Dream Deep

THE GUEST HOUSE

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be cleaning you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
Because each has been sent
As a guide from beyond.

Jelaluddin Rumi

Translation by Coleman Barks
Harper San Francisco, 2004, ISBN 0-06-250959-4

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.

Rumi

A present from Wayne Dyer
See his book:

There Is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem

Art and Science,
Listening
to and through
Language

Haj Ross
Linguistics
University of North Texas
haj@unt.edu

I would like to discuss a way to let C. P. Snow’s two cultures blur cheerfully that students and I have been codiscovering. It happens at the University of North Texas in a course that is called Linguistics 5590: Linguistics and Literature. It’s an English Department course; most of the students who come know a lot more literature than I do, and have a dusting of linguistics, just enough to make them suspicious of the technicality of it. How could anything so dessicated have any relevance to understanding someone like Shakespeare or Dickinson or Levertov?
Fair question. I tell them that we are going to hang out with pieces of language, from any author, any century, any continent, and any genre. The only criterion is this: any piece of language that we look at we do because it matters to someone in the room. Someone there loves it, is moved by it. Wants to understand it more deeply, or maybe: wants to rip it to shreds to see how in the world the writer put it together in such a luminous way.

Our colistening starts with someone reading the piece aloud. Verbal art is (usually) a choreography for the throat – the sound of the syllables is at the very center of the aesthetics of the word. After listening to the music of the text, we sit in a circle, and practice the art of noticing. The noticings may have to do with some aspect of meaning – with the feeling that the text calls forth in us – or with some aspect of structure – patterns of sound (like rhyme, alliteration, and so forth), or of the structure of words, or clauses, or with tropes, such as metaphor or metonymy, which strike our eye/ear/mind as we read and reread the poem. Some of us will be familiar with the poem already, and they may come armed with some noticings to prime the pump with, but that is definitely not always the case. I have been involved in this kind of class for about 30 years now, and many of the texts that come to class are ones that I bring – but that gives me a lot less of a headstart than might be expected. For the reason that I bring a poem to class is not primarily to make a point with it – rather, I come with it because it has stunned me, and I want to share this thing of beauty with others. Many times it has happened that all of us will sit and marvel at a poem that someone has brought in, and be absolutely unable to understand how the writer has wrought the magic. The poem simply will stay with us, shining in our minds, a bit like a wondrous flower that we come upon deep in the woods, far away from any path, perhaps seen before by no one, ever.

Another side of that same coin is that very often, despite my decades of experience in trying to become a better noticer, there is often someone in the class, perhaps a poet themselves, who is just light years ahead of me. And as Kierkegaard says, real education starts when the teacher learns from the student.

I follow the lead of Freedom to Learn, by the late psychologist/educator Carl Rogers, in his belief that just as he could not teach anyone how to teach, so I believe that I cannot teach someone to love language, and to find deeper meanings in literature. Rather, I hold that each person’s encounter with the magic that words can bring is necessarily a private, and a sacred, one. It may strike the reader as strange to find words like “sacred” in the context of education; I feel that I have been incredibly fortunate to find that thinkers like Parker Palmer are way ahead of me in this respect. Some of his papers that have had the strongest impact on me appear in the bibliography.

There is little that is “required” of those who sit in our circle. Rather, each of us comes to realize that the more they can be open with, and trust, and respect, each other, the greater will be the chance that they will be able to be a part of a kind of collective being that such classes can sometimes jell into. The people in the room get to be friends with each other, come to appreciate the insights that have come from various quarters of the room, and to be thankful that the others have sometimes shyly brought pieces of language which have a profound significance in their own lives, and have passed on this significance to others.

And the shared experience of being a part of something as fragile, as unsummonable, as mystical, as this collective being, or superindividual, or perhaps simply this community – this has a validity that cannot be mistaken, one which is hard to describe, to get a handle on, but which is not soon forgotten. There is a joy to this experience, an excitement, a feeling of reconnection, akin to what Nietzsche describes:

Philosophical thinking is…far less a discovery than a recognition,
a remembering, a return, and a homecoming to a remote, primordial,
and inclusive household of the soul.

Beyond Good and Evil

This experience has a lot in common with such others as these: being on a great athletic or research team, or playing or singing in an inspired musical group, or being in love, or being a part of a happy and deep family. The “class” seems officially to be about the love of the art and patterns of (literary) language, but many of us who have had the experience of soaring in this collective way soon realize that this initial setting of the stage is irrelevant. I have found, in asking the members of the classes in which some degree of this jelling has occurred, that some students have had this kind of magical educational experience previously, in the most diverse of contexts – perhaps in a graduate seminar, or a class on lifesaving, or Italian. But far too few raise their hands when I ask them who has been in such a learning community before.
It is my contention that the true goal of all educational systems should be the (re)discovery of what the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out.” If a teacher (i. e., a fellow student) can help someone else to see that this is what education can be, that person will have received a permanent gift. Once someone has tasted of the joy of discovery, they are hooked. It is a bit as if they have found a wonderful beach or mountain which they can always return to, which will always recharge, reenergize them.

