29
February
2008
Our fingerprints and faces tell us we are each “sui generis,” (one-of-a-kind), although most of us were raised to conform to, and fit into, a social structure, rather than being encouraged to discover and display our distinctive gifts.
I often wonder about and imagine what a world of people brought up to shine as one-of-a-kind, creative expressions of humanity would be like. Each child would be approached with utter curiosity and a reverence for the unforeseen gifts they might bring to the family and society, their sui generis idiosyncracies nurtured by parents, teachers, leaders and the culture at large.
Would that sort of approach help to bring about whole and fulfilled people, people who felt unashamed, welcomed and appreciated as they truly are?
Most kids have jumping-for-joy natures, abounding life energies and strong emotions. Their unusual thoughts and insights, their self-love, love of pleasure, and love of life are considered, at best, adorable in the cute way, rather than the truly worthy-of-adoration way. They are asked, in so many ways, to conform to what’s expected of them, to apply themselves to finding their place (a.s.a.p.!) in the existing models, roles and structures.
How confusing to be asked to thwart one’s natural love of life to better plug into a system that is stressful, unhealthy and inhumane. Young people, whose heart-intelligence and innate compassion are still very much in tact, are one day treated to a movie about how sweet and wonderful penguins are and the next day informed of the destruction of the penguin habitat due to human profligacy.
When children object to such confusion, their sui generis assertion is often attacked or undermined. I recently witnessed a young boy of about seven with his mother in front of a fish counter at Whole Foods. I saw him looking up at her and overheard her say, dismissively, not willing to look back down to meet his eyes, “There are plenty of fish in the sea, Johnny; it’s perfectly fine for us to eat them.”
The point is not the fish here, the point is this boy’s heart and how his mother responded to his heart’s cry. And we wonder how the steep rise of childhood mental health disorders, and all the consequences associated with them, could be happening in such a wonderful place as the suburbs of the United States.
The erroneously attributed Chinese dish named Chop Suey is a bland, overcooked, and unpalatable dish of cheap and canned vegetables and water chestnuts held together with corn starch, invented in America and passed off as Chinese.
America turns its children into Chop Sui and the worry of America’s next generation is supposed to be that the Chinese will take it all away from us, this glorious way of life, this American Dream!
Yesterday, I watched the better part of a video conference dialogue between a large group of 9th graders at Arapahoe High School in Colorado and author Dan Pink (whom I interviewed on Feb 19th–see below). The kids had prepared questions and were given the chance to talk about the future with a bestselling author, speaking with them about the future from his home office, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. One of the students asked: what do you think it would take for school to be like this all the time?
In considering Dan Pink’s Six Senses from his book, A Whole New Mind: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning, I believe Empathy is the most important one to develop. The ability to feel what another is feeling, to meet other people where they live, so to speak–just imagine what a world this would be if empathy were an aptitude highly developed and prized in society at large!
Imagine how that value of tenderness and care would change the nature of the other senses and of the products and services that drive our economy. Just what are we putting ourselves in service to? What games are we playing? How are we making and interpreting meaning? How are we putting it all together? What’s the narrative about? What are we designing, and for what purposes? All our activity would be in service to a healthier way of life, in the presence of pervasive and abiding empathy. And, I would add, that true empathy is what makes it possible for the sui generis nature of each face, each individual living thing, to shine and be held dear.
Here’s the link to view that video conference, set up by educator Karl Fisch.
jari 
holistic health, consciousness, education, future, human potential, culture, a whole new mind, creativity, stress, parenting, conscience, feeling, mental health, values, empathy 
3 Comments » |
19
February
2008
Living Hero is pleased to present an interview with author and futurist Daniel Pink
• The increasing value of right brain skills and capacities • The global forces giving rise to A Whole New Mind • The one cognitive skill common among corporate star performers • Reckoning with unfulfillment • Dan’s own creative process and methods • The Adventures of Johnny Bunko
Enjoy the podcast! You may download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players or listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below. (The interview is about 32 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience! Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)
Instructions for Windows Right click on the blue link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Click on “Save Target as”. The file will start downloading. A window will pop up and the name of the file will be filled in, as well as the file format. Just choose to save it to your desktop in the left bar.Then you will have an mp3 file sitting on your desktop. Right click on that and choose Open with: iTunes (or your chosen player). Or, alternatively, open iTunes and just drag the mp3 into iTunes.
Instructions for Mac Control click or right click on the blue link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Either “Open with iTunes” to listen now or “Download link file as” and save to your desktop. Open with iTunes later or just drag the file into iTunes and play it whenever you like.
Link to Dan Pink’s Feb 2005 Wired magazine article “Revenge of the Right Brain”
Click through to buy his books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left. Don’t miss them!
jari interviews, meditation, education, future, culture, synthesis, a whole new mind, books, creativity, creative, mind, mind-body, economy, global forces, right brain Comments (0) » |
6
February
2008
“. . . the greatest economic competition in the world going forward is not going to be between countries and countries. And it’s not going to be between companies and companies. The greatest economic competition going forward is going to be between you and your own imagination. Your ability to act on your imagination is going to be so decisive in driving your future and the standard of living in your country. So the school, the state, the country that empowers, nurtures, enables imagination among its students and citizens, that’s who’s going to be the winner.”
