Tag Archives: New World

What we see… (Part I)

14 Oct


Imagine that you live in a house with a window that looks out on the view above. I suspect, whether you would prefer oceans or mountains or woods or city scape, most of you would think this view is a pretty good one. Beautiful, in fact. As you look at it, what do you notice? The mountains in the background? The pond? The trees and expanse of green? The sunset glow? How might it make you feel to be sitting in your own house looking out at that view? Would you enjoy and take comfort from such a view?

Now let us consider some of the aspects of that landscape that might not be apparent from this window. Might there be deadly-disease-carrying mosquitoes around the pond? Ticks in the grass? Poisonous mushrooms growing under those trees? Hornets nests? Snakes? Wolves or coyotes or bears that could attack if you went out, or gobble up one of your pets? Maybe a fast-moving storm with lightning that would start a wildfire in the woods? Are any of these things likely to come immediately to mind on looking out this window?

 

If you were to say yes, those are exactly the sorts of thoughts such a view would engender, I might advise you to start looking for a good therapist. It’s true that any of those things might be in the world outside that window, in fact some of them almost certainly are, but to perceive mostly threats in a view of such calm and beauty would suggest an unhealthy level of paranoia.

Now think about the other kinds of windows in our world:  television, email, Face Book and Twitter feeds, cell phones, or even, here or there a newspaper. And think about the view they show us of the world just outside, or maybe beyond (or even very, very far beyond) our immediate surroundings. There is so much focus on the threats, whether there is anything we can do about them or not, that it’s difficult to see anything else. Statistics show levels of anxiety and depression skyrocketing in many or most of what are called “the developed” countries. If every time you looked at the scene above you could see only images of ticks and predators and wildfires, why wouldn’t you be anxious and depressed?

Some years ago I gave a talk about “Good News” at NAGC. Back then it was possible, with some persistent searching, to find compilations of positive stories from around the world, in spite of the “if it bleeds it leads” pattern of news programming. One major network in the United States (I believe it was ABC then) had newly decided to end each half hour national news program with one short positive story. Others now have taken up that policy. Most of these short positive stories actually take fewer minutes from the allotted broadcast time than a single commercial break, while before that final story, almost every other segment tells of catastrophe, violence, political struggle, warfare, medical threat, injustice, accident, mass shooting, storms, earthquakes, or other horrors. And now “the news” provided by our media, isn’t only half an hour in the evening; it’s 24/7 and very difficult to avoid.

Parents who attempt to limit their children’s exposure to this kind of news coverage are fighting a losing battle once the kids start school or get their own phones. And the brighter kids are the earlier they begin to take an interest in what goes on outside their own homes or neighborhoods. It isn’t that this is an entirely new phenomenon. When our older boys were kids, one of them came into the living room one night when we happened to be watching an old war movie. He started to tell us something and then said, “Never mind, I can tell you after the news is over.” During his whole lifetime the evening news had devoted much of its air time to the war in Vietnam.

But now it is next to impossible to escape being deluged with the worst of human experience, no matter where it is happening in the world. I remember when parents were advised to tell their children, when there was shocking news from the other side of the world, “Don’t worry, it isn’t happening here.” And I pointed out to parents then that gifted kids know that much of this isn’t happening here, but it isn’t themselves and their own families they are worried about. They worry about kids wherever they may be threatened, even on the other side of the world. And they worry about the apparent depravity of the human species, especially when that is very nearly all they “see” out the technological windows on the world.

And of course, now, they hear about every school shooting and instead of the “duck and cover” nonsense method my generation was given in school to protect ourselves from a nuclear bomb, they are given “active shooter” drills from kindergarten on. In addition, along with Greta Thunberg, they worry about the fate of the planet they are going to inherit. “Will there still be a world for me to grow up in?” many of them are asking. And it can be especially scary when they see that much of our culture goes on as if none of this were happening.

If “what you see is what you get,” we need to consider not just what we see, but how we look. It is possible to focus more attention on what is going right. We can begin the effort to see beauty and caring and the willingness to help.

