Read an Excerpt
A New Education for New Minds
A Conversation About Mind-Centered Learning
By Marquis R. Nave iUniverse LLC
Copyright © 2014 Marquis R. Nave
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4917-4101-6
CHAPTER 1
Beyond Words, There Is Knowledge
Imagine having a spell cast over you that prevents you from telling the difference between reality and illusion. Imagine that feeling of dreaming. In this dream, you are special and unique because you are the center of the universe and you have some control in how the dream plays out. The enchantment is very intoxicating because it gives you an incredible sense of freedom and power. At times the dream turns into a nightmare, especially when you feel as if things are out of control. But not even the occasional nightmare is enough to wake you up.
Such a spell would be powerful indeed.
Well, if such a spell existed, words, symbols, beliefs, and perceptions would be the primary ingredients of this potent potion. In this world, learning is sacrificed for wishes. Illusions stand in for reality. This is the world created by perceptions. Perception is reality as we wish it to be but not as it is, and this becomes our narrative. When Einstein said that "a man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be," he was speaking to the potency of the spell of illusion, the world of words. Our narrative is but a dream made from a world of our own making.
Beyond the words or symbols or representations is knowledge, a state of certainty and creativity. Certainty comes from knowledge because knowledge is constant and unchangeable. Creative thinking is a natural consequence of knowledge. On the other hand, perceiving involves the shifting and changing of reality. We are either perceiving or knowing, but never both at the same time. Perceptions are born of the body's senses. When we perceive, a story is conjured up. The offspring of perception and narrative is the basis of this human reality. So first comes experiences, and then perceptions stabilize. As perceptions stabilize, the stories turn into beliefs that grow into fairytales, horror stories, and happy endings. The human veil of narrative is intricate and multiplicitous. These self-made narratives establish beliefs that are mistaken for knowledge. In this reality, these beliefs restrict our awareness to only what we process through our central nervous systems. Our material reality is a narrative, a fantastical drama of light and vibration and the sensory aftershocks. In this world, the mind is dreaming of interacting with matter, and then our ego provides the story to make the dream seem real. There are stories that are dramatic, others are comic, and some are tragic.
It would be like accidently walking in on a stage play being performed and having no idea that the props and the people arguing or laughing on stage are acting out a scene for a play. Nor do they know. In the same way, we react to our mind-made stories because we have no idea what is real or illusion. This confusion in the mind can only persist if the mind cannot break its addiction to the story. Projecting our story onto the actions we witness is a habit more addictive than any drug, even more addictive than sugar. To feel the truth of this addiction, just try to witness actions without ascribing any meaning to those actions. This is challenging because we are psychologically addicted to meaning, familiarity and consistency. In order to access a broader awareness, we must go beyond words, beyond our self-made narratives. How many times have we believed something to be true and then had our reality change right before our eyes? Remember, realities that change are based on perception, an ever-changing illusion. The physical world is a reality that can be changed by the ideas that come from our minds. It is this truth that is the seed of the new education.
From the viewpoint of the new education, all material matter has an interdependent relationship with our mind. This is the same as the Buddhist notion of "dependent arising": basically, all phenomena are arising together in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect. In a letter from Einstein to the 1933 Nobel Prize–winning Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, he wrote, "You are the only contemporary physicist ... who sees that one cannot get around the assumption of reality, if only one is honest. Most of them simply do not see what sort of risky game they are playing with reality—reality as something independent of what is experimentally established" (Barrett 1999). The association of our minds and how they participate in assembling our reality is unmistaken. In his book Understanding the Secrets of Human Perception, Peter M. Vishton explains in detail how our perceptual world is constructed. The relationship of mind and matter is unequivocal. How that relationship works is a mystery we must examine. In this book, I make the claim that our minds are making narratives which encompass and co-opt physical matter. This narrative is what we experience as reality. But beyond this mental projection is knowledge.
