The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80-20 rule, first figured into my own thinking several years before someone hipped me to the origins of a conception I was using. In truth, I had developed its bastard child, also a regulation of the vital few, I called–at the time–the 10% problem. The context was artist development in the music industry and the application was as a device to thoughtfully put reverse pressure on a musician’s tendency to spend time convincing naysayers. What I saw was artists spending more time trying to market to naysayers than they spent either pullng fence sitters in, or turning their believers into evangelists. Also, it seemed at the time what promoted this was their sense everybody was supposed to be a fan and that those who weren’t yet fans were thought to be ripe targets. But, the naysayers were hardly low hanging fruit and so I offered the suggestion that they should be ignored.

Several years later a colleague on the only management team I’ve ever been a member of hipped me to The Pareto Rule in the aftermath of my attempt to apply the 10% problem to the company’s marketing philosophy. In this instance, I was advocating more product testing because it seemed to me the company was wasting resources based in the assumption that 90% of the new products would always appeal to 100% of their customers.

Since then I’ve employed variations of the 80-20 (or 90-10) principle to all sorts of situations. My innovation is with respect to transformative learning: roughly, spend a figurative 10% of your time doing wild experiments, and doing so irrespective of so-called conventional wisdom. Here, in a sense, one pays attention to the outlying possibilities.

This has led me to reflect upon how the concept of the vital few may be consequential for perspectives about systems. This follows from a hypothesis about systems, (or about how in effect the world works,) that goes like this, what aspects of the system are hidden when it is presumed seeing the entire system in fact sees only 90%?
(90%, or, whatever is the presumptive portion said perspective views.

This comes back to the genesis of the 10% Problem because often the conventional wisdom, or habitual perspective, holds its conclusions about the system to be the inevitable product of seeing/understanding the system in the purportedly correct, (read into this also: normative, ‘as commonly understood,’) way. Whereas, my supposition holds that any incomplete perspective allows for, at least, inclusion of what’s absent, and, audaciously, allows for novelty–especially novel ways for viewing and analyzing the system at hand.

C. Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like opportunity. They are rare, much rarer than you think. Remember that positive Black Swans have a necessary first step: you need to be exposed to them. Many people do not realize that they are getting a lucky break in life when they get it. If a big publisher (or a big art dealer or a movie executive or a hotshot banker or a big thinker) suggests an appointment, cancel anything you have planned: you may never see such a window open up again. I am sometimes shocked at how little people realize that these opportunities do not grow on trees. Collect as many free nonlottery tickets (those with open-ended payoffs) as you can, and, once they start paying off, do not discard them. Work hard, not in grunt work, but in chasing such opportunities and maximizing exposure to them. This makes living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters—you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity. The idea of settling in a rural area on grounds that one has good communications “in the age of the Internet” tunnels out of such sources of positive uncertainty. Diplomats understand that very well: casual chance discussions at cocktail parties usually lead to big breakthroughs—not dry correspondence or telephone conver­ sations. Go to parties! If you’re a scientist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark new research. And if you are autistic, send your associates to these events. Nassim Nicholas Taleb – p208-209 – The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable

“They are rare, much rarer than you think.”

Hypothesis central to Transformative Anthropology (my term): people’s development with respect to their crucial relationships, work life, interests, and, location, much more often than not present necessary developmental events that are happenstance, serendipitous, random.

Such events, I term strategic serendipity.

They’re rare in the sense that a person may identify several key events in their life story. but, they’re common were it overwhelmingly true that almost all persons are advantaged by strategic serendipity.

I’m sorting out the turning point, concerned with the presentation of my main research focus in the open-source of the web.

The first step was to create a page for the work-in-progress notes about so-called Transformative Anthropology. This will be temporary in the sense that I’m will eventually shutter the Transformative Tools blog, folding it back into Explorations (here,) and then reconfiguring the SquareONE web site so it can allow ‘research subjects’ (you?) to input their personal recollections.

Those personal recollections are qualified by the parameters given by my research into life-altering serendipities; although the more meaningful term is a necessary conceptual coinage: chance strategic contingencies. This is the kind of recollection I’m interested in documenting.

I’ll track changes to the Transformative Anthropology page—as updates–here, yet, at some point in the near future, those notes will be organized by the structure of the reconfigured ‘main’ web site.

(The music sites, nogutsnoglory studios and Rhythm River, aren’t effected by any of this.)

