#767 BASICS #2: The Heart of Mindfulness

     “Mindfulness can be thought of as moment-to-moment, nonjudgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, as nonjudgmentally, and as openheartedly as possible.” Jon Kabat-Zinn. “Wherever You Go, There You Are.” Hyperion, 1994.

     Moment-to-moment means continuously ie all the time - we intend this to become our stable way of being in the world.
     Non-judgmentally doesn’t mean detached – quite the opposite. We’re learning to cultivate a friendly, kind, even loving attitude, toward ourselves, others & life in general, as life keeps unfolding for us in each present moment.
     One way to help achieve this is to instead of compulsively analyzing our thoughts & sensations, to simply notice if they feel pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. This counterbalances our tendency to become lost in our heads thinking, and helps bring us back down to earth, into our bodies, right here, right now ie back to reality.

     All of us have sustained different traumas. The more severe the trauma and the earlier in life it occurs, the greater the impact and the less we may be consciously aware of it. All of us are at least somewhat armoured, and therefore, we have more in common with military veterans with PTSD than we realize.
     "Whoever you're looking at, know that that person has been through hell several times." Christian Bobin
     So we automatically behave qualitatively differently, as if we were totally different people, when for example, we face a hostile stranger vs when we rock a beloved one-year-old to sleep on our chest. The hostile stranger 'triggers' us! We 'react' by hardening (armour), become 'stone cold,' ready to fight, run or shut down ('fight, flight or freeze instinct'). With the baby however, our heart opens wide, radiating warmth, safety, nurturing, unconditional love ('tend & befriend instinct').
     This radical difference is 'normal' ie common, but not optimal! A person competent in negotiating with enraged people will show relaxation, concern & curiosity towards the hostile stranger, will get to know them (no longer a stranger), find out why they're upset, maybe give them a hot drink, and hold them in safety & unconditional kindness. This is what we all need, especially when we're triggered!
    Triggered people unfortunately usually trigger others! When two triggered parties confront each other, things don't go well (eg when mentally ill people are killed; the many ongoing endless religious / tribal / racial conflicts). INSTEAD, we CAN cultivate the mindfulness required to face all situations far, far more skillfully: with an open mind & an open heart.

                              "We are fools to make war
                               on our brothers in arms."          Mark Knopfler

     “… in any situation in life, confronted by an outer threat or opportunity, you can notice yourself responding inwardly in one of two ways. Either you will brace, harden, and resist, or you will soften, open and yield. If you go with the former gesture, you will be catapulted immediately into your smaller self, with its animal instincts and survival responses. If you stay with the latter regardless of the outer conditions, you will remain in alignment with your innermost being, and through it, divine being can reach you. Spiritual practice at its no-frills simplest is a moment-by-moment learning not to do anything in a state of internal brace. Bracing is never worth the cost.
     This does not necessarily carry over into an outer state of surrender, or ‘rolling over and playing dead.’ On the contrary, interior surrender is often precisely what makes it possible to see a decisive action that must be taken and to do it with courage and strength. To ski down a hill or split a piece of wood, you first have to relax inwardly; only then can you exert the right force and timing. It’s exactly the same in the emotional world. Whether it’s a matter of holding your ground in a dispute with your boss, handling a rebellious teenager with tough love, or putting your life on the line for an ideal you believe in like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., action flows better when it flows from nonviolence, that is, from the place of relaxed, inner opening.
     Remember that memorable scene in the first Star Wars movie when young Luke Skywalker had to guide his space cruiser through a narrow passage and release his missile at exactly the right time? ‘Feel the force, feel the force’ – that powerful mantra his teacher Obi-Wan-Kenobi had impressed on him – captures perfectly the relationship between inner surrender and effortless action. It’s a secret the great spiritual masters have always known.”
    Cynthia Bourgeault. “The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming An Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart.” Jossey-Bass, 2003.

   A useful meditation PRACTICE: http://www.johnlovas.com/2021/01/768-basics-2a-heart-of-mindfulness.html

#766 BASICS #1: Recognizing the Need for a Qualitative Shift

      Welcome to a new series on my humble ideas of the basic principles or premises of learning to become more mindful. 