We ask ourselves: why does this happen so rarely? Can it be facilitated? What gets in the way of the birth of such a collective? How can we together move towards coinventing an educational system in which such joy, excitement, trust, and yes: love – is the norm, not a rare exception?

I can claim no particular credit for these ideas; what I propose is to lead a workshop of 60 (or preferably 90) minutes in which I will attempt to give the participants a taste of what such a collective mind is like being a facet of. I have tried before, extremely unsuccessfully, to talk about such matters theoretically, in the absence of the fundamental ingredient, which is: the fascination with a text whose author has propelled it, somehow, into orbit. A class like this marches on examples.
So I would bring to Hawaii some texts that see to generally have a powerful impact on their readers. For instance, a poem like this one, which was given to me by a friend.

Chase Scenes

He’s been after me
For years now.
Once when I was a boy
Sliding down the riverbank
He got one hand around my ankle.
While muddy water lapped and surged
I scrambled along a gnarled root
And hauled myself to the upper bank
Trembling with terror.

Just a trial balloon,” he said cheerfully,
Lighting a cigar.

So many other times, mountain climbing
And ready to take the wrong step
Or lazing in the milky foam of Pacific Ocean surf
Or driving fast at four A.M. ready to fall asleep
And smash against some anonymous
Freeway wall.

And then the tests he puts you through:
The scans and probes and liquids measured
For cancer’s black sand, for the leaking
Glue of inflammation; the number of times
He taps you for another round
Of dodge ball, firing one disease after another
Past your ahead as you dance
And jump, still alive.

Michael Shorb

The Sun
May 2003, page 47
(a magazine it would be hard to be more consistently more wonderful than)
www.thesunmagazine.org

A present from Elizabeth DiFranco

I know next to nothing about this poem; whether this one would be one I would bring to Hawaii or whether it would be some other one is of little importance. I would bring copies of enough texts so that we might have the great good fortune of finding one which quickened interest, awoke insight, with one or more of us in the room, so that perhaps, maybe, just possibly . . .

Since this text, whose original purpose was to troll for acceptance at a huge conference in Hawaii, which it succeeded in, and where the five or so people who showed up, did, I think, begin to glide a bit, has come and gone, and since the text is now becoming part of a generic trolling – a description of what happens to those who stumble on 5590 in one way or another – I will add one love poem which Austin Hummell, a great teacher and poet-pal, gave to me, just so that the strangeness which exudes from each of the above words, and which has lured you into reading this far, will be complemented by a poem that I hope that you too will want to show to someone who you love as much as Bob Hicok loves whoever this one was written for.

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening,

it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

Bob Hicok, Plus Shipping,
Boa Editions, Rochester, NY (1988), pp. 98-99

It should have become clear that one of the key ingredients for this exploration is the dissolving of the boundary between teachers and students. Rather, everyone in the room becomes a colearner, to use a word which I will have to use until I find a better one. The goal of the workshop would be to explain colearning, to talk about the possibility of the emergence of a collective being, to ask pedagogical questions, and share experiences – but more than any of these typical academic activities, the real goal will be to fish for The Big One – a taste of a kind of thinking and discovering together that is permanently contagious.

John Seely Brown and Paul Seguid. The university in the digital age. www.johnseelybrown.com/DigitalU.pdf

Parker J. Palmer The Grace of Great Things: Recovering the Sacred in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning
http://csf.Colorado.EDU/sine/transcripts/palmer.html

______________ The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching
http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/events/afc99/articles.html

Carl Rogers. Freedom to Learn, Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company, Columbus, Ohio (1969).