The principal objective sometime in the not-so-near future, is to beta test experiential learning tools based in the as yet un-implicated instrumental, (thus constructivist,) conceptions of Transformative Anthropology. Yet, here’s a clue: would a learner assimilate to a novel, modestly salutary, self-understanding, were he or she to go through a learning process aimed to sensitize the learner to the ingredient of chance strategic contingencies discoverable in their own life? Are life’s chance strategic events consequential as part of the terms for self-reflection?

Ha! I don’t know, yet, if I’m onto something.

Try to be a true skeptic with respect to your interpretations and you will be worn out in no time. You will also be humiliated for resisting to theorize. (There are tricks to achieving true skepticism; but you have to go through the back door rather than engage in a frontal attack on yourself.) Even from an anatomical perspective, it is impossible for our brain to see anything in raw form without some interpretation. We may not even always be conscious of it. Nassim Nicholas Taleb; The Black Swan. The Impact of the Highly Improbable

She told me about meeting a future employer at a gas station, on the occasion when both had stopped at the same station, you know, for gas! The thing is: a stranger approaches her, recognizes her because she had taken note of her reputation in some public notice or the like, and strikes up a conversation.

What followed, eventually, was a job offer. And, what followed from taking the job were all sorts of other events that, in concrete respects, stand on the foundation of her changing jobs.

What would have happened had the soon-to-be new employer and employee not stopped in the gas station at the same moment? No one can say, but it’s as if such a speculation is about an alternative universe, rather than the universe in which this life altering and happenstance event took place.

My friend called the event, random. “Random” hadn’t occurred to me as a qualifier. It’s a good term because it strips away something of the various evaluative adjectives which follow from a random event turning out to be positive or negative.

1. What brought you to live where you currently live?

2. What brought you to work in the field you currently work in?

3. What was the circumstance via which you met your current partner?

4. What brought you to your current central interest, (or avocation, or hobby, or passion?)

There are, of course, many such questions like these four.

In conducting an inquiry along these lines, what I have found is that the narrative offered in response contains propositions about features of a necessary founding circumstance Those propositions tell of required features.

For example, I met my future wife at a party in September of 1993. For this to happen, I had to be in Cleveland and be invited to the party. I had to know the party-givers, and, they had to be in Cleveland too. So did my future wife. There are enough implicit features in these three sentences to make clear the obvious point: my meeting my wife rests on a web of contingencies that encompass many lives, and in turn this rests on many requisites, rests on many prior requirements.

It is striking to me that it would be the normal sense of a person narrating a development such as this one, that those requirements are not strongly “felt” by the narrator. However, in facilitating a subject’s re-collection of these necessary requirements, the process has always evoked an intense insight.

Ha! “I never looked at life that way!”

The baseline goal that that the organization or any human system must pursue is the development of the person within it; other matters, other goals, must come after.

…the primary axiological commitment of transformational theory is not dominantly rational or utilitarian in motivation or behavior.

… indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that the technology of the field of organization development is at bottom a set of techniques for managing the resolution of individual and group projections, thereby releasing the energy that is bound up by them.

Cynthia McSwain/
A Transformational Theory of Organizations
American Review of Public Administration 23:2.1993

Psychoanalytic approaches to OD and managerial psychology seemed to have waned in the U.S.. This isn’t surprising because here anybody can be a constructivist and bill by the hour. I sometimes test people by throwing out the name ‘Kets de Vries.’ LOL

The apparent slowness of comprehension of the benefits of innovation and change or the emergence of negative fantasies of the future shown by others is not irrational, in fact, makes a lot of sense, when we understand how people learn, comprehend, and predict the future. — The person hangs on to past behaviors that were rewarded and is suspicious of new behaviors that have anticipated consequences outside his/her experience. — This visionary nature may make it difficult for the paradigm pioneer to understand the need to restate, repeat, reformulate, and recast the vision into fantasies that others can share.

Erik Winslow and George Solomon
Entrepreneurs: Architects of Innovation, Paradigm Pioneers and Change
Journal of Creative Behavior; 27:2 Spring 93

All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence.” – Emmanuel Levinas

Instant Oracle – An exercise of Experiential Martial Arts

Here’s a fun exercise you can do with your friends on a rainy day. Because the experiential martial arts series asks users to do the exercises in public, this particular exercise is a good one for a coffee house, picnic table, or casual public space. Invite onlookers to join in the play and see what happens.