     It seems we as individuals, and industrialized societies, are becoming busier & busier. Does this mean that we and our human race are becoming proportionately more deeply happy, healthy, fulfilled & whole? Does working harder & longer, becoming more specialized, ie doing more & more of the same bring about what we need?
      Actually, rates of anxiety, depression, cynicism, drug-abuse/addictions, burnout & suicide are markedly increasing, with endless wars/conflicts, misogyny, racism, mass migration of refugees, hunger/starvation (all while we in 'developed' countries waste ~33% of our food), rising numbers of dictatorships / elected dictator-wannabe's, & escalating decimation of all living species / forests / air / water / Arctic sea ice. So yes, we are busier & busier - making ourselves & each other suffer.

      "The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." Omar Bradley, American World War II field commander

      “We are no longer in a period of history when the inner journey is solely about our own liberation: it is about taking part in a global shift in consciousness. It is about preparing us to act, with compassion, on behalf of this planet and the beings around us.
      My prayer for this world is that we find meaning & purpose in uprooting the deeper causes of our earth’s environmental malaise — the inner causes of aggression, greed & delusion — and train in establishing the deeper causes of peace & sustainable living — compassion, kindness, contentment & wisdom. I believe everyone on this earth is capable of finding the courage to go the distance.” Lama Willa Miller

     “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.” Albert Einstein

     When we become "just wise enough to know that we know nothing, when we've reached the pinnacle of success – the highest position possible for us – but find ourselves alone, unrelated, our life meaningless. … When our ‘reality function’ – the feet-on-the-ground’ ability – is threatened, an encounter with the dark side … is the corrective.
     This is a terrible moment in the life of an intelligent man (or woman). He now sees that his level of consciousness, his perspective on life, will not support him. He has explored discipline and self-consciousness only to find them a dead end. This exploration is absolutely essential in one’s evolution, and the man who has not trodden that road is not eligible for the moment of despair that is also the moment of redemption and enlightenment. This is the midlife crisis, the mute suffering of existential man, the dark night of the soul. This is the experience of the intelligent man, the heroic man, the one who has reached the goal of modern consciousness. This is what happens when you reach the top of the ladder only to find that it was set up against the wrong wall. It is the very best man (or woman) who suffers this Hamlet crisis. Lesser men (or women) take refuge in guilt at their inadequacy, or blame their environment, or find yet another set of windmills to vanquish – anything but face the terror of seeing that (their current) consciousness is not bearable, no matter how finely developed it is.
     It is a compliment of the highest order when a man finds that he cannot go farther and that his life is an irredeemable tragedy. His ego consciousness is stalemated, and this stalemate is the only medicine that will drive him out of the Hamlet tragedy and inspire him into a new consciousness.
     A fault of this magnitude cannot be repaired, but can be healed only by finding a whole new level of consciousness from which to function.
     … the ego-centered man fails; (one) who learns a center of gravity greater than himself, redeems that failure. If one were a genius the process would be inspirational, but for most of us it is experienced as the torture at the end of the rope. This divine/hellish point is the critical moment that can make or break the rest of a man’s life.”
      Robert A. Johnson. “Transformation. Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness.” HarperOne, 1991.

     The option to make this qualitative shift in consciousness comes about when it finally dawns on us that we EITHER remain stuck, frustrated, getting nowhere - OR - we intentionally start becoming wiser individuals & societies. One way of doing the latter is by seriously practicing mindfulness.

      “The easy path of aging is to become a thick-skinned, unbudging curmudgeon, a battle-axe. To grow soft and sweet is the harder way.” James Hillman

 

www.BuddhaDoodles.shop

#765 From Fear & Suffering - to - Love & Joy

     “Wisdom is deep understanding and practical skill in the central issues of life, especially existential and spiritual issues.
      Existential issues are those crucial and universal concerns all of us face simply because we are human. They include finding meaning and purpose in our lives; managing relationships and aloneness; acknowledging our limits and smallness in a universe vast beyond comprehension; living in inevitable uncertainty and mystery; and dealing with sickness, suffering, and death. A person who has developed deep insights into these issues – and skills for dealing with them – is wise indeed.
      Visionary wisdom sees that conventional ways of living are rife with suffering. Practical wisdom begins when a person recognizes there must be a better way to live and commits to finding it. The quest to awaken begins.
      Wisdom recognizes the awesome power of the mind to both create and cloud our experience, to produce ecstasy and suffering, and to learn or stagnate. Once you appreciate the all-consuming power of the mind, learning how your mind works and how to train it become vital goals.”