Instead of focusing on how much school violence there has been, we could, for instance, use the resources of the internet to estimate how many schools there are in this country and consider how many kids, therefore, have not faced gun violence in their schools. It doesn’t diminish the tragedy of what has happened, of course, or the need for positive change—it just helps change our perspective. We’re told it is foolish to say “It can’t happen here,” but it’s also foolish to allow every child to set out for school expecting that at any moment it may happen here,

Both parents and schools can make a constant, serious, and determined effort to find and report to our kids (and show them how to go looking for) stories of the massive efforts on the part of real humans to counteract the threats that exist in the world. Focus whenever and wherever possible on the other aspects of the view through our windows. There are organizations formed to work on most of the problems we face. As Mr. Rogers’s mother told him, watch the helpers. For every story of catastrophe there are more stories (though not always as easy to find) of individuals, organizations, often massive nationwide efforts to help. Encourage kids to find ways they, too, can get involved.

Studies were done back during the Cold War when the threat of a Russian nuclear first strike made the possibility of nuclear winter and human extinction seemed very, very real, that showed children whose parents had themselves become involved in organizations working for peace were less likely to be afraid than children whose parents only watched the news and talked about it. Any actual action, no matter how small, gave their children a sense of hope and possibility. Often, now, it is kids who are pushing the adults to do something! We need to encourage that and join them when we can.

How we choose to look has a great deal to do with what we see, of course. It is not denial to change our focus to find the best in humanity, and more often than not turn off the news that focuses on the worst.

Part II of this post will come soon…

P.S. New addition: Here is one of the “good news” sources: https://www.findhorn.org/programmes/an-introduction-to-project-drawdown/

 

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Competition to Cooperation—The Roads Are Diverging

27 Sep

Because I recently uncovered an old “boom box” from my garage, I suddenly have a way of playing cassette tapes (yes, those old things) in my bedroom while I’m doing my morning exercises. I’m feeling vindicated for saving them all when I moved 3 years ago!

I’ve been speaking about the gifted since 1982, and at some point most of my talks began to be recorded on cassettes. So I’ve been taking a stroll through my own history. The last two days I’ve been listening to a talk

 I did for the Hollingworth Conference in 1999. The title was When Two Roads Diverge, How Will They Choose? The Hollingworth Conferences were created for the families of profoundly gifted children, and this talk was for the adults—parents and/or educators (most were parents). When I began the talk I told the audience that it was going to be my “sermon” for the conference, so if they wanted practical tips I’d be okay if they ditched my talk and went to hear somebody else.

Not being a preacher, what I meant by calling my talk a sermon was that it would be philosophical—a “why are these kids here and what is their evolutionary value to the human species?” sort of talk. Imagine my surprise, given that I’d just written a blog about competition, to discover that my twenty year old talk’s most central theme was the negative effect of our vison of “life, the universe and everything” as based on competition. If profoundly gifted children might actually come into the world with the capacity to think in new ways, I suggested back then that parents consider giving them a new way to see the world—new to our current culture, though very, very old in human history—as based on cooperation.  

Consider the human body, I suggested. What if the cells were designed to compete with each other rather than cooperate? If we ate a piece of cake, with its heavy load of sugar (especially important for the brain) imagine what would happen if, once the cake was broken into its essential nutrients, the first organ to encounter them grabbed most of the sugars for itself, using what it needed and hoarding the extra in its own cells. The negative impact of such a design would not only harm the organs of the body that would be deprived of necessary nutrients, but also the organ storing more than it needed. Obviously, such a design would soon leave the Earth without our species. Our bodies are designed for cooperation. So is our planet.

But Darwin!” someone might say. “Survival of the fittest! Nature red in tooth and claw.” Years ago I learned that before he died Darwin had backed away from that interpretation (though apparently those who had bought his original view dismissed his new awareness by suggesting he was getting senile). Even though we humans need to consume other living things (both animals and plants) to survive, we are powerfully prejudiced against death—at least our own. So Darwin’s original version of the predator-prey relationship perceived it as competition. One lives and the other dies. One wins, one loses.

But the natural world is balanced by the fact that prey animals reproduce in far greater numbers than predators, so that there are enough individuals to preserve both species. Plants are involved in this balance as well, but humans tend to identify with animals far more than with plants, so for thousands of years have mostly missed the plant/animal balance—while disturbing it massively in favor of the plants that we (or our prey) like to eat. And, as with the buffalo, and many kinds of fish and birds, we have often killed vastly more prey animals than we needed for our own survival. We have tended to think of ourselves as the only living beings with absolute value. Thinking in terms of competition we accepted our right to “win out” over every other life form that might in some way harm us. (Though we are willing to share our well-being and status with the creatures we like best.)