Suffering Is Not Enough

Thich Nhat Hanh

Life is filled with suffering, but it is also filled with many wonders, like the blue sky, the sunshine, the eyes of a baby. To suffer is not enough. We must also be in touch with the wonders of life. They are within us and all around us, everywhere, any time.
If we are not happy, if we are not peaceful, we cannot share peace and happiness with others, even those we love, those who live under the same roof. If we are happy, if we are peaceful, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace. Do we need to make a special effort to enjoy the beauty of the blue sky? Do we have to practice to be able to enjoy it? No, we just enjoy it. Each second, each minute of our lives can be like this. Wherever we are, any time, we have the capacity to enjoy the sunshine, the presence of each other, even the sensation of our breathing. We don’t need to go to China to enjoy the blue sky. We don’t have to travel into the future to enjoy our breathing. We can be in touch with these things right now. It would be a pity if we are only aware of suffering.
We are so busy we hardly have time to look at the people we love, even in our own household, and to look at ourselves. Society is organized in such a way that even when we have some leisure time, we don’t know how to use it to get back in touch with ourselves. We have millions of ways to lose this precious time–we turn on the TV or pick up the telephone, or start the car and go somewhere. We are not used to being with ourselves, and we act like we don’t like ourselves and are trying to escape from ourselves.
Meditation is to be aware of what is going on–in our bodies, in our feelings, in our minds, and in the world. Each day 40,000 children die from hunger. The superpowers now have more than 50,000 nuclear warheads, enough to destroy our planet many times. Yet the sunrise is beautiful, and the rose that bloomed this morning along the wall is a miracle. Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice mediation is to be in touch with both aspects. Please do not think we must be solemn in order to meditate. In fact, to meditate well, we have to smile a lot.
Recently I was sitting with a group of children, and a boy named Tim was smiling beautifully. I said, “Tim, you have a beautiful smile,” and he said, “Thank you.” I told him, “You don’t have to thank me, I have to thank you. Because of your smile, you make life more beautiful. Instead of saying, ‘Thank you,’ you should say, ‘You’re welcome.’”
If a child smiles, if an adult smiles, that is very important. If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work. When I see Tim smiling, I am so happy. If he is aware that he is making other people happy, he can say, “You are welcome.”

* * *

From time to time, to remind ourselves to relax, to be peaceful, we may wish to set aside some time for a retreat, a day of mindfulness, when we can walk slowly, smile, drink tea with a friend, enjoy being together as if we are the happiest people on Earth. This is not a retreat, it is a treat. During walking meditation, during kitchen and garden work, during sitting meditation, all day long, we can practice smiling. At first you may find it difficult to smile, and we have to think about why. Smiling means that we are ourselves, that we are not drowned into forgetfulness. This kind of smile can be seen on the faces of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
I would like to offer one short poem you can recite from time to time, while breathing and smiling.

Breathing in, I calm body and mind.
Breathing out, I smile.
Dwelling in the present moment
I know this is the only moment.

“Breathing in, I calm body and mind.” This line is like drinking a glass of ice water–you feel the cold, the freshness, permeate your body. When I breathe in and recite this line, I actually feel the breathing calming my body, calming my mind.
“Breathing out, I smile.” You know the effect of a smile. A smile can relax hundreds of muscles in your face, and relax your nervous system. A smile makes you master of yourself. That is why the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are always smiling. When you smile, you realize the wonder of the smile.
“Dwelling in the present moment.” While I sit here, I don’t think of somewhere else, of the future or the past. I sit here and I know where I am. This is very important. We tend to be alive in the future, not now. We say, “Wait until I finish school and get my Ph. D. degree, and then I will be really alive.” When we have it, and it’s not easy to get, we say to ourselves, “I have to wait until I get a job, in order to be really alive.” And then after the job, a car. After the car, a house. We are not capable of being alive in the present moment. We tend to postpone being alive to the future, the distant future, we don’t know when. Now is not the moment to be alive. We may never be alive in our entire life. Therefore, the technique, if we have to speak of a technique, is to be in the present moment, to be aware that we are here and now, and the only moment to be alive is the present moment.
“I know this is the only moment.” This is the only moment that is real. To be here and now, and enjoy the present moment is our most important task. “Calming. Smiling, Present moment, Only moment.” I hope you will try it.

* * *

Even though life is hard, even though it is sometimes difficult to smile, we have to try. Just as when we wish each other, “Good morning,” it must be a real “Good morning.” Recently, one friend asked me, “How can I force myself to smile when I am filled with sorrow? It isn’t natural.” I told her she must be able to smile to her sorrow, because we are more than our sorrow. A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha on, we are the Buddha. If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty.
When we sit down peacefully, breathing and smiling, with awareness, we are our true selves, we have sovereignty over ourselves. When we open ourselves up to a TV program, we let ourselves be invaded by the program. Sometimes it is a good program, but often it is just noisy. Because we want to have something other than ourselves enter us, we sit there and let a noisy television invade us, assail us, destroy us. Even if our nervous system suffers, we don’t have the courage to stand up and turn it off, because if we do that, we will have to return to our self.
Meditation is the opposite. It helps us return to our true self. Practicing meditation in this kind of society is very difficult. Everything seems to work in concert to take us away from our true self. We have thousands of things, like video tapes and music, which help us to be away from ourselves. Practicing meditation is to be aware, to smile, to breathe. These are on the opposite side. We go back to ourselves in order to see what is going on, because to meditate means to be aware of what is going on. What is going on is very important.