     Roger Walsh. “Essential Spirituality. The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind.” John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1999.

     "Our unwillingness to turn towards & relate kindly to negative mind states causes suffering." Bill Morgan

   “Our suffering is caused by holding on to how things might have been, should have been, could have been.” Stephen Levine

 

    "... investigate how resistance turns pain into suffering, the unpleasant into the unbearable." Stephen Levine

      “Our intelligence and dignity themselves are developed by our being alive for everything, including the mundane anguish of our lives. Just our awareness of our sensations, of our experience, with no object or idea in mind, is the practice of not preferring any particular state of mind. Intimacy with our activity and the objects around us connects us deeply to our lives. This connection – to the earth, our bodies, our sense impressions, our creative energies, our feelings, other people – is the only way I know of to alleviate suffering. To me, our awareness of these things without preference is a meditation that synchronizes body and mind. This synchronization, the experience of deep integrity, of being all of a piece, is a very deep healing. It is unconventional to value such a subtle experience. It is not encouraged in our culture. We’re much more apt to strive to feel special, uniquely talented, particularly loved. It’s extraordinary to be willing to live an ordinary life, to be fully alive for the laundry, to be present for the dishes. We overlook these everyday connections to our lives, waiting for the Big Event.
      Because our conditioning to avoid unpleasantness, the hardest thing may not be bearing the unpleasant experiences we have so much as learning how to experience the details of our suffering so thoroughly that ‘suffering,’ ‘stress,’ and ‘pain’ lose their distinctive character and just become our lives, and rich lives at that.”
      Darlene Cohen. “Turning Suffering Inside Out: A Zen Approach to Living with Physical and Emotional Pain.” Shambhala, 2002.

“If this world is to be healed through human efforts,

I am convinced it will be by ordinary people

whose love for life is even greater than their fear." Joanna Macy

      Joanna Macy “discovered that when people opened up to the pain they felt for the world, they began to sense a deeper connection with life.”

     “Wisdom is deep understanding and practical skill in the central issues of life, especially existential and spiritual issues.

      Existential issues are those crucial and universal concerns all of us face simply because we are human. They include finding meaning and purpose in our lives; managing relationships and aloneness; acknowledging our limits and smallness in a universe vast beyond comprehension; living in inevitable uncertainty and mystery; and dealing with sickness, suffering, and death. A person who has developed deep insights into these issues – and skills for dealing with them – is wise indeed.”

     Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield. “Seeking the Heart of Wisdom. The Path of Insight Meditation.” Shambhala, 2001.

P. Michael Lovas photograph

#764 Awareness and Suffering

     “A psychiatrist told this story: 

     ‘I was interning at a hospital and working with a very depressed young man. Certainly drug therapy was called for, but I wanted to try something else before prescribing pills. I listened attentively to his story. He was very good at detailing his depression and spoke clearly, with a level of understanding that suggested he had been in therapy before, which he had.
     When he finished speaking, I said, ‘Is the person telling me this story of depression himself depressed?’

     The young man just stared at me.

     ‘Think about your depression, and then notice if the you that is thinking about your depression is also depressed.’

     He closed his eyes and sought an honest answer to my question.
     ‘No,’ he said. ‘He’s not.’

     ‘He’s not? Who is he?’

     ‘Me,’ he said, ‘I’m not. I mean the me that was telling you about my depression wasn’t depressed, but was just telling you about another me that was, that is, depressed.’

     ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Let’s use the you who isn’t depressed to help the you who is depressed.’

     His eyes grew wide, and he smiled with a mixture of surprise and joy. He was ready to get well.