–Tom Friedman (The World is Flat)
from an interview with Daniel Pink (A Whole New Mind)
We are a people longing to see beyond our current dilemmas and dangers to a future that is reasonable and sustainable. But we need more than reason to get to reasonable. We need imagination.
How can we become visionaries and nurture our visions in the reality of community? How can we recognize a vision worth pursuing when one comes along?
The world’s best and brightest leaders, philosophers, artists and inventors have always relied on imagination to envision a better future and to bring it to life through creative expression and invention.
Now it is time for all of us to actively put our imaginative powers to work, to open our minds and to face the imperative of envisioning a future that will truly work for the global community.
This means strengthening and nurturing a healthier balance of thought and feeling, which will bring more wisdom to bear as we imagine, work, create. Getting to this healthier balance in the midst of our high-pressured, busy days is a real challenge and we are all in this together.
Our next podcast (scheduled for late February) will feature futurist Daniel Pink talking with us about how he sees practices such as yoga, art and meditation contributing to the shift he describes in his latest book A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers will Rule the Future. He’ll explain how he came to use the creative genre of manga (Japanese for “comics”) for his upcoming business book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, due to be released on April 1st.
He’ll also speak about the early adopters and also any resistors of the whole new mind he describes and share what’s on the creative horizon for him after The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.
To make the most of the podcast, please enjoy A Whole New Mind prior to listening! Get it right here!
jari Uncategorized, education, future, human potential, a whole new mind, wisdom, books, creativity, creative, feeling Comments (0) » |
4
January
2008
As I’ve been reviewing the material for the first two Living Hero shows, I find a common thread that ought to be of interest to artists, scientists, educators, caregivers and business people alike: the capacity of our minds to recognize patterns and harness the advantage of having done so and, most importantly, how to develop this capacity.
Dr. Robert Stickgold, who studies the brain in relation to sleep, memory and dreaming, tells us that in sleep the brain processes the new information received during the day and indexes it in relation to that to which it has already has been exposed, adding to its “maps of probability” and better equipping it to recognize patterns of relationship in the future.
We are urged by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future to develop our capacity to not only see the big picture, but also to perceive the many relationships that can make a whole coherent and satisfying, which he calls “Symphony.”
My interest is in HOW we develop these abilities. I think that one key answer lies in both physical activity and deep relaxation.
My work involves teaching people to use integrative movements, acupressure and self-massage, breathing and stress reduction techniques to foster an ideal state for creative work or performance of any kind. There’s a teacher named William Westney who uses movement in what he calls his “unmaster classes” with musicians. Actors, athletes, and body-oriented performers have always used physical warm-ups to reduce anxiety and do a better job.
I am suggesting that physical warm-ups boost performance for all kinds of work, and evidence of this has not shown up in practice enough in schools and in the workplace—yet!
Mindfulness and meditative practices also help develop your capacity for R-directed thinking and you can stay tuned here for more in-depth coverage and exploration of these subjects!
jari Uncategorized, psychology, interviews, education, future, a whole new mind, memory, dreams, creative, sleep Comments (0) » |
20
November
2007
Our educational system over-stresses the importance of logical, linear and verbal skills–all of these processed primarily by the left brain. In order to advance our capabilities now, to balance ourselves and come to wholeness, we need to regenerate our innate ability to tap into the irrational, metaphorical, symbol-making, intuitive, tonal and imaginative right brain.
Although most Americans watch a lot of television and see a lot of movies, which are, indeed, image-based, most of us have been rendered passive before images. Pop culture images are predictable and put together by professionals according to formulas.
Our imaginations are stunted. And, as Einstein stated, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” So, we need to reactivate and strengthen our right-brain functions and, more importantly, to simultaneously integrate those with our left-brain functions to become whole-brained, integrated beings.
jari Uncategorized, psychology, creative arts, education, human potential, synthesis, a whole new mind 1 Comment » |
15
November
2007
E.O. Wilson, one of our most brilliant living heroes, preciently wrote in his 1999 bestseller, Consilience, “Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”
Many other luminaries have echoed this call for synthesis. One of Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future is “Synthesizing Mind,” and Daniel Pink devotes a chapter of his recently released A Whole New Mind to “Symphony,” the ability to draw together details from many different disciplines while holding in mind the big picture and what it takes to achieve harmony, balance, and beauty.
This whole-brain capacity has been the gifted and treasured realm of artists, writers, philosophers, and spiritual leaders all along, but these are realms of activity that our culture has not rewarded financially. Is this going to change now? How will we see this change?
This blog is devoted to providing a forum for the exploration and discussion of these and related topics. I invite your thoughts and wish to know specifically whom you would most like to hear from in an interview or panel discussion and what your most burning questions on these topics are.
jari Uncategorized, integrate, interviews, future, human development, feminine values, culture, synthesis, a whole new mind, wisdom, financial reward Comments (0) » |
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