* * *

Suppose you are expecting a child. You need to breathe and smile for him or her. Please don’t wait until your baby is born before beginning to take care of him or her. You can take care of your baby right now, or even sooner. If you cannot smile, that is very serious. You might think, “I am too sad. Smiling is not the correct thing to do.” Maybe crying or shouting would be correct, but your baby will get it–anything you are, anything you do, is for your baby.
Even if you do not have a baby in your womb, the seed is already there. Even if you are not married, even if you are a man, you should be aware that a baby is already there, the seeds of future generations are already there. Please don’t wait until the doctors tell you that you are going to have a baby to begin to take care of it. It is already there. Whatever you are, whatever you do, your baby will get it. Anything you eat, any worries that are on your mind will be for him or her. Can you tell me that you cannot smile? Think of the baby, and smile for him, for her, for the future generations. Please don’t tell me that a smile and your sorrow just don’t go together. It’s your sorrow, but what about your baby? It’s not his sorrow, it’s not her sorrow.
Children understand very well that in each woman, in each man, there is a capacity of waking up, of understanding, and of loving. Many children have told me that they cannot show me anyone who does not have this capacity. Some people allow it to develop and some do not, but everyone has it. This capacity of waking up, of being aware of what is going on in your feelings, in your body, in your perceptions, in the world, is called Buddha nature, the capacity of understanding and loving. Since the baby of that Buddha is in us, we should give him or her a chance. Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.

•

From Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace, edited by Arnold Kotler, Parallax Press, P. O. Box 7355, Berkeley, California.94707.

A present from Donald Rothberg.
10.14.1987.

From The Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing

“It is like this, bhikkus: the practitioner goes into the forest or to the foot of a tree, or to any deserted place, and sits stably in the lotus position, holding his body quite straight. Breathing in, he knows that he is breathing in: and breathing out, he knows that he is breathing out.

1. Breathing in a long breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing in a long breath.’
Breathing out a long breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing out a long breath.’

2. Breathing in a short breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing in a short breath.’ Breathing out
a short breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing out a short breath.’

3. ‘I am breathing in and am aware of my whole body.
I am breathing out and am aware of my whole body.’ This is how he practices.

4. ‘I am breathing in and making my whole body calm and at peace.
I am breathing out and making my whole body calm and at peace.’ This is how he practices.

5. ‘I am breathing in and feeling joyful. I am breathing out and feeling joyful.’
This is how he practices.

6. ‘I am breathing in and feeling happy. I am breathing out and feeling happy.’
This is how he practices.

7. ‘I am breathing in and am aware of the activities of the mind in me.
I am breathing out and am aware of the activities of the mind in me.’ This is how he practices.

8. ‘I am breathing in and making the activities of the mind in me calm and at peace. I am breathing out and making the activities of the mind in me calm and at peace.’ This is how he practices.

9. ‘I am breathing in and am aware of my mind. I am breathing out and am aware of my mind.’ This is how he practices.

10. ‘I am breathing in and making my mind happy and at peace.
I am breathing out and making my mind happy and at peace.’ This is how he practices.

11. ‘I am breathing in and concentrating my mind. I am breathing out and concentrating my mind.’ This is how he practices.

12. ‘I am breathing in and liberating my mind.
I am breathing out and liberating my mind.’ This is how he practices.

13. ‘I am breathing in and observing the impermanent nature of all dharmas. I am breathing out
and observing the impermanent nature of all dharmas.’ This is how he practices.

14. ‘I am breathing in and observing the fading of all dharmas. I am breathing out
and observing the fading of all dharmas.’ This is how he practices.

15. ‘I am breathing in and contemplating liberation. I am breathing out
and contemplating liberation.’ This is how he practices.

16. ‘I am breathing in and contemplating letting go. I am breathing out
and contemplating letting go.’ This is how he practices.

The Full Awareness of Breathing, if developed and practiced continuously according to these instructions, will be rewarding and of great benefit.”

The Buddha

From The Sutra On the Full Awareness of Breathing, by Thich Nhat Hanh, Parallax Press, P. O. Box 7355, Berkeley, California. 94707 (1988), pp. 6 – 8.

The store is on the [other/?*south/**interesting] side of the bridge from here.

From Walker Percy, The Loss of the Creature, 1954.