… The ‘I’ that notices sadness or depression is not sad or depressed; the ‘I’ that notices joy or guilt, hunger or lust, isn’t actually feeling any of these states. This ‘I’ is witnessing everything but isn’t caught up in anything.”
       Rami Shapiro. “Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent. Sacred Teachings – Annotated & Explained.” SkyLight Paths, 2013.


      “Awareness and meditation are, for me, fundamental to the deep change that is necessary for healing. Chronic illness is a way of life as well as, perhaps even more than, a disease entity. Before we can be free of the symptoms of illness and the role of the sick person, we need to know what has precipitated those symptoms, and how we are responding to our sickness. We need to recognize in our own lives the psychological, biological, and sociological factors that may affect our health.
      Awareness allows us to see where we are; to stand for a moment outside ourselves; to appreciate in a powerful, personal way, how the world around us affects us; to observe the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise in us. Meditation is a state of moment-to-moment awareness that over time may help to dissolve physical symptoms and habitual ways of thinking and acting. Both awareness and meditation enable us to experience the way our mind may limit or free us. Together they prepare us to use our mind to make the deep changes in thought, feeling, and action that are necessary for our healing.” James S. Gordon MD
        McCabe Ruf, K, Mackenzie ER. "The Role of Mindfulness in Healthcare Reform: A Policy Paper." Explore (NY) 2009; 5(6): 313-23. 

     “Because noting states of mind as they arise keep us present, it allows us to meet difficulties at their inception – before they become more real than we are."
       Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as if it Were Your Last.” 

     “The only service you can do for anyone (including yourself) is to remind them of their true nature.” Stephen Levine

#763 Overview of Meditation PRACTICE

     Our life, at times, appears to be under control - "I've got this!" Though we more-or-less sleep-walk through life, "doing things half-assed," we assume we're smart enough to get away with it. We're self-absorbed, lost in youthful naivete, (imagined) power & bright future. At this level of unconsciousness, we're not interested meditation at all. For a variety reasons, some of us remain at this level of maturity.

     As the years roll on, some of us are forced to learn hard lessons, become more humble, recognize how minimal our ability is to control life, and start searching for a deeper, more reliable form of happiness that's independent of conditions. Meditation now becomes more relevant.

     NOW the entire world is in turmoil: Covid 19 crisis / financial meltdown / climate crisis / direct or proxy warfare / refugee crises. "Normal" times have evaporated, possibly forever. It's time to wake up & engage with life CONSCIOUSLY, WISELY. 
     Einstein said that we can't solve a mess with the same level of consciousness as the one with which we caused it. We MUST evolve / mature to a higher level of consciousness. Now meditation practice is a vital asset.

     The various mindfulness meditation (MBSR) practices all have us concentrate our awareness on an object of meditation, in real time. The physically-felt details of our object of meditation (eg breath in our belly) are to completely fill our awareness. No part of our awareness should remain with which to be anxious, sad, to obsess, or daydream. Stable, one-pointed concentration - absorbed only on one "object" in silence & stillness (without metal chatter, without physical / emotional restlessness), in and of itself, feels pleasant & can therefore be effortlessly maintained. Profound mental rest & therefore stress relief are relatively easily & quickly obtainable.
     But initially, we ALL behave according to our lifelong training - unconsciously follow our deeply conditioned habits. So we follow the instructions in a "half-assed" way, "just going through the motions," remaining lost in our trance: self-talk about "the story of me," continuing to catastrophize, wallow, or daydream. Then we quickly jump to self-judgment & want to quit meditation "because we're no good at it."
     Our greatest obstacles are: 1) Lack of practice,  2) Impatience, & 3) Expecting dramatic results.
     1) A regular daily meditation PRACTICE must be established to replace our old outdated conditioning with new more appropriate conditioning / training. The more we practice wisely, the better we become at it. Without this disciplined approach, we derive ZERO benefits, no matter how much we read & talk about meditation. As with skiing, tennis or golf, we improve in direct proportion to the quality & quantity of our practice.
     2) IF we PATIENTLY persevere, and accept our old conditioning (untrained, distracted mind), treat ourselves with incredible patience, gentleness & kindness - holding ourselves in safety & unconditional love - carefully following the meditation instructions - zooming in on the details with curiosity, we WILL INEVITABLY SUCCEED. 
     Our mind is the organ of change. Wise, consistent training invariably transforms our mind to work FOR us (instead of against us). We will turn our life right around. From feeling helpless, vulnerable & needy, we gradually shift to embody the source of safety & unconditional love first for ourselves, and subsequently for others. 
     3) When we stabilize our awareness on a physical sensation (even for 10 seconds), we release our habitual shallow level of consciousness ("noisy ego") and become our deeper intelligence, experiencing peace, stillness & silence. The first few times, we tend to get either bored or all excited and so pop right back up to the shallows & start blabbering to ourselves, which of course immediately ends the experience. 
     If we expect meditation to deliver fireworks & levitation, we might actually overlook the subtle quality of profound peace, stillness & silence, and judge it boring, a waste of time! 
     If however we have suffered, or are now suffering from a lot of emotional anguish, then experiencing profound peace, stillness & silence will feel absolutely heavenly. Gradually, we do learn to feel comfortable & stabilize in this profoundly peaceful, still, silent, loving space of deep intelligence where we are deeply connected to, engaged, intimate with ourselves, others, the environment, life itself: http://www.johnlovas.com/2020/03/appreciating-subtle.html