The Instant Oracle. Gather up some old magazines and mail order catalogues, glue sticks, crayons or markers, and thirty 5 x 7 index cards or fifteen halved sheets of blank paper. You will need one full piece of paper, or, even better, a single sheet of card stock or paper-sized cardboard. Spread them on the table. Fold the single sheet in half and write on one half an announcement for your game: INSTANT ORACLE – CARE TO JOIN IN? Fold it in half and make it into a tent card. This is the set up and is all you will need aside from a playful, exploratory intention to spontaneously learn.

You make up the cards of the Instant oracle by intuitively capturing pictures from the magazines. Tear out pictures you are drawn to and do so for any reason or no reason at all. The only guideline is: you’re drawn to the picture. Glue them to the card, leave some room for a title, and then name the card. For example, if you tear out a picture of a pretty bed set from a catalogue, you might title the card, ‘bed set’.

Once you’ve created the beginning of the Instant Oracle’s deck, you’re ready to play. If an onlooker wonders what the heck you and your pals are up to, invite them to play and have them make up some cards. Of course they will ask you what you’re doing, and the answer is: “We’re making up cards for the Instant Oracle so we can ask it questions.”

After the group has created twenty or more cards, it’s time to discover the wisdom of this newly created Instant Oracle. Put the cards together so you can’t see the pictures. Address the oracle by asking it a question of personal interest. I recommend constructing the question along a ritual and formal design, ‘Oh great Instant Oracle, please tell me…’

For example, you could ask, “Oh great Instant Oracle, please tell me about my prospects for discovering my true calling.”

Reach into the deck and pull out a card. Your selection is obviously random and the oracle’s response is instant!

Say you pull out Bed Set. Bed Set? What does a bed set have to do with your life’s calling? The Instant Oracle has spoken. This experiential exercise is all about playing with the answer creatively and insightfully.

“Hmmm, a bed set is the bed you make and lie down in. It’s the place where one rests and recharges. Associations are a fine way to amplify the oracle’s answer, as is word play, or other elaborations of the raw stuff of the picture and title. ‘Set in bed’ relaxing; the privacy of the bed room, the place of sleep and dreams and, usually, the place ‘all your own’.”

The key to the discovery of insight is the way you explore and interpret whatever comes up. The learning design is quite simple: ask and let the card inspire the answer. The design is effective because it’s the engagement and amplification of the data out of which insight emerges. And, it surely will.

In a group, it’s recommended that the interpretation proceed in three steps. Allow the questioner to interpret the card first. Participants contribute next. A good rule for the collaborative step is: contribute comments about what comes up which are about the card, and not about the personal question. Finally, the questioner plays with the entire data set, first insights, collaborators’ comments, and, hopefully, amazing discoveries in the last step.

In a public space, just laying out the materials and tent card will cause onlookers to be intrigued. Invite them in and learn together. To play with complete strangers is part of the purpose of the exercise. It’s true the unknown factor they bring to the table could limit the sharing of a truly personal question, yet it’s also true that trust of the process and its unknown factors is the best way for the players to deeply engage the wisdom of the Instant Oracle. The purpose of the exercise is to experience playing together with important questions on the table. The goal is to discover through collaborative play helpful, perhaps profound, answers to the questions. Bingo. Instant learning.

Commentary: the last quotation of the late genius of improvisation has wider applications.

The students in the monastery were in total awe of the elder monk, not because he was strict, but because nothing ever seemed to upset or ruffle him. So they found him a bit unearthly and even frightening. One day they decided to put him to a test. A bunch of them very quietly hid in a dark corner of one of the hallways, and waited for the monk to walk by. Within moments, the old man appeared, carrying a cup of hot tea. Just as he passed by, the students all rushed out at him screaming as loud as they could. But the monk showed no reaction whatsoever. He peacefully made his way to a small table at the end of the hall, gently placed the cup down, and then, leaning against the wall, cried out with shock, “Ohhhhh!”

I’ve been privileged to be the not very good student of a succession of teachers. (This admitted, I remain surprised how much of the transmission gets through despite my own resistance!) Judith came into my life under a surprising fitting together of a corner of the jigsaw puzzle in 1995. We worked together, founding squareONE in 1996, until she first became ill in 1999. She courageously investigated death’s gateway a number of times before departing from her fragile body this weekend. God Willing, her peace is now assured. Alhumdulilah!