A young Falkland Islander walking along a beach and spying a dead dogfish and going to work on it with his jackknife has, in a fashion wholly unprovided in modern educational theory, a great advantage over the Scarsdale high-school pupil who finds the dogfish on his laboratory desk. Similarly the citizen of Huxley’s Brave New World who stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare in some vine-grown ruins and squats on a potsherd to read it is in a fairer way of getting at a sonnet than the Harvard sophomore taking English Poetry II.
The educator whose business it is to teach students biology or poetry is unaware of a whole ensemble of relations which exist between the student and the dogfish and between the student and the Shakespeare sonnet.
To put it bluntly: A student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented. The great difficulty is that he is not aware that there is a difficulty; surely, he thinks, in such a fine classroom, with such a fine textbook, the sonnet must come across! What’s wrong with me?
The sonnet and the dogfish are obscured by two different processes. The sonnet is obscured by the symbolic package which is formulated not by the sonnet itself but by the media through which the sonnet is transmitted, the media which the educators believe for some reason to be transparent. The new textbook, the type, the smell of the page, the classroom, the aluminum windows and the winter sky, the personality of Miss Hawkins–these media which are supposed to transmit the sonnet may only succeed in transmitting themselves. It is only the hardiest and cleverest of students who can salvage the sonnet from this many-tissued package. It is only the rarest student who knows that the sonnet must be salvaged from the package. (The educator is well aware that something is wrong, that there is fatal gap between the student’s learning and the student’s life: The student reads the poem, appears to understand it, and gives all the answers. But what does he recall if he should happen to read a Shakespeare sonnet twenty years later? Does he recall the poem or does he recall the smell of the page and the smell of Miss Hawkins?)
One might object, pointing out that Huxley’s citizen reading his sonnet in the ruins and the Falkland Islander looking at his dogfish on the beach also receive them in a certain package. Yes, but the difference lies in the fundamental placement of the student in the world, a placement which makes it possible to extract the thing from the package. The pupil at Scarsdale High sees himself placed as a consumer receiving an experience-package; but the Falkland Islander exploring his dogfish is a person exercising the sovereign right of a person in his lordship and mastery of creation. He too could use an instructor and a book and a technique, but he would use them as his subordinates, just as he uses his jackknife. The biology student does not use his scalpel as an instrument, he uses it as a magic wand! Since it is a “scientific instrument,” it should do “scientific things.”
The dogfish is concealed in the same symbolic package as the sonnet. But the dogfish suffers an additional loss. As a consequence of this double deprivation, the Sarah Lawrence student who scores A in zoology is apt to know very little about a dogfish. She is twice removed from the dogfish, once by the symbolic complex by which the the dogfish is concealed, once again by the spoliation of the dogfish by theory which renders it invisible. Through no fault of zoology instructors, it is nevertheless a fact that the zoology laboratory at Sarah Lawrence College is one of the few places in the world where it is all but impossible to see a dogfish.
[…]
To illustrate… The student comes to his desk. On it, neatly arranged by his instructor, he finds his laboratory manual, a dissecting board, instruments, and a mimeographed list:
Exercise 22

materials: 1 dissecting board
1 scalpel
1 forceps
1 probe
1 bottle india ink and syringe
1 specimen of Squalus acanthias
The clue to the situation in which the student finds himself is to be found in the last item: 1 specimen of Squalus acanthias.
The phrase specimen of expresses in the most succinct way imaginable the radical character of the loss of being which has occurred under his very nose. To refer to the dogfish, the unique concrete existent before him, as a “specimen of Squalus acanthias” reveals by its grammar the spoliation of the dogfish by the theoretical method. This phrase, specimen of, example of, instance of, indicates the ontological status of the individual creature in the eyes of the theorist. The dogfish itself is seen as a rather shabby expression of an ideal reality, the species Squalus acanthias. The result is the radical devaluation of the individual dogfish…
If we look into the ways in which the student can recover the dogfish (or the sonnet), we will see that they have in common the stratagem of avoiding the educator’s direct presentation of the object as a lesson to be learned, and restoring access to sonnet and dogfish as beings to be known, reasserting the sovereignty of knower over known.
In truth, the biography of scientists and poets is usually the story of the discovery of the indirect approach, the circumvention of the educator’s presentation–the young man who was sent to the Technikum and on his way fell into the habit of loitering in book stores and reading poetry; or the young man dutifully attending law school who on the way became curious about the comings and goings of ants …
However it may come about, we notice two traits of the second situation: (1) an openness of the thing before one–instead of being an exercise to be learned according to an approved mode, it is a garden of delights which beckons to one; (2) a sovereignty of the knower–instead of being a consumer of a prepared experience, I am a sovereign wayfarer, a wanderer in the neighborhood of being who stumbles into the garden.
One can think of two sorts of circumstances through which the thing may be restored to the person. (There is always the direct recovery: A student may simply be strong enough, brave enough, clever enough to take the dogfish and the sonnet by storm, to wrest control of it from the educators and the educational package.) First by ordeal: The Bomb falls; when the young man recovers consciousness in the shambles of the biology laboratory, there not ten inches from his nose lies the dogfish. now all at once he can see it, directly and without let, just as the exile or the prisoner or the sick man sees the sparrow at his window in all its inexhaustibility; just as the commuter who has had a heart attack sees his own hand for the first time. In these cases, the simulacrum of everydayness and of consumption has been destroyed by disaster; in the case of the bomb, literally destroyed. Secondly, by apprenticeship to a great man: One day a great biologist walks into the laboratory; he stops in front of our student’s desk; he leans over, picks up the dogfish, and ignoring instruments and procedure, probes with a broken fingernail into the little carcass. “Now here is a curious business,” he says, ignoring also the proper jargon of the specialty. “Look here how this little duct reverses its direction and drops into the pelvis. Now if you would look into a coelancanth, you would see that it–” And all at once the student can see. The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbook are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and always humble before the thing; he doesn’t have much use for the equipment or the jargon. Whereas the technician is never vague and never humble before the thing; he holds the thing disposed of by the principle, the formula, the textbook outline; and he thinks a great deal of equipment and jargon.
But since neither of these methods of recovering the dogfish is pedagogically feasible–perhaps the great man even less so than the Bomb–I wish to propose the following educational technique which should prove equally effective for Harvard and Shreveport High School. I propose that English poetry and biology should be taught as usual, but that at irregular intervals, poetry students should find dogfishes on their desks and biology students should find Shakespeare sonnets on their dissecting boards …
http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/percy/