Just as the brain's function is to interpret sensory patterns from the various senses, the mind has the functions of learning and creating. The brain and mind have a beneficial relationship, yet the mind does not dissipate or diminish due to any physical injury; the mind's expression may be hindered but not its ability. According to Kara Rogers, biomedical sciences editor for Encyclopedia Britannica, who holds a PhD in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Arizona,
It would also be naive to suppose that a function is represented in a particular brain area just because it is disrupted after damage to that area. For example, a tennis champion does not play well with a broken ankle, but this would not lead one to conclude that the ankle is the centre in which athletic skill resides. Reasonably certain conclusions about brain-behavior relationships, therefore, can be drawn only if similar well-defined changes occur reliably in a substantial number of patients suffering from similar lesions or disease states. (2011)
Our brains are marvelous devices that our minds use to most easily expresses themselves, but our minds do not wax or wane according to brain function. The expression of our minds may be inhibited or altered, but the mind never loses its creative function. That is why the mind becomes the frontier of learning. And what the mind can learn to do is rewire the brain's neural network.
One of the greatest discoveries of our time is the fact that our neural pathways are malleable and that we can rewire them. Neuroscientists tell us that our neural networks can be relocated by our own mental activity. We can literally change the way our brains are wired. In his book The Malleable Brain: Benefits and Harm from Plasticity of the Brain, Dr. Aage R. Moller, a well-respected neuroscience researcher, writes, "The brain does not change its shape in the way formable material can, but it can change the way it functions and how its cells are connected to each other ('wired'). The Activation of neural plasticity can change the way different parts of the brain are connected to each other" (2009). We are at a point in our history where research shows that we can influence brain and central nervous function to a certain degree with our thoughts. Again Dr. Moller allows us another peek behind the curtain of narrative:
Neural plasticity is based on synapses' ability to change the way they work (their efficacy or strength) and it may involve formation or elimination of synapses, nerve fibers and dendrites. Plastic changes also include sprouting and branching of nerve fibers, whereby new connections are created between nerve cells. Death of entire nerve cells (programmed cell deaths, PCD) may occur when neural plasticity is turned on [emphasis mine]. It may also cause changes in protein synthesis in nerve cells. Neural plasticity, when turned on, can cause reorganization or remodeling (re-wiring) of parts of the nervous system. (2009)
This research gives us enough reason to infer that our minds are working outside our brains precisely because the change is initiated from our thoughts. This mentation, "when turned on," has the ability to influence our central nervous systems. Dr. Moller uncovers another mental phenomenon:
Neural plasticity has many similarities with memory but there are also differences. Both memory and plasticity are based on changes in the brain that occur because of experience and practice [emphasis mine]. What has been learned by practice has to be retrieved actively and voluntarily [emphasis mine]. However, changes in skills acquired through activation of neural plasticity by training [emphasis mine] are there automatically every time the skills are used. (2009)
I believe neuroscience is systematizing the mechanics of the practice of what ancient scientists/philosophers observed as universal or metaphysical laws, like those coming out of Egypt, Greece, India and China. Both modern science and ancient knowledge travel along a single continuum in opposite directions, one through our physical technologies (bodily senses especially) and the other beyond the bodily senses, what I call direct realization learning. No matter what route one chooses, both inquiries begin and end with the human mind and all that we identify as being part of the human experience.
In review, a new education facilitates the student in discerning illusion from truth in his own mind. Here, the mind is trained to look beyond the concocted narratives it has accepted from society. And from this new perspective, they have the opportunity to access the broader awareness in order to receive new information. As we move from perception to knowledge, our learning moves from concept to direct realization. If one knows conceptually, one cannot also know directly. Direct realization is the way for a student to break the circle of reasoning that comes from perceptual learning. When a student experiences the effect of creative thought, their minds will irrevocably expand. This is the new education for the new mind. When we understand that only the mind learns, ripe minds will being to manifest all over education and they will able to continually access creative thinking. The confidence that students gain from this experience will have immeasurable effects on education and the world at large. As true inspired thinking is experienced enough times, the creative spark is lit within a student. And that student will know the difference between perception and knowledge, illusion and truth. If we can begin to understand that knowledge cannot be found in concepts, we will begin to truly learn. True perception begins from this fundamental discernment.