The glue of our process together was a series of weekly meetings over 30 months. We also conducted a couple of dozen workshops, yet the daring request I managed to meet was to stick my finger into her circuit regularly. Her teaching was not formal but it was bravura. She didn’t introduce me to the experiential mode but she exemplified how to go about it. She was there in every case to help debrief the experience in the aftermath of (my) task. I don’t feel she knew that she knew what she was doing. I trusted her anyway.

However, she was so effective that toward the end of her coiled journey I was given the opportunity to affirm to her the impress of her transmission.

This impress etched into me the availability of <em>Being</em> beyond the narrow strictures one imposes upon one’s self and being. She understood: <strong>human hugeness is urged to realize itself over and above the limiting confines from which we normally play out our obsessive satisfactions and dissatisfactions.</strong> Her teaching via experience confirmed opportunity and challenge cosmically provided for in and by the daily paradoxes, and, through the play of the symbolic, and oppositions, and fruitful problem recognition.

Curiously, she would tell me she really didn’t get ‘humor’ or ‘play’. This admission was made despite her great wit and it cannot be true in light of the many belly laughs. Life is but play, say the yogis. In our work we witnessed so many moments of graceful and playful learning; each moment was amazing if not startling. The description of my own learning, in almost every instance spinnable as a wise tale, weaves together very hearty aspects of playful self-recognition and response. Several of the stories are more than startling in their suggestion that this is the way it can, does, must, work.

Her illness imposed upon her a horrifying travail and task. Somehow, she was able to rise both everyday and through it all to face her task without yielding. She became more the student and learned to receive the generosity of those who deeply loved her. As a matter of forthrightness about this last phase, unfolded over nine years-some of them harrowing, it is necessary to note: a narrowing of horizons nevertheless provides for the concentration of energy and the focus upon the only mission critical application: to receive love and to be lovesome.

Almost everything darkly complicated, deleterious, and anxiety-provoking issues from our alienation from the profound vulnerability posed by this first and last receptivity.

In our work I hoped for a modest implementation and she hoped for a shattering instigation. She was a dramatic facilitator and I was the post-scientist, and designer, in the lab coat. In this we made a place between her intuition and my experimental rigor for shocking novelty and then we bid it to come in and be received.

Judith, you came in to my cells and there you shall remain.

In honor of Desse today, I literally pull a card from the deck, and, here it is bidden and abiding, in the words of Rumi, ra, inscripted on this card:

You’ll only enjoy the City,

and your relations,

After enduring

all the griefs

and ordeals of exile.

Now the teacher of teacher departs, as the Teacher must always depart. Adieu, with love; in this Love. Salaamu, Ish’q

It’s tempting to insert here that it is a two-way street too, but, my experience is that there can be a significant differential between two approaches and how effective each, in actuality, is.

When engaged with other persons my common mode is research and participant/deep observer, so, at a minimum, I’m often sitting there being greatly amused by processes of interpersonal knowledge building. For example, it is often for me a case of observing how much interference there is in people’s attempts to be present, listen, respond, and, overall, apprehend what is going on. This goes for me too: reflecting on my own interference.

Interpersonal interactions suppose the meeting of–in the case of two people–neural complexity and processing power on a scale that is staggering. Think about it. Two brains in conjoined mutual cognition suppose the immensities and complexities of the separate mental architecture and literally this means in a deep conversational knowledge building process many billions upon billions of interwoven connections in the neural wetware and extensive nervous system meet for the purpose of getting to know each other.

We don’t, of course, implicate this perspective in even a second order sense in this respect: we don’t say to ourselves, “I am now going to observe the penetration of my billionfold connection mental network with this other billionfold network.”

At a small dinner party last night I was asked simply enough what I thought about religion. Then in providing a glib answer, ‘I don’t mess with it, and it doesn’t mess with me,’ I was asked, given the premise introduced in the person’s response, about what would be my own sense of my own spirituality.

My goodness. Another attendee changed the subject. I didn’t answer but I sure did think about how I might answer such a question were I to take advantage of the opportunity. I also thought to myself, counting on one hand, of persons who have been exposed to deeper parts of the answer.