A present from
Mark Liberman
His home page: www.ling.upenn.edu/~myl/
9/23/1998

Click immediately to his superb blog:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/

http://www.panarchy.org/rogers/learning.html

Carl R. Rogers
Freedom to Learn

Note
This essay is from a book titled “Freedom to Learn” published in 1969, that contains the basic ideas on learning of a very creative and original psychologist like Carl Rogers.

Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning (1952) 

I wish to present some very brief remarks, in the hope that if they bring forth any reaction from you, I may get some new light on my own ideas. 

a) My experience is that I cannot teach another person how to teach. To attempt it is for me, in the long run, futile.
b) It seems to me that anything that can be taught to another is relatively inconsequential and has little or no significant influence on behavior.
c) I realize increasingly that I am only interested in learnings which significantly influence behavior.
d) I have come to feel that the only learning which significantly influence behavior is self-discovered, self-appropriated learning.
e) Such self-discovered learning, truth that has been personally appropriated and assimilated in experience, cannot be directly communicated to another.
f) As a consequence of the above, I realize that I have lost interest in being a teacher.
g) When I try to teach, as I do sometimes, I am appalled by the results, which seems a little more than inconsequential, because sometimes the teaching appears to succeed. When this happens I find that the results are damaging. It seems to cause the individual to distrust his own experience, and to stifle significant learning. Hence, I have come to feel that the outcomes of teaching are either unimportant or hurtful.
h) When I look back at the results of my past teaching, the real results seem the same – either damage was done – or nothing significant occurred. This is frankly troubling.
i) As a consequence, I realize that I am only interested in being a learner, preferably learning things that matter, that have some significant influence on my own behavior.
j) I find it very rewarding to learn, in groups, in relationships with one person as in therapy, or by myself.
k) I find that one of the best, but most difficult, ways for me to learn is to drop my own defensiveness, at least temporarily, and to try to understand the way in which his experience seems and feels to the other person.
l) I find that another way of learning for me is to state my own uncertainties, to try to clarify my puzzlements, and thus get closer to the meaning that my experience actually seems to have.
m) This whole train of experiencing, and the meanings that I have thus far discovered in it, seem to have launched me on a process which is both fascinating and at times a little frightening. It seems to mean letting my experiences carry me on, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals that I can but dimly define, as I try to understand at least the current meaning of that experience. The sensation is that of floating with a complex stream of experience, with the fascinating possibility of trying to comprehend its ever-changing complexity. 

I am almost afraid I may seem to have gotten away from any discussion of learning, as well as teaching. Let me again introduce a practical note by saying that by themselves these interpretations of my experience may sound queer and aberrant, but not particularly shocking. It is when I realize the implications that I shudder a bit at the distance I have come from the commonsense world that everyone knows is right. I can best illustrate this by saying that if the experiences of others had been the same as mine, and if 1 had discovered similar meanings in it, many consequences would be implied:

a.) Such experience would imply that we would do away with teaching. People would get together if they wished to learn.
b.) We would do away with examinations. They measure the inconsequential type of learning.
c.) We would do away with grades and credits for the same reason.
d.) We would do away with degrees as a measure of competence partly for the same reason. Another reason is that a degree marks an end or a conclusion of something, and a learner is only interested in the continuing process of learning.
e.) We would do away with the exposition of conclusions, for we would realize that no one learns significantly from conclusions.

