I am Stephen Calhoun aka hoon aka Dr. Puck, author of the squareONE Explorations blog, principal of squareONE:experiential toolmakers.
My interests are always resolving themselves but have long orbited the cosmos of music and the cosmos itself, the ins and outs of human awareness and behavior and the nature of adult learning.
I’m curious about how knowledge is created and deployed in normal everyday life. In this respect my current central research focus is on (what’s called) folk psychology and folk ‘psychological heuristics’. I am extremely curious about how people come to know one another and why this process of knowing often comes to be weakened and slowed to a crawl and rarely amplified and vivified. I come at this as a self-trained, interdisciplinary and phenomenologically-minded researcher. This is framed via social and cognitive psychology and anthropology.
As a matter of application, my experience and insights inform my practice as an experiential toolmaker, facilitator and guide. My principal motivation is selfish enjoyment of experiencing and/or witnessing genuine insight come about in real time and spontaneously. This noted, my intellectual interests are very broad and are not able to be characterized via a term for any damn position. I’m a fundamentalist agnostic and am both theory and instrument-wise post-any school. <|;-}=
People who have made the effort to know me well have suggested that ‘I am always doing research.’ Everybody else would do well to be forewarned! Everything human is grist for my mill 24/7.
People ask about my background and I tell them “music, and, being a hippie.” When I give this response to people in my fifty-something cohort, very often they relax and recollect about when they too were a hippie. I guess this is a guilty memory for some, but not for me. As Paul Krassner says: “My only sacred cow is that I have no sacred cows.” It’s all brilliant corners to me, to whit:
The words thoughtful and thoughtless signify a rhythmic or unrhythmic state of the mind; and balance, which is the only upholding power in life, is kept by rhythm. Respiration, which keeps mind and body connected and which links the mind and soul, consists in keeping rhythm every moment when awake or asleep; inhaling and exhaling may be likened to the moving and swinging of the pendulum of a clock. As all strength and energy is maintained by breath, and as breath is the sign of life, and its nature is to flow alternately on the right and left side, all this proves rhythm be of the greatest significance in life. _Inayat Khan
I am very laid back. I am not in fifth gear on the outermost lane any of the time, and, fulfillment and happiness is available to me everyday under extremely modest circumstances. I currently pay the bills contracting services in the field of organizational behavior. However, the rest of the time I am exploring, listening, drilling down, reflecting, fooling around, reconfiguring my prejudices, having fun.
My hobbies are music making, painting and digital art making, and, corresponding with my far flung and crazywild friends and colleagues.
My personal mission is to be tender. However, certain ‘negative’ cognitive fixities get me going: magical thinking, creationism, unwarranted absolutisms and unwarranted warrants(!), and when closely held beliefs are offered while their obvious ramifications are withheld. If somebody treats me as if the way they know the world works is also supposed to be–from their perspective–the way the world works for me and everybody else, I am likely to provide a challenge to their efforts.
I take none of this particularly seriously. I am not a doctor and barely made it out of prep school. Thank goodness on both accounts for life is play and the last breath may be the next!
As John Lilly put it: “My beliefs are unbelievable!” Because I am a dispositional (William) Jamesian, it is my principal that if something comes to be experienced it earns–for this alone–an account of some sort. Also, my prejudices are such that I feel my own attempts to wring cause out of mystery are bound to failure.
And, finally, I offer my two secrets of the good, happy life: don’t sweat stuff small or medium, and, if you can do but one thing, serve to lessen another’s suffering, no matter how small, medium, or big.
“Follow the perfume, not the tracks.” - Shams
