?

Schooling vs. Education

I have written quite a few times about the Chinese education system and the structure of Chinese society, and the double-bind the people seem to be in: there's recognition that something's wrong, that there needs to be a jolt of individuality in the country, but the system's so entrenched that it's basically impossible to succeed without it (of course, the objection could be raised that talk of individualism is lip service. Let's assume, here, that it's not.) Here's probably my best one. Here's another.

Here's a terrible essay written by a high-schooler in relatively poor AnHui province. (Terrible because moving, not written poorly.)

Two days before I read that I was in class with a High-schooler in his second year. He brought in his winter homework for me to check. It was amazing for a few related reasons. Firstly, it was pretty high-level English, though with quite a few vague usage mistakes on the parts of the (obviously) Chinese compilers. And, he got most of it right. had it been a test, he would have scored in the 90s. But the most amazing thing of all is that this kid basically can't say a complete English sentence without mangling it, pausing for an inordinate amount of time, or simply stopping in the middle.
After finishing checking half of his homework, (which took me 80 out of our 100 minute class) I put the book down and asked him if he thought what we were doing was helpful, or a good use of time.
The most astounding thing was that in the book itself, there was a passage about the difference between schooling and education, starting off with "It's common to think of kids going off to school to start their education, but many experts say going to school interrupts a child's education.." and then going into a short comparison of education vs. schooling, a dichotomy I would call Life Experience vs. Formal (Institutional) Education. At the end, it was clear that the authors came down firmly on the side of Education as being helpful for society, and schooling as... well... not so much. There was even a passage that said "High-schoolers know that what they learn in politics class is not relevant to the political issues of the day." (Really???) When I asked my gf about this, she said, "I hated politics class in highschool, because everything is bullshit." Though this was all framed by the initial "In The United States of America..." it was obviously pertinant to the Chinese education system.
Outside, it was the 15th, last, and second most important day of the Spring Festival, what we call the Chinese New Year. Fireworks were going off everywhere. People were eating special food for the celebration. And here it was, 8pm, and this poor kid was trapped in a room basically watching a high-paid English instructor check little red marks in his book. I called to his attention the irony of all of this.

The Chinese Education system is about 80 percent schooling, 20 percent education, I'd say. It's really good for a few things. It's great for learning how to do math problems, or fill-in-the-blank English problems. It's great for creating a cowed populace of robots. (Cynics would likely say that's the point.) It's probably not so great for creating great earth-changing people. Even the Chinese people who are doing big things in China are doing so mostly in a Western style. (Like, say, real estate developers educated in England.)

It will happen, though. It might be happening now. We just haven't seen it yet, I don't think. And someone's got to tell the kids to forget their homework and play during their vacations. Loss to "Intellectual Knowledge" - 5%. Gain in Experience, understanding and comfort in life? 80%.

The above percentages have been thoroughly researched.

Happy Niu Year!

