Experiment:

Two dogs and their owners standing next to each other, a series of volunteers from the student body, one monitor who also serves refreshments, one or two escorts and a camera person.

First the volunteer is introduced to the owners and the dogs to make sure he has no issues with them. Then the escorts take each victim some distance away from the dogs, owners, etc. and drop a firecracker behind him without warning, watching to make sure there is a gratifying effect. The volunteer is then escorted to the place where the dogs, owners, and monitor are waiting.

The volunteer is presented with two cocktail glasses full of sparkling water by the monitor, one for each hand, and is asked to take these to the dog’s owners several paces away and hand them both over simultaneously; and he is told that part of the test is to see how much of the water will actually get delivered.

Result: the volunteer approaches the dog’s and owners with the two glasses of water, but before he can hand these to the two owners he has a fit of panic just like the one he had when the firecracker was lit behind his back, and he spills a good deal of the water.

Observation: from the video we conclude that the hormones of the panic emotion are discovered by the dogs, but in the discovery process these hormones are not excreted into the dog's blood; rather they are excreted into the volunteer's blood by the dog's discovery. We are calling this a "self-oblivious” discovery or emotion. In the dog it is an emotion of the mind, which is a difficult thing to define, while in the volunteer it is an emotion of the blood. The dog understands the feeling perfectly without physically feeling it, but not without re-inducing it in the volunteer.

The experiment is repeated to try to determine if it matters to the dogs if they have heard the firecracker or not.

Then the experiment is repeated using an embarrassing wet spot, where the volunteer puts a spot of water on his clothes where it may be misconstrued. He then is given a folded paper to hide it with while he is walked through a crowd of people. Hiding it this way he does not look quite natural, and inevitably he becomes embarrassed just the same.

When the spot has dried and the embarrassment is presumed gone he is taken to two dogs and their owners who are close together to see if the dogs will discover the emotion as before.

Result: There was no way to check the hormones without more invasive technology than a camera, but the volunteers agreed that the dogs brought the embarrassment back. One volunteer denied the feeling, but he also became suddenly visibly angry with the dogs for some reason at the point where the other volunteers nodded.

On this blog we are looking at the impediments to discovery, to learning at a phenomenal rate. And where do we impose these impediments on children? We impose them as the trick of posing as this and as that. We show them that it is not rewarding to find authority figures transparent. We trick them before they can even conceive of trickery, establishing a lifelong susceptibility to experiencing poses as genuine others, to accept mirages as company.

On the road to senility there arrives a reflex: The other person is speaking or writing, and we see this as a successful manipulation. We have pretended to pay attention, making this other feel that he has someone to speak to or write to, and that was the desired effect, to con him into speaking or writing to a mere pose of attending his words.

Safely behind the pose we can pursue our agendas as long as we have the other speaking or writing to that pose. We feel we have conned the whole world into thinking that we are simple enough to have time for them, that we can spare the time from our plotting and scheming to actually become absorbed in what they have to say. We have become anti-social, and no one knows it.

And when we try to get someone’s meaning we always fail (unless the meaning is inane enough to serve as mere verbal petting) and then we congratulate ourselves for having become immune to change (except for decay).

What happens if we find ourselves transparent to someone? What happens when someone turns and points, the way this is doing, to the hidden workings? We intend for someone to be simple, and instead he is complex. Do we cherish this effect, do we cultivate this relationship?

We know the ego is preying, and we know predation injures others, so do we want our children to find the hidden workings transparent, to see the tiger in the bushes before it strikes? Or is this hidden self so precious to itself that it would resent having children in the world who could see past each pose? Is this a tiger who has children for the sole purpose of feeding tigers?

To rescue the complexity of perception with which children are born, the ability to grasp and to discover, we must rescue them from our own intent to indulge in hidden processes.

Here we continue on the subject raised in the previous instalment, educating the whole mind.

We can approach the problem of introducing material that becomes memory by its falseness or oversimplification in two ways. The first and best is to never introduce any; to spare the child the forming of a contrived memory. The second is to introduce the naturally complex form or version of what is in memory. The oversimplified version will not survive in the face of the real one. The false can not exist in the shadow of the true.

Michael Crichton introduced seven quite good fractal iterations to the general reading public in his book Jurassic Park. Fractal math, sometimes called "reality math”, asks us to realize that there is an infinite scope to all observation, and that one can not get to infinity by taking steps (there is no fraction of infinity; a trillion is not closer to infinity than 2). One must begin with infinity in the first place. If I can only find ten steps I don’t put it down as the ten steps of reality. To do so is a kind of blasphemy.

In astronomy, for example, we tend to stop where we can’t see, which is beyond about 14 billion light-years. That leaves us somewhere inside a universe, or close to one; hard to tell the difference. A universe that was actually crashing into ours, the way some galaxies crash into others, wouldn’t be noticed by our astronomy unless it were incredibly old and incredibly close to just our Galaxy. So when we are speaking of the cosmos we tend to stop at the word and the mass called "universe”, just because we can’t see another universe.