How do you enter into a deep dialogue about something so personal and unfolded over the course of a lifetime? I thought about how this could be accomplished were I to introduce my own terms. Let’s see: we’d have to clarify the initializing intention so as to learn if both really wanted to enter into a dialogue and really begin to learn the answers. Obviously this goes both ways. Then there could be the introduction of a beginning meta-dialogue about how to define certain fundamental and instrumental terms. What is religion?

Next could be a generous and challenging and hopefully loving struggle to depose the certain prejudices which are not cleared away just because the terms of the dialogue can be mutualized.

It’s all very difficult. My interlocutor had no way of knowing that, in fact, the subject area of religion has been of great interest to me since I was 19, and that my own feeling for my own spirituality predates the colder interest in religion by six years. Not only this, but this interest in religion plugs naturally into an interest in history, the history of ideas, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. What compels one to instantiate a religious commitment? How is this different than the religious problem posed by the nature and telos of the individual personality, (per C.G. Jung, among others,) and the ‘psychologization’ of the hard-wired urge to ask, quest for, experience and answers to the biggest kinds of questions?

Day in and day out I’m made aware of the levels of purported interpersonal knowing, (construal in technical terms,) and how it is at the superficial, everyday, familiar levels where the practical action plays out. This happens short of people making a determined effort to loosen the hold of their assumptions and the implicit actions of those assumptions as they bias the self system-of-knowing. This is garden-variety knowing. We don’t need a lot of information for us to remark ‘we know this other person’. (In fact hardly any information is needed to support the report suggestive of a little bit of knowledge being equivalent to a lot of knowledge.)

People, if aware of their (epistemic) biases and habitual heuristics and ingrained methods of interpretation and analysis and synthesis, are better positioned to make a collaborative inquiry…of one other. Commonsense, yes, and apparently very seldom the case. You can test this suggestion.

(An abiding and deep interpersonal process emerges out of intentional procedures. In novel terms, this involves: drilling down, getting into the grain, orders of awareness ordinated via discernments of various domain, and untangling the entanglement. This all takes surely capacious chops. This also takes an ability to fend off certainty, concretization, and reductive moves. It helps to have a comfort level with the mysterious and the tentative, etc..)

Certainly in the terms of transformative learning, especially when it adheres to the mode of conversational learning, the frameworks have to do both with meta-dialogue, and, practical processes of intentional knowing. The point of emphasis is intention, knowing what you’re about to get into.

Deep interpersonal knowing is rare. Spirituality is–partly–for me about how one goes about knowing. My droll, facile answer about my own spirituality is that it represents “the current state of the effectiveness of my prejudices”. This is to admit of and in the terms of olden spiritual lingo, that those prejudices constitute the veils between me and whatever is the spiritual (as opposed to spiritualized,) reality.

Reflect on the people who know you extremely well and reflect upon what is their knowledge and, especially, upon what those people had to do to meet or surpass wherever you happened to set the bar of their knowing. My experience is that most people do not do the groundwork of getting to know one another very often. In other words, the sublime feeling of being known deeply results from sublime enactments of learning and this may require preparation.

Sure, some questions shouldn’t be asked at dinner parties! Still, as always, be careful what you ask for and, (I remind myself,) try not to ask for knowledge you’re not ready to prepare the ground for. This can be hard to anticipate!

I.

Since we’ve seen each other, a game goes on.
Secretly I move, and you respond.
You’re winning, you think it’s funny.
But look up from the board now, look how
I’ve brought in furniture to this invisible place,
so we can live here.

II.

I’ ve heard it said there’s a window that opens
from one mind to another,
but if there’s no wall, there’s no need
for fitting the window, or he latch.

Barks/Moyne version; Rumi

Grove International, one of my favorite visionary ‘schematicists,’ has published a terrific poster A Theory of Process putting Young’s little known and important work in graphical summary form.

Lincoln as an Exemplar

We can find in Lincoln distinct presence of all the characteristics cited by Dabrowski as indications of a very high level of mental development, particularly the level of autonomous personality and secondary integration.

A self-chosen, self-confirmed and self-educating harmonious and stable organization of highly refined mental qualities —long itemization follows.

KALAHARI ORIGINS is about the folkloric music of the San and Himba peoples of the Kalahari Desert (in southern Africa) and the music of ancient Africa. Participants will listen to both Khoi-San music and other spiritual music from South African traditions and then collaboratively imagine this music’s purposes and transmission over tens of millenia.

Bring your big ears and hearts when you come!