Even among other humans, however, we have mostly chosen competition rather than cooperation in exactly the way our own bodies do not. Just as with animals, we tend to value some humans more than others, and so often are willing to sacrifice the well-being of some in favor of the ones we value more. We as a whole “thinking species” haven’t managed yet to consider and treat all of humanity as our “friends and relations.”

As I write this members of our species’ younger generation around the world (those who are hoping to still have a habitable Earth to grow up and raise children on) are demanding that we recognize and address the ultimate damage to ourselves and our planet that our competitive (humans-at-the-top-of-the-evolutionary-pyramid) view of life has created. They see and say what so many of their elders don’t yet, that we need to make a major change because “our house is burning.”

Meanwhile some rich people in the USA are having to serve at least a little jail time for having used their personally amassed wealth to cheat their kids into “top schools” in the race to get to the top of our society’s pyramid, whether their kids have the ability to get there themselves or not. But consider this:  whether kids get into “top colleges” by cheating or by profound intelligence, what they will find there is the “upper” end of an entire culture based on and still mostly teaching, competition. My last blog was about my personal discovery that I, who have known about Darwin’s revision, and who have been “preaching” about the need to change our world view from competition to cooperation for more than twenty years, have been unconsciously just as motivated by competition in my personal life as I was taught to be! That’s more than a little scary!

The roads are diverging in front of us, and we as a species are running out of time to make a choice of which road to take—the one that has led us to where we are, or the one that will begin a massive change.

At the time I gave that 1999 talk many people were already aware that the planet was in danger (the first Earth Day was in 1970!) and efforts to change direction were being implemented, surely, if slowly. Weirdly enough now, 20 years later, as storms and wildfires and rising sea levels and droughts (and floods) and volcanoes and the extinction of great numbers of species become impossible to ignore, our own country is being taken literally backward by a leadership focused entirely on competition. Most of the world is still governed by systems based on modern humanity’s failure to see, understand, and value cooperation.

If we look closely at the issues that make the headlines and grab the most air time in our news broadcasts (immigration, me too, black lives matter, voting rights, political battles, health care, rising poverty rates…) it doesn’t take much to see the operation of the “winner take all” mentality that a culture based on competition creates.

Of course it will take a change in behavior to move to a new road and many people are afraid we have run out of time or can’t muster the courage and commitment or even know-how, to “take the road less traveled.” But the change in consciousness required is not only possible, it is happening.

Consciousness is energy, and each of us, as we change our own consciousness, has an energetic effect on the whole. And we are doing it! Once we begin to focus our attention on the real changes that real humans are making in the old pattern, we can see the “good news” about how many of us are already at work in this direction. Rather than being seduced into believing that all the news is bad, we begin to see that each one of us has real power. I’m not among those who think that more technology will solve the problem or that “artificial intelligence” will save our planet or our species. Nature’s intelligence is now and always has been superior to that of even the most profoundly gifted human individuals. So if we as a species can get over our need to feel superior in order to compete successfully, we may yet learn to cooperate our way into long term survival.

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Special?

30 Nov

Not long ago when I was talking about my work about highly gifted kids with a healer I was seeing, she asked whether I thought highly gifted kids were special. “Well,” I said, “I prefer to think of them as different.  The word special seems to suggest better than others, and I don’t mean that.  They’re just different.”

She nodded.  “Yes, but we’re really all different, aren’t we?  I can’t think of any two people who aren’t.  Even identical twins aren’t actually the same.”

“I didn’t mean that kind of different,” I corrected myself.  “Of course there aren’t any people anywhere who are exactly the same.  I meant more like ‘outside the norms.’”

She nodded again, gravely.  “What sort of norms?”

I took refuge in an analogy.  “Think of height.  There’s a great height variation among same age children.  But there’s a ‘normal’ range that the majority of kids fit into, and then there are some that are much shorter and some who are much taller.  Highly gifted kids are like the taller kids.  All children have height, but not all children are tall.”

“But instead of height, you’re talking about intelligence, yes?”

“Right.  There’s a range of intelligence into which most people fall, and then there are some who are outside that range.  The greatest clustering is in the middle of the continuum, with smaller numbers of individuals on either side.” 

“So the ones on either side are special and the ones in the middle are—what?—regular?”