     Let us PRACTICE regularly, wisely, patiently, kindly every day, formally and informally. We've created a desperate mess with our noisy ego. Now we must clean up this hot mess, but can only do so by embodying our deep intelligence. We know how; we can do it!

#762 Overview of the Meditative Path

     While busy raising a family, establishing a career, and coping with the effects of various traumas, little time or energy remains to get one's bearings. A recent radio show: "The Death of Leisure" discussed how current societal pressures & priorities are so narrowly focused on productivity (work), that opportunities to "think about how to pursue the things we value" are disappearing. "So how do we reconfigure our relationship to the time we have and open it up so we can pursue the good life?" https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-death-of-leisure-1.5470259
     A small proportion of us do seek out, and do obtain symptomatic relief from stress through meditation, including mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).
     After children have grown & become independent, career has peaked (or starts winding down), and psychological issues have more or less resolved, a gnawing "lack" often still remains - or becomes more pressing than ever before. 
     But because most of us have so exclusively devoted ourselves to "productivity," our profession becomes our entire identity, so we often find ourselves lost & feeling empty by middle-age, and especially after we retire. So some swear "I'll never retire"; some quickly go back to work after a very brief retirement; and some very quickly die after retirement. The momentum of a lifetime of constant struggle & striving for financial security, material success & professional respect is powerful & enduring. 
     All life transitions are challenging, perhaps especially retirement: loss of identity; diminished prestige, income, control & social contacts; diminishing physical & mental health; fear of death; and perhaps the most frightening of all - becoming consciously aware (perhaps for the first time) of what's actually going on. Retirement is an inherent part of wise aging - something in which most of us have ZERO training, knowledge, or even interest. http://www.johnlovas.com/2011/12/successful-aging.html

     Serious meditation practice can help us far more than we can imagine:

      “Beginning meditation may be difficult. Just sitting immobile for a half hour can be arduous at first and intensive practice over a period of days can be powerful and at times disconcerting. Any unresolved psychological conflicts tend to surface as soon as attention is turned inward and the restless agitated nature of the untrained mind rapidly becomes apparent. Powerful surges of arousal and emotion may alternate with deep peace and joy.
     Even a few hours of intensive practice can easily demonstrate that our usual levels of awareness and perception are grossly insensitive, distorted, and outside voluntary control. Indeed, it rapidly becomes apparent that our usual degree of voluntary control of psychological processes is far less than commonly assumed. Amazingly enough, we can live a whole lifetime without recognizing the fact that these perceptual processes continuously control, create, and distort our reality as well as our ideas of who and what we are. Most people who have tried would probably agree that training the mind and bringing it under voluntary control is one of the most difficult tasks a person can undertake.
     The rewards of meditative practice tend to be subtle at first. Increased calm, sensitivity, receptivity, empathy, insight, and clarity are some of the qualities that may be experienced early as a result of regular practice. Old assumptions about oneself and the world are gradually surrendered, and more finely tuned, comprehensive perspectives begin to emerge.
     Such immediate benefits, however, are only tastes of what is potentially a profound transformative process, for when practiced intensely, meditation disciplines almost invariably lead into the transpersonal realm of experience. Advanced practitioners report states of consciousness, levels of perceptual sensitivity and clarity, and degrees of insight, calm, joy, and love that far exceed those experienced by most people in their daily life. A progressive sequence of altered states of consciousness can occur, which may ultimately result in the permanent, radical shift in consciousness known as enlightenment or liberation.”