Appendix A. Instructor Characteristics and Roles Which Facilitate Transformational Learning
1. Encourage students to reflect on and share their feelings and thoughts in class.
2. Be holistically oriented, aware of body, mind, and spirit in the learning process.
3. Become transcendent of his own beliefs and accepting of others’ beliefs.
4. Cultivate awareness of alternate ways of learning.
5. Establish an environment characterized by trust and care.
6. Facilitate sensitive relationships among the participants.
7. Demonstrate ability to serve as an experienced mentor reflecting on his own journey.
8. Help students question reality in ways that promote shifts in their worldview.
Appendix B. Student Characteristics and Roles which Facilitate Transformational Learning
1. Students must be free to determine their own reality, as opposed to social realities defined by others or by cultural institutions.
2. Students must be ready for and open to change.
3. Those with a wider variety of life experiences, including prior stressful life events, are likely to experience more transformation.
4. Cultivate the ability to transcend past contexts of learning and experience.
5. Students must be willing and able to integrate critical reflection into their school work and personal life.
6. Students must be able to access both rational and affective mental functioning.
7. Have sufficient maturity to deal with paradigm shifts and material which differs from their current beliefs.

Thanks Sunny!

EXPERIENCE & THE LIBRARY Personal Development & Transformative Learning in the Library

Part 1 Sat 3/4@3pm TRANSFORMATIONAL BEING AND EXPERIENCE
Part 2 Sat 3/25@3pm DYNAMIC PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
Part 3 Sat 4/15@3pm NOVEL PATHWAYS THROUGH THE LIBRARY
Part 4 Sat 5/6@3pm SERENDIPITOUS SEARCH-INTERNET APPLICATIONS
Part 5 Sat 5/27@3pm COLLABORATIVE APPLICATIONS-DATA DUETS
Part 6 Sat 6/17@3pm HUNTING AND GATHERING
Part 7 Sat 7/8@3pm THE NEW LIBRARY -PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Lakewood Public Library
15425 Detroit Rd.
Lakewood, Ohio 44107

A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

Zen joke from: Lighter Side of Zen Buddhism:

Q: What did one Zen practitioner give to another for his/her birthday?

A: Nothing.

Q: What did the birthday boy/girl respond in return?

A: You are thoughtless for giving me this meaningless gift.

To which the giver replied, “Thank you.”

Irreverent Zen joke from: Laughing Librarian

A young patron approached the Zen Librarian and asked, “What is the formula for the volume of a cylinder?” The Zen Librarian answered, “Please get me a cup of coffee.”

101 Zen Stories

Zen Koans – Study (links) | 101 Zen Koans | Zen Koans 1* |

Commentaries – Comments on the Paradoxality of Koans (M. Levin) |
Dogen GZenji’s Genjo Koan Lecture

Zen Buddhism – General Resources

You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. -Plato

Found on a page about: The Healing Carnival

The Healing Carnival is becoming: an evolutionary game, a multimedia arts ensemble an epic conspiracy, a garden of earthly delights, a sowing of seeds of harmony a new way of making love, a balm for troubled hearts, an endless pilgrimage, a culture sculptors’ colony, the moral equivalent of war, a clarion call in the midst of a storm, a path to wisdom, an exercise in applied cosmology, a bodhisattvas’ boot camp, a form of right livelihood, a festival of life, suitable for the entire family!

John Dicus offers The Fourth Piece of the Puzzle @Cornerstone Associates. If it provides a gloss to some extent, Dicus does get into some intriguing details; for example, ‘ Whole-System Experiential Learning gives meaning to unused ideas, making it possible to reject some outright and to implement others.’ The conception of unused might also include hidden or heretofore unconscious ideas, so this comment gets at a crucial concept.

Scott Forbes offers Krishnamurti’s Insights into Education: Education as a Religious Activity. He makes explicit in this fine article a different view on ‘unused’ knowing,

Throughout the ages sages have warned us that we can’t see what is true even when it is presented to us because that which is true isn’t what we expect or want to hear.

Obviously this describes the problem of: not wanting to use knowing.

Krishnamurti:

The function of education, then, is to help you from childhood not to imitate anybody, but to be yourself all the time. So freedom lies…in understanding what you are from moment to moment. You see, you are not [normally] educated for this; your education encourages you to become something or other.

In short, who a person really is, is not what many persons wish to learn about or see or is knowledge the person wants to use.