In truth universes do not shine. Light isn’t fast enough at that scale to be found actually moving out of a universe in such a short time as 14 billion years, or even a hundred times that. (Try it in your imagination: you are watching a fast car from a helicopter, and you climb and climb until you see the whole continent. The higher you climb the more you see and the slower the car.) So we get a world full of eager graduates who want to talk about how the universe began without accepting rule one: it didn’t begin by itself. "Let there be light! One, two, three, Big Bang!” It began as a direct consequence of its environment, which is a profound environment, far more so than a universe in its infancy.

Inconceivably creative, is what a mature part of the cosmos must be called, since even here in our universe we have the evolution of the elements and compounds advanced to something fairly impressive even though it is for the present contained inside of galaxies as far as I know. When do galaxies begin to contribute to the intergalactic medium, to compost themselves? And the g-clusters? etc. And how do they do it?

And where there are universe clusters, just as there are galaxy clusters, and these contain up to hundreds of billions of universes, our presumably rather unformed u-cluster averaging, let us say universes about 4, 000 billion years old (which still isn't old enough for centrifugal force to have lent them much shape or even identity), then we have a universe that is very active. We have a grander iteration of the spinning galaxy, the spinning galaxy supercluster, etc.

We also have a question of how profoundly dynamic a universe is, the RELATIVE rotation (which is virtually none if we don't compare it with greater masses instead of lesser), the extreme velocity at the u-equator, relative to the positions of other universes within the cluster. And in the next iteration there are clusters of universe clusters, and so on, until we come to a question of shape: Are universes "born” at some growing tip of the cosmos, as a root grows, most of it old and the tip being new?

If we approach things in this complex way (of course this is just a preface to the complexity we want in the study of the cosmos and microcosm; here it is just an illustration, not science) we have a potential for actually feeling the phenomenon, and this is the mind at work naturally. The feeling mind will make new discoveries without trying to. Preserving the feeling mind is the key to granting a joyous lifetime to children and producing a humanity the planet can live with.

As long as education is directed at the consciously accessible memory, which is the only memory most people recognise as such, it (education) is actually disturbing. Hopefully we all want education to be fulfilling, not disturbing; we want it to ease as well as facilitate the transition from the natural or paradisiacal creature we are born as to modern man.

The reason it disturbs us to have things directed at the memory is that the past and the memory are incompatible (as is demonstrated below). There is a past, and there is a memory, and these are two completely contradictory things, which is easy enough to understand from an example:

Let us say you are a woman with a small baby, and the baby torments you with his traumatic episodes, sometimes lasting for days on end. You use every device you can imagine, like earplugs, the ipod, Valium, and so on. When the child finally becomes old enough to understand a fairly complex sentence you tell him that he was a serene baby, that you were so devoted to him that he never shed a tear throughout his whole infancy. His actual past, which is an unassertive natural, and hence fragile, accumulation phenomenon --a phenomenon cultivated in harmony so that it never needed defending, and so, has no armour, like an orchid or a hummingbird-- evaporates (as the intelligence behind action and behaviour) in the face of this message and you become his idol; he puts you on a pedestal next to the virgin in the Nativity myth. This pedestal is a conscious phenomenon. This past is an unnatural and aggressive memory in the child’s psychology.

(And how could a mother resist exploiting this innate weakness? Why should she suffer a child’s discontent with her when she can conjure his affection, make him an Oedipus? It is immoral, but appears so practical to her, and what is man consistently if not immorally practical?)

Now, how should the child treat you after the neglect or incompetence you, as this mother, inflicted on him? How should he relate to his new brother or sister a few years later, when this new baby starts having traumatic episodes? He should side with the baby against you (as far as the real past is concerned, a past he can not consciously or "on-demand” access, a meek past), but his memory tells him to side with you against the baby. And as he lives a life of similar mistakes (helping his enemies and thwarting his friends) through having had his memory filled to substitute for the real world and a real life, his life spirals downward emotionally until it finally crashes and he must apply for a pharmaceutical solution.

If you are a careful reader following this as clearly as it is written, maybe you are thinking: why can’t the memory be filled with reality as well as deceptions? Actually it can if the reality is simple enough, which means taking it out of context. If you are given as a project to find a way to put something real into memory you just find something real that is very very simple. But if you are asked to find a way to put an algebraic equation into the memory, then you have an equation that falls far short of co-invention. Perhaps the student co-invented all the math up to algebra, but algebra was not simple enough. The only way to understand an equation is to co-invent it. As its co-inventor you never get a wrong answer, and this equation is not in the memory we are looking at here. This equation is an acquired gift.

Since the memory is limited it is also emotionally limited. What is a wild bird? A wild bird is someone who can’t talk to us, and can’t understand us when we talk. That is an adult memory’s reply. Emotionally close to freezing. Birds cease to draw our eyes. But to a small child, who also can’t talk, a bird is people, another innocent and a playmate who can do great tricks, besides having the profound gift of having become independent of parents, and even becoming parents themselves, in a world without human order.