I certainly was not preparing to write about the Chinese New Year at 8 in the morning, not after a night spent chasing fireworks around town until two booming in the Niu year (Niu =牛, which means ox, or cow.) Add in jet lag from arriving here in Beijing two days ago, and you could understand why I’d be excited about getting a real nice night’s sleep. I should have known.
It’s hard to describe the sound, though I’m sure any one reading this has heard fireworks. Imagine the end of a gigantic fireworks display, except you’re in four corners Arizona and each state has their own display for their respective corner. Add in the “cracklers,” which are as to our little cracklers like a tarantula is to a picture of a spider drawn by a four-year-old, and you have a foothold. Loud, continuous. Our fireworks displays have the pace of moderate rock, with some climaxes of sixteen notes on the snare drum. This is more like jungle trance: 240bpm, and all sixteenth notes, directly next to your apartment building, which is a concrete wall in a giant sound rebounding maze. In war, sitting under a tin roof in a furious hail, while shots from automatic rifles scream around you mixed in with an occasional chorus of mortar fire, you would hear that same mix of percussion, but the anxiety would likely not give you space to listen, or hear.
Hear, as opposed to see, being operative. Despite the night bringing out all varieties of exploding colored lights and streaming jets of sparks, in the day, it’s all about the noise. Vaguely, and I don’t at the moment of writing have the internet so I will not confirm this, I remember that fireworks in the superstitious mythos that is the Chinese motivation for doing all things are supposed to frighten off evil demons, and so their powers are needed the most at the end of the old/beginning of the new year, I suppose because demons have off from work during this time as well and are disposed otherwise at their offices. Most of the fireworks that go off during the day are either the aforementioned cracklers, or large M-80 style noisemakers, which is not to say they are not present during the night, merely that any association of “fireworks,” with “pretty,” or “majestic,” is purely a nighttime phenomenon.
As is the association of “fireworks,” with “children.” While kids certainly enjoy the fireworks, they’re not setting them off. Most of what I have seen in the last two days of setting off fireworks has been single men, by themselves, usually in their forties or beyond. It’s a little creepy, their approach to the task eerily robotic. But that is not to say there is nothing childlike about it.
In fact, one of the greatest things about being here at this time is the sense of wonder and simple joy on people’s faces, from the young to the old, as they watch and hear fireworks blast off all around them. It is as if the stodgy no-fun discipline of the rest of the Chinese year were simply a show, and the time off (just about everyone has a week off, at least) and periodic unexpectable bursts of sound act as just enough of a counterweight to keep everyone aware that life is fun, the burst of sound behind a young woman making her grasp for her ears in her winter coat and turn her beaming laughing face towards her companion, blurting out something like “oh that surprised me!” If this seems like an extreme reminder, it should only go to hint at what the other 360 days of the year are like.
There is, after all, a reason this is a tradition held so strongly. If (and I think this is true) the more rigid a society is, the more unflinching its rituals must be honored, each holding up its own inch of the society, then the Chinese adherence to tradition becomes clearer. I realized this week an interesting way of putting the difference between American and Chinese culture. In America, if we say, “it’s just a tradition,” we mean that there’s no solid reason to keep doing it, and if for one or another reason, we have to or want to do something else, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a tradition, after all. In China, “it’s just a tradition” means, “even though no one knows why we do it this way, this is the way it is done, so it is how we must do it.” This became clear for me when I asked my girlfriend why it’s so important to eat dumplings the first day of the New Year, (and noodles the second, and on and on…that’s how specific some of these are) and she responded, “I don’t know, it’s just a tradition.” There’s a great pride in the Chinese traditions, and the sense that this is what brings Chinese together as a people, something that not only creates but also in a sense is their cultural identity. Evangelical Christians have the literal word of God in the Bible; this is what gives them their identity. But the Chinese have only Chinese-ness, and so all of these rituals, all of the history, the shared sense of hard work and study as children, and the reverence for their ancestors come together to create the sense of identity. While all these internal factors are true for Evangelicals as well, at least they can point to the book to cover it all up. Chinese only have this, which is likely a factor making them so aware of the boundaries between “us,” and “them.” You’re either Chinese, or you’ll never be, and will never understand. (Because you don’t eat dumplings on the New Year?)
There’s another interesting contrast between our two societies I have noticed but have not so far been able to find an example for: the difference in degrees and places of freedom that society allows. One might think that China and America are simply at two ends of a spectrum, Americans being more or less “free,” and Chinese not, but this is a gross over-simplification. Exhibit A: in the public square last night, there were probably 2-3 thousand people, all setting off fireworks, and very very few cops, or authorities of any kind. In the square, it was absolute anarchy, which is not to say chaos, only that the crowd had its own logic. In the middle was a huge open space, around which people were gathered. Most of the fireworks were set off in the middle of the square, and all went well. It was all done privately, by the people. Juxtapose this to a fireworks display in America, where people aren’t involved in it at all, except as spectators. The point I’m trying to make is that while in America the range of activities allowed people (by society, I’m not exactly saying by law) is broader, there is almost always still a set of rules one must abide by. In China, the range for free activity is greatly circumscribed: 360 days of the year, there is no spring festival, and you can’t choose when to have off. However, within this circumscribed area, when allowed, you can do 100% as you please. I had noticed something similar when teaching in a primary school: between fifty- minute classes there is a ten minute break of complete chaos you’d never see in America, and students run as fast as they can wherever they’re going, unless it is with the whole class. In America, you don’t run in school, only on the playground. In America, if the students were allowed to go ape for ten minutes between classes they might never calm down. But, this is China. As soon as that class bell rings (actually a twenty second song) kids are in their seats, if not ready to learn, then at the least orderly. Again, I don’t quite have an explanation for this, other than to say perhaps it is the tradeoff for circumscribing free space so totally: within that space, freedom is also total. But they’re trained well: when the bell rings, kids are sitting, when the lights in the square went off (at 12:10) people began to filter out in droves.
Another fascinating social phenomenon is the yearly four-hour pageant, broadcast all over the world, and without commercial interruption, that precedes the 12 AM turn of the year (in a way it’s odd that they’re so westernly precise about the exact time the year turns when they are using the lunar calendar, but, such is modern China.) This year the theme was overtly a celebration of the last thirty years of economic reforms, which have brought the country great wealth. In this generally tame and traditional setting (one song featured the lyrics “Mao ZeDong has to lead us” over and over again…actually that may have been the Beijing pageant the next night, but same idea) where the comedy acts were snow-white and everything family friendly, one act stood out: a dance/rap routine featuring a man, a woman, and a ten-year old. It was overtly hip-hop inspired in fashion and in music, and it stuck out precisely because the older generations find the hip-hop fashions of the youngest generation revolting. Far from an embrace of hip-hop, however, this seemed to be far more a way of acknowledging the youth culture and bringing it in ever tighter into the fold of society, defusing any element of rebellion and individuality. It was, after all, only a display, lasting ten-minutes in a four hour program, a way for China to say, “don’t forget, kids, what’s underneath the adidas pants.” Oh, there was break dancing. But the kid was wearing a helmet.