I think I had better to stop here. I do not want to become too fantastic. I want to know primarily whether anything in my inward thinking, as I have tried to describe it, speaks to anything in your experience of the classroom as you have lived it, and if so, what the meanings are that exist for you in your experience.

Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation (1969)
How does a person learn? How can important learnings be facilitated? What basic theoretical assumptions are involved?
Here are a number of the principles which can, I believe, be abstracted from current experience and research related to this newer approach:
Learning
1) Human beings have a natural potentiality for learning.
2) Significant learning takes place when the subject matter is perceived by the student as having relevance for his own purposes.
3) Learning which involves a change in self organization – in the perception of oneself – is threatening and tends to be resisted.
4) Those learning which are threatening to the self are more easily perceived and assimilated when external threats are at a minimum.
5) When threats to the self is low, experience can be perceived in differentiated fashion and learning can proceed.
6) Much significant learning is acquired through doing.
7) Learning is facilitated when the student participates responsibly in the learning process.
8) Self-initiated learning which involves the whole person of the learner – feelings as well as intellect – is the most lasting and pervasive.
9) Independence, creativity, and self-reliance are all facilitated when self-criticism and self-evaluation are basic and evaluation by others is of secondary importance.
10) The most socially useful learning in the modern world is the learning of the process of learning, a continuing openness to experience and incorporation into oneself of the process of change.

Facilitation
1) The facilitator has much to do with setting the initial mood or climate of the group or class experience.
2) The facilitator helps to elicit and clarify the purposes of the individuals in the class as well as the more general purposes of the group.
3) He relies upon the desire of each student to implement those purposes which have meaning for him, as the motivational force behind significant learning.
4) He endeavours to organize and make easily available the widest possible range of resources for learning.
5) He regards himself as a flexible resource to be utilized by the group.
6) In responding to expressions in the classroom group, he accepts both the intellectual content and the emotionalized attitudes, endeavouring to give each aspect the approximate degree of emphasis which it has for the individual or the group.
7) As the acceptant classroom climate becomes established, the facilitator is able increasingly to become a participant learner, a member of the group, expressing his views as those of one individual only.
8) He takes the initiative in sharing himself with the group – his feelings as well as his thoughts – in ways which do not demand nor impose but represent simply a personal sharing which students may take or leave.
9) Throughout the classroom experience, he remains alert to the expression indicative of deep or strong feelings.
10) In his functioning as a facilitator of learning, the leader endeavours to recognize and accept his own limitations.

Waking up

Haj Ross
English Department
University of North Texas
haj@unt.edu

I have been chasing after Zen for what seems like a long time now, and recently, it has begun to seem that maybe the relationship is getting mutual. For those of you for in San Francisco. I tried to get Si to explain what it was that he was doing, and I couldn’t understand a word that he said to me. Which makes me think now that he must have been pretty far along even then.

But the one thing that I got, somehow, was that whatever this was, it was something of immense value. Hmm.

•

And then, near the end of that turbulent and much maligned decade, the 60’s, another good friend, Jerry Katz, a philosopher, loans me a book by Philip Kapleau: The Three Pillars of Zen. I read it uncomprehendingly, it talks about meditation, the basic instruction, to sit down and follow one’s breath, counting up to ten breaths, one for each exhalation – this is so simple. How come that when I try to (try to) try it, it is so hard?

•

And this book gives me for the first time a Zen word: koan. And tells me what it is like to live with a koan. A koan is some kind of riddle or something, something that you cannot answer with your mind, something so fiendishly crafted that it in fact defeats your mind, after you have lived with it long enough.

Hey waidaminit! What is all this stuff about getting rid of my mind? What is so bad about having a mind, after all? Haven’t I been going to all kinds of lengths to train my mind, and now I’m supposed to just chuck it? And for something as dubious as this, the first koan I remember encountering, and one that is said to be central to Zen?

The monk Joshu is asked: Has a dog Buddha nature?
Joshu’s reply: Mu.

[“mu” is helpfully said to be a generalized word for negation]

And here are all these stories about extremely serious people, going through extreme hardships, meditating for many years, staying up, outside, under the moon, baying Mu into the night air. And for what?

•

Well, there is said to be a way of being, at the end of this indefinitely long and painful ordeal with Mu, something the least intelligible of all, something called enlightenment, or realization, or in Japanese, satori. And from the testimonials of several of the people in Kapleau’s book who have had these satori experiences, something mysterious, which somehow comes through, despite their inability to talk about it (better: despite their indifference towards the impossibility of expressing this whatever it is in words) – something from far away and yet also nearer than language is calling to me.