       Roger Walsh. “Meditation: Doorway to the Transpersonal.” In R. Walsh, F. Vaughan eds. “Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology.” JP Tarcher, 1980.

    For more depth & detail: http://www.johnlovas.com/2020/02/maturing-beyond-ordinary-happiness.html

#761 Integration Now

     “Da Vinci’s approach was an integrated science, philosophy, and art of quality and wholeness, an exploration of patterns, systems, and the interrelatedness of things, more complete than the mechanistic and reductionistic understanding. He understood the parts and the mechanics; he designed hundreds of mechanical devices and carefully studied their properties, including precise understanding of things like the human arm or of the flow of fluids – hydraulics – recognizing its applicability to everything from water in a stream to blood flow in the body.
     But while he understood full well that the arm, for example, provided mechanical utility and could be dissected into individual components, he did not reduce the arm or the human or nature at large simply to mechanics. His reverence for natural creations and his ability to recognize patterns and interconnecting phenomena provided an integrated science and art, value and meaning, rationality and beauty. Without this larger, more integrated way of knowing, as he says, we ‘do injury to knowledge and to love.’
     To what extent does our prevailing educational approach leave out parts of the mind – ways of knowing – and thereby foster the same kind of injury? Today, how do we reconcile mechanistic and holistic understanding, awe and information, quality and quantity, and while we are at it, find what the ancient Greeks searched for – the good, the true, and the beautiful?