Love, in other words, comes from reality including a real past, and emotional freeze-out comes from conscious, which is memory as "entity” or self. The emotion of real complexity versus that of contrived simplicity.

See how the birds fly. How economical is grace! Why should people fly, when it costs so much to fly without their grace? Arrogance, audacity, fickleness; such unsustainable attitudes! Along with the greed that cultivates them: please eat more, fly more, burn more, etc.; and of course, work more, as if more work did not ravage more.

Why do people have to eat an amount their bodies actually resent. Why do they have to smoke, or drink or take pills? Is it so hard to love the world, to love living, to find it profound, to be fulfilled in the sane and universal way? It is not the world that bores a person so that he becomes restless and must fritter away the waking hours with familiar vices. It is the person’s upbringing makes it seem boring, which is to say, family, neighbours, teachers, preachers and the various media which bring us the celebrities from politics and entertainment. His upbringing has adapted him to ignore the profound and submerge himself in the sea of human endeavour.

If we truly mean to save the world we must obviously reinvent the civilized man and woman. We must produce a generation of people who do not miss the real beauty of living, so that they don’t have to burn up the world as an opiate.

There is not one man or woman on Earth who can truthfully say, "I believe education and upbringing should lead to people thinking the kind of thoughts that constantly run through my head each day.”. (I stress the word truthfully!) Human thought, once it has become a private indulgence (which is usually shortly after puberty), is actually an affliction. There are extremely few men and women who could even say, truthfully, that they believe education and upbringing should lead to the reasoning processes they have achieved, the conclusions they have reached. So, to be honest, we all have to admit that it has not been working. We were educated, brought up, and it was not at all done rightly.

People have made a lot of money on us, despite this failure to cultivate our humanity. When people make a lot of money on something they say, "Oh, look! It’s working perfectly!”. How does it happen that such reckless reasoning governs education and upbringing?

How does one save a child from this kind of education and upbringing? By not subjecting him to the words and devices we produce from our thoughts! Thought gives us things to say and do. Don’t say and do them. The younger he is the more horrid the offence of thinking about what to say and do to him.

Teachers on the internet. Put a camera in every classroom, and keep it pointed at the person who is getting paid to attend. If he moves around there are devices that can be applied to keep the camera both aimed and focused on him. The student can then repeat things from A to B at his liesure. The parents can vote with real certainty whether or not a teacher ought to be teaching a particular class. And future students can refer back to see if the same class has ever been taught better.

Also there is the question of segregating classes according to scholastic aptitude. Parents can also vote with clear insight on this issue if they watch how much or how little the slower children's attendance delays the process of educating the quicker ones, and how much or how little the quicker children's accelerates the slower ones.

The cost is nothing compared with the cost of political fencing around the education issues. You don't fine tune a broken telly; you replace it.

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One of the most significant factors of behavioral development is touch. When do adults touch the child; where, with what parts of themselves, how and why? Perhaps there are no children on Earth who are touched in more ways by more people than today's Swedes.

Touch is an irrational substitution syndrome. At birth we have natural expectations, and adults can't imagine what is dissapointing us since all their wants are unnatural, and so the prescription for any mysterious ailment becomes to bounce, stroke, squeeze and rock the baby. This, which is normal, is in itself already deviant behavior (and there are fewer and fewer normal people in the world). It leads to masochism, where the child begins to depend on the substitute, rather than sticking to his guns and continuing to demand the natural stimulant.

Touch communicates itself very precisely to the child. A child does not suspect but perceives helplessly or choicelessly, perception being infallibly perfect, an exact and direct awareness of what is happening. And when we are older we become inured to touch because everyone has effectively (to conscious) denied all the things communicated by touch (making pickpockets very happy). This is perception becoming unconscious (perception of the intent behind the touch), and intended effect (where no one with any clout knows what was intended by the touch) substituting, making a conscious.

It is put this way: 'We are not conscious of people touching us.' Then, using this conscious "experience" for judging the touch children are subjected to we say it doesn't matter; there is nothing wrong with how the people we leave in charge of little children are touching them. We have an idea that this conscious accumulation of experience, in which no one ever touches anyone inappropriately except on the News, is the adult equivalent of a child's perception, upgraded to wisdom.

Man has produced a human environment which seems to necessitate the educating of the young. They are born, like any creature, utterly alienated by this environment. The problem becomes that this process of initiation becomes all-consuming. It is a form of bigotry: How much importance do we adults place upon adapting to the human environment, and how little on what it costs the planet to relinquish its evolved environments to these changes? This bigotry takes the form that we dismiss the child's inborn or innate perception so that it becomes blocked by the "conscious" addition of human-environment-related conditioning.

This is as destructive to the child as human progress is to the planet and its diversity of life. It is the best someone can do for a child once he himself has been conditioned this way. Bigotry makes bigots. Let us discover together if there isn't a ready science of how to change this radically.