Discussion Questions:
1. How does the quote at the beginning of the chapter prepare the reader for the content of this chapter?
2. What is knowledge? And how do we access it?
3. Why/how does the mind perceive things as separate?
4. Why are words, symbol, and concepts not knowledge?
5. How does going beyond words connect to education and learning?
6. What is direct realization learning?
Perception is the function of the body and, therefore, represents a limit on awareness. Perception sees through the body's eyes and hears through the body's ears. It evokes the limited responses which the body makes.... True perception is the basis of knowledge, but knowing is the affirmation of truth and beyond all perception.... Knowledge is timeless because certainty is not questionable. You know when you have ceased to ask questions.
—A Course In Miracles
CHAPTER 2
Perception versus Knowledge
Niels Bohr, a pioneer of twentieth-century physics and 1922 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, wrote in his book The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, Vol. I, "An independent reality, in the ordinary physical sense, can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation" (1987). This Danish scientific voice echoes the Buddhist idea of dependent arising, the general principle of interdependent causation and its application in the twelve causes (nidanas). Who knew that a Nobel Prize–winning physicist would sound like a Buddhist philosopher? But there it is. Could it be that perception creates our experience of this world? Perception is an interpretation, a way to make sense out of what we observe as the similarities and differences between agencies of observation (subject) and phenomena (object). Perception is the disintegrating of information in an attempt to reintegrate it according to its own making. This is what the brain and central nervous center are doing. Therefore, perceiving is the act of separating first, in order to piece back together in a way that makes sense to our personal awareness. Again, for a great academic exposition of this process, I suggest Peter M. Vishton's work, Understanding the Secrets of Human Perception.
Perception is the way our minds shape and translate our experience of physical reality. Experiences create beliefs, and beliefs create perception. When beliefs become fixed, perception stabilizes. Stabilized perceptions are the material that literally builds our belief patterns, our life habits, and eventually, our personal awareness. This personal awareness is what we believe to be all that is real. Now remember, neither the agencies of observation (our central nervous systems and physical senses) nor the objects of these senses (physical matter) can be said to possess an independent reality. Erwin Schrödinger, another Nobel Prize–winning physicist, in his book What is Life?, postulates the possibility that individual consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe (Schrodinger 1967). This wholeness theory can be better understood in terms of looking rationally and empirically at what is knowledge and perception. This will give us insight into Niels Bohr's comment on the interdependent relationship of the agencies of observation and the phenomena that it observes.
The observable universe (only 4 percent) cannot be ascribed, as Niels Bohr said, in the "ordinary physical sense" an independent reality. So how do we actually know anything about physical matter? It is through our senses that we claim we know. We believe our brains and central nervous systems are our sole mechanism for verifying what we know to be real. They communicate our experience of reality to us. What we cannot know experientially, we believe or accept conceptually. We base learning on what our senses tell us as if those senses can tell us truly without fault. Our current educational model is based on a perception-oriented system, or brain-centered learning. Physics (though I must admit I am no math or science whiz) can tell us important information regarding our physical human reality. But it only can tell us what the bodily senses or our technological tools are capable of measuring or what we can believe or accept conceptually. What if the greatest information lies outside our physical measurements and personal beliefs or concepts?
Take the idea of quantum entanglement from the field of quantum mechanics: a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently—instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole. This is the one idea Einstein refused to accept, making him one of quantum mechanics' harshest critics. The quantum world, dark matter, and dark energy are a mystery because we are unable to measure or quantify them and because we have no concept to imagine it. But what if we had another technology, a technology that could peer into the world beyond our physical measuring apparatuses? Our addiction to perception limits us to only accepting what the physical senses can measure. I believe we have a technology that goes beyond physical perception. Although perception is a measuring mechanism, it is not accurate because its very premise is change. A reality that changes or is not stable must by definition be an illusion. Illusions are made from perceptions. Knowledge is beyond perception because it is beyond change and processing and measuring.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A New Education for New Minds by Marquis R. Nave. Copyright © 2014 Marquis R. Nave. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse LLC.
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