THE FRONTIER OF CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
     Confusion arises in education today particularly because we are in the midst of an epochal change and we cannot quite clearly make out the horizon and thus how education should best proceed. Civilization appears to move through various eras or epochs of knowing, that is, the grounds on which we constitute truth and knowledge. Philosopher Michel Foucault referred to this as the episteme of an era. Thomas Kuhn spoke of scientific paradigms in a fairly similar although more circumscribed way. Basically, the episteme is made up of the assumptions, rules, roles, standards, and methods of knowing that guide and limit how we think and know. We cannot quite see this; it is a kind of epistemic unconscious or underlying field that we operate within. This matrix forms the conditions and limits of possibility for knowledge in a given time and place. Such an epoch of knowing emerges from, overlaps with, and then eclipses the previous episteme. For example, we might conclude that the early Renaissance was followed by a modernist period. (Because culture is not homogeneous, multiple epistemes could exist as part of different power-knowledge systems or subcultures.) We can recognize some of the characteristics of the predominant modernist episteme of the past few centuries including the role of the individual, the application of a scientific, materialistic, reductionistic, objectivist knowing as the standard of truth. This naturally led to education that emphasizes facts, measurement, control, predictability, generality, reduction, materiality, and the like. It also would tend to miss observations and conclusions that land outside that episteme.
     More recently, the postmodern turn has opened great cracks in the modernist episteme. It helps us unpack facts and ask critical questions about knowledge. For example, we recognize that truth and knowledge are often tied to power. When we ask, ‘Who funded that research?’ we are recognizing the mutability of objective fact. Truth is mediated by our intent, expectations, social status, language, race, history, and more. In Washington and elsewhere we may now even refer to ‘true facts’ revealing this postmodern recognition of just how facts can be a product of power and spin, not only reduced, objective, certain, and measurable.
     I want to make clear that this in no way whatsoever diminishes the importance of science or facts or measurement or logic, but it places them in the context of human understanding and culture. It helps us think critically and go behind the curtain of so-called objective knowledge. We can thank this postmodern shift for elevating critical reasoning and questioning, helping us recognize that ‘truth,’ to one degree or another, is socially construed.
     The modernist era has helped us to distinguish in so many ways. The postmodern has helped expose how culture and context shape what we consider to be true and good and beautiful. But we are on the cusp of something more.
     The challenge for this new era is not just to differentiate, dominate, or deconstruct, but instead to integrate. An industrial era yields to the information age, but the front edge is not merely about more information, it is instead an age of integration. Goethe said it this way: ‘To locate yourself in the infinite you must distinguish and then unite.’
     We already see the harbingers of a drive toward integration in all sorts of front-edge initiatives: mind-body medicine; fusion of art, music, and technology; East-West dialogue in everything from culture to cuisine; neurophenomenology as a research approach to merge direct experience and brain activity; social neuroscience that challenges the assumptions of discrete, individual consciousness, recognizing the linking of brains; new previously inconceivable blended fields like neuroaesthetics and neuroethics; lessons from paleobiology being applied to global finance; tide pool ecology informing approaches to post-9/11 national security; and the largest annual academic prize being the Templeton Prize for the integration of science and spirituality, two domains that have been radically segregated for four hundred years. We are coming to recognize interconnection in everything from pollution to politics to persons.
     The fundamental assumptions of reality that underlie the modernist epiteme are not only being deconstructed but also being turned upside down. We are moving from an understanding of the world as chunks of dead matter to seeing it as part of a self-organizing, living universe. In domain after domain we are coming to recognize connection, interdependence, and integration at every level of being. With it we have the possibility and the need, in the words of Thomas Berry, to move from seeing the world as a collection of objects to experiencing it as a communion of subjects.
     However partial our view of the horizon is, we are standing in a position that enables us to recognize many of the features of this knowing: integrating versus abbreviating, holistic versus reductionistic, connection versus domination, emergent and coconstituted versus materially existent and individual, value-laden versus valueless, interdependent versus isolated, dynamic versus static, probabilistic rather than deterministic, subjective and objective, intuition and logic, forest and tree, commonality and difference, compassion and calculation.
     The challenge for this age is not just about more information and faster connections, more differentiation and domination, but to find a way to bring together the bits and the bytes in living the integrated life in a world of global interconnection so that we, as da Vinci warned, stop doing injury to knowledge and to love. If our education and our consciousness are to be a match for this century, this is where the trail of knowing leads. But how do we proceed?

TWO WAYS OF KNOWING
     Our understanding of knowing is multifaceted and in education emphasizes memory, reasoning, learning style, language, intelligence, and on and on. Acknowledging the vast array of distinctions, I want to cut beneath these to claim that with respect to education, consciousness, and culture today, there are two ways of knowing. That is, there are two fundamental ways that the mind works to know the world. There are myriad variations to be sure and certainly plenty of other ways to slice this rhetorically, but the most salient concern today comes down to this.
     One way we will call categorical. This knows the world through abstraction, through separating it from us, through taking apart to understand. In a sense everything is reduced to parts, to lowest units that are differentiated, named, catalogued. It reaches its apex in metaphor of computer zeroes and ones. Categorical awareness narrows in to focus on detail and seeks precision, objectivity, and presupposes certainty. It simplifies and represents, proceeds linearly and sequentially, and generalizes. Our schooling emphasizes this way of knowing, and for the most part, only this.
     The other knowing is through contact instead of category. Its style is direct, relational, embodied, and recognizes wholes and connections. Awareness through contact enables a broader view, one connected with the world and the body, scanning for changes in the environment. This knowing seeks novelty, picks up implicit meaning and metaphor, is able to read faces and other cues of individuals instead of simplified, predetermined, and generalized categories. Knowledge through contact is evolving, implicit, and indeterminate since it always exists in relationship to something else and is not ever fully graspable.
     Iain McGilchrist*, drawing from a vast body of neuroscientific and phenomenological data, makes a compelling case that these ways of knowing have neurological substrates corresponding to the anatomically distinct hemispheres of the brain.” 
         Tobin Hart. “The Integrative Mind: Transformative Education for a World on Fire.” Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

        * Iain McGilchrist. “The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.” Yale University Press, 2019.
                 ALSO: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=McGilchrist
                 AND wrt health-care education: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/2019/11/conflicting-perspectives-and.html