“Well, the ones on either side have special needs that are different from the needs of the ones in the middle, but all kids have the same value.”

“So all kids are special—or else no kids are.”

“Wait,” I said.  “If all are special then of course no one is.”  I had a strange sense of being caught in a language trap.  “But if gifted kids are going to get an education that fits their need for challenging learning in a system based on norms, they have to have something the others don’t need.  In that sense they’re special.”

This healer knows what my spiritual beliefs are—we share most of them, including that we are all aspects of the divine.  She looked me steadily in the eye.  “So they are something others are not?” she asked.  “If all people are Spirit, do gifted kids somehow have more of Spirit, or a different Spirit?  If there is just One Spirit, how could that be?”

We went on to talk of other things, and then she worked with me on the PTSD left behind after the deaths in my family in 2013, and I headed home.  We’d made excellent progress with the PTSD.  But I was still genuinely unsettled about that conversation. 

My connection with the highly gifted began with my own experience of childhood, with my husband’s and then our offspring’s experiences, and then with families and teachers of such kids all over the country.  I have seen their struggles to get a challenging education and to find friends who understand them, their sense of “not fitting” in the world.  I have related powerfully to their trials and challenges.  How could I not?

But she had challenged me to notice for the first time the “us/them” dichotomy I had created in my own mind in spite of my deep belief that we humans are all one family, all expressions of the divine, all coping with the challenges of life. And—all supported through those challenges by that all-encompassing Spirit.  I have an image I’ve used in some of my talks of “Indra’s net,” the Buddhist symbol used to describe the non-dual transcendent basis of all existence, or its holographic equivalent. 

The human tendency to identify an “us” to feel comfortable and safe with, and a “them” to defend against, has been obvious to me among races, among political parties, among countries, ethnic groups, religions, and people with different sexual orientations.  I have felt that it was one of humanity’s most dangerous and self-destructive tendencies, leading us to generalize about groups defined as other.  But never before had my focus on highly gifted kids who so seldom get their educational needs met seemed to be in any way part of that tendency. My reaction to her questions showed me that it was.

Please understand me here.  This confrontation with the disparity between my deepest beliefs and my feelings about this population I care about doesn’t change my awareness of their needs or my wish to help them get those needs met.  It has only shifted something inside. 

It has given me a new understanding of those people who have ranged their arguments so intensely against the gifted, seeming to believe that if my us gets the world’s focus and support it will somehow leave their us out.  We all of us have problems, have needs that don’t get addressed, have trials and tribulations and pains that we cope with as best we can.  The world we see around us often feels and is said to be limited, a place where there is never enough for all of us. 

In that world, the truth is that we who have been given the blessing of fine minds need to remember that humans are more alike than different.  Many of our kids are clear about wanting to work for all. We don’t need more struggles between us and them, no matter how subtly (or internally) they occur. 

None of this changes the fact that there are infinite numbers of differences among the beings of our planet—cheetahs and whales, butterflies and frogs, snails and humans and bluebirds and gnats—life is diverse.  And life forms have diverse needs.  Naturally we will go on working to meet the needs of our own particular bits of the web of life, but it is essential to remember that we’re in this together–that life itself is one.  And it is life that is special.web

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Stepping into a New World

14 Oct

Those (possibly very few reading here) who know tarot will recognize the “Zero” card in traditional decks as The Fool.  The image for this card usually includes someone about to step off the cliff of the known world into empty air—carrying or wearing a pack.  He is shown as care free and smiling.  We consider it inherently foolish to step off solid high ground, oblivious to the fall that clearly seems so certain.  But there may be something other than foolishness involved.  There is an aphorism that says, “when you must move forward beyond the edge of the cliff one of two things will happen—firm support will appear under your feet, or you will sprout wings and fly. 

Stepping off the very edge of the known world takes radical trust.  Not just trust, but the ability to trust in trust itself.  When the solid ground you’ve been standing on begins to shake and crumble beneath your feet, it may be wise rather than foolish to grab a few tools and step off.

I think about this new world thing today because I just returned from the OAGC fall conference in Ohio where I gave a keynote on Monday about the definition of giftedness as asynchronous development that was contributed to the field by the Columbus Group (yes, in Columbus on Columbus Day!)  At that conference there were inevitably many people acutely aware of tremors in the ground beneath their feet. 

In my small sessions for teachers questions were raised about how those dedicated to “doing no harm” to their gifted asynchronous students (or any others in their classes, for that matter) can be effective in a system that allows little breathing room and punishes teachers if their students do poorly on the tests that have come to rule the academic calendar.  We spoke of good, even great, teachers leaving the field because of massive frustration.  “It should not be this way,” we agreed.  I reminded them that some states are beginning to change draconian testing policies and suggested that when things get bad enough, even massive systems have to change, a bit at a time.  Finally, I found myself telling them to do whatever they can manage, and keep up their own spirits and their willingness to stick with it by finding at least one thing to be grateful for in every school day.  Then I apologized for having only the tool to give them that Bernie Siegel offers to cancer patients facing uncertain outcomes.  Has teaching come to this?  But I don’t apologize for the tool, because it is a very powerful one.

New forms arise out of chaos, but it takes courage to hold on through the chaos.  What we pay attention to expands in our experience, so it is important to focus on what works, no matter what else is going on around that. 

For myself, what I noticed to be grateful for in the very large gathering at OAGC (as well as back in March at the NJ state conference) was the strongest sense of a shift in consciousness I have ever felt in such gatherings in this country.  There is a growing awareness that our old way of thinking about “mind” as referring solely to rational thought within a rational/material world, is insufficient.  No matter how good it is, the rational mind cannot predict what the world our children will face as adults will look like, what they will need to know, or what skills they will need to have to find a place in that world.  As the pace of change continues to accelerate, educational patterns based on ideas about the human mind from decades, even centuries ago, will fail.

I put up a slide asking the conference attendees to consider their own definition or “sense” of what mind is, using at first these three images:

braincogswispy

The first represents, of course, the traditional scientific belief that mind originates and resides in the physical brain, the second symbolizes the mechanistic cogwheels of intellectual/rational/logical  thought, and the third a kind of nebulous, wispy not quite physical “something,” hard to pin down or “understand.”

Then I added a fourth image from painter Alex Gray:

        energy body

This one acknowledges an energy basis of both mind and body.

The feel of a very big room full of educators, when offered these images, is more open these days.  There seems to be a growing willingness to consider new ideas about what mind, what consciousness, may be. 

This is deeply heartening to me, because the ground we’ve been standing on all these centuries (while we have been developing, using and relying on our quite splendid rational minds to understand and analyze and tame the material world) is demonstrably crumbling beneath our feet.  Materialism, with its emphasis on separation, on particles rather than waves, leaves out something absolutely essential—what might be called the “heart” of humanity.

Here is a slide I have used in several talks to try to help broaden the concept of what mind consists of:

 Aspects of Mind/Consciousness

Awareness                           Perception                     Emotion/Feeling

Intellect                                Imagination                    Memory

Will                                       Intuition                          Compassion                

Only a few of these aspects are addressed in most school curricula.  We need to consider the world our children might help create if we began to recognize and value more of what can be called the non-rational aspects of our consciousness.  The rational mind, focusing on analyzing, separating, labeling, categorizing and creating hierarchies, has brought us to where we are today, disconnected from each other and from the nature that supports us.  We see the effects of this disconnection all around us and in every evening news broadcast.

The Columbus Group focuses not solely on intellect and achievement, but on the “whole child” in the education and raising of gifted kids.  It is essential that we also begin to recognize “whole mind,” the “whole being” as we look to the human future.  According to Jack Kornfield Sanskrit has only a single word for “mind” and “heart.”  Imagine the difference it would make if we could heal the separation we now see between these two aspects of ourselves!  It shouldn’t be such a huge stretch now that the field of neurocardiology is showing that the heart both receives and processes information. 

The members of the Columbus Group who went to New Zealand in April for our Symposium on Asynchronous Development all felt something personally transforming happened there.  That symposium began with an indigenous ceremony specifically recognizing the connectedness of all peoples, all beings, all aspects of our universe.  Such a different way of beginning an educational gathering surely had a part to play in this noticeable sense of transformation. 

For me this week it was a lovely synchronicity that October 12th is not only Columbus Day, but is called Indigenous Peoples Day in some places.  The old world (that had long been inhabited when Columbus set sail to “discover” it) possessed valuable—non-rational—tools of consciousness most of Europe had forgotten, tools that are likely to be useful or even necessary for taking our own next step as the ground continues to shake beneath us all. 

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