•

And so I go to Japan in 1971 for the first time, and somehow, comically, (turns out that one has to laugh a lot at oneself on this trip) find myself at a Zen temple, where I go to take part in a sesshin, a fierce ten-day retreat of about 18 to 20 hours of Zen per day, I arrive in the middle of it, I burn out after twelve hours, leave feeling defeated, but also, how can this be? – still drawn, hypnotizedly, to this order of being, to this inaccessibility. I will spare you the gory details, suffice it to say that I fitfully meditate, read more stuff without understanding it, think that I want to (want to) learn more, fill the next 12 years with as much shillying as shallying. Let us kindly refer to this interlude as “Haj (thinking he is) chasing after Zen.”

•

And now the scene shifts, it is the summer of 1983, I have a grant, from the Jason and Marion Whiting Foundation, to talk to various people on the West coast about the relationships between art and science and philosophy and religion, which I feel are in some way inextricably intertwined, are much more alike than they are often thought to be, I am in Los Angeles. And I have been told, by a very dear friend, someone much farther along on this pathless path, that when she met the head of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, she burst into tears, she knew immediately that he was her teacher, changed from the practice that she had been doing intensively for years to follow this man.

This sounds wonderful. This is more like it. Certainty. Yes sir, I could sure use some of that, something to galvanize me, help me stop stumbling around so like a fool. I will go and see this Roshi fellow (if he will see me), maybe something magical will happen to me too, after all, I have been muddling around for 15 years, surely this should count for something?

•

So miraculously enough, I call up, am granted an audience with this man. He is small, very quiet, almost clean-shaven head, brown robe, surrounded by many kind people who live at the Zen Center, they take me in, give me tea, show me around – it is clear that there is a lot of work here, a lot of purpose, above all, a lot of love. I am beginning to get the idea: friendship is very important, somehow, in this whole difficult process. Friends have brought me this far, I am wrapped in friendship and love, from people who either have gone, like me, groping after something that they did not know how to describe either, or who were lucky enough to have figured out earlier that describing was anyway irrelevant.

•

And so I try to tell Maezumi Roshi, this kind being, something about what it might be that has brought me to him, I am nervous, he is enlightened, and I am not, I say something about mooshing art and science together, I don’t know what. He is so patient, he doesn’t put me down, he introduces me to some other wonderful people, they seem to hear something in me to take seriously, but now it is time to go, Roshi says something like, “Good luck with your koan.”

My koan! My koan? What koan? Nobody ever gave me one. I’m not even in any Zen community, I don’t have a roshi to go to to check in with, a roshi who will know when I have “solved” the unsolvable koan that I have been given.

So – but look here! He is obliquely (everything is oblique in this business) giving me a koan right now! I better ask him what it is!!

“What koan, Roshi?”

“The koan of fusing art and science.”

Wow! That is a koan?? This confused bunch of thinking and reading that I have been enmeshed with for who knows how long? This can be dignified with the name of koan? I had better collect some brownie points, I’ll ask him how I’m doing, now that I’m a koaneer, like all the other real Zen students, who I have always been so envious of.

“How am I doing with it, Roshi?”

He looks at me, kindly, Zenly, Japanesely, says three words:

“Not very well.”

•

Aha. So it’s not going to be so easy, hunh? This mooshing business, how could anyone do it anyway, it’s impossible, the enterprises are too far apart, the reading is difficult, it’s all in a vague area, who could even do something like this, they would have to have understood all of this, but me? No wonder (grrrr) I have gotten nowhere, I better just go back to ripping poems to pieces and loving syntax and things like that which I have to do anyway because they’re so interesting that I have to do them even if I won’t get realized for it.

•

And now it is 13 and a half years after those three words. I have been mooshing together fiercely in as many ways as I could think of, in a bunch of different settings and places around the world, sometimes some of them seem to work, others fall flat on their face. The not so vague guilt with which I was beset in 1983, guilt at not doing something recognizable, not doing pure syntax, or pure poetics, or pure something, at being lost without even being able to tell anyone except extremely kind and patient friends what I think it might be that I think I am lost in – miraculously, this permaguilt has begun to thaw. At first I had tried to sort of compartmentalize, say, by putting books that I read about enlightenment and like that in a different category (like not business expenses) from journals, books, real books. And also to keep it out of the classroom. I mean, this is all private, my trip, right? How can I, in good conscience, lay it on anyone else? I can’t, which however does not stop me from laying it on, thick, in bad conscience.
Because oooo would I like to be a realized being, a saint, a guru. MmmmMMMM. I’m losing patience with all this waiting, I don’t have the moxie to really do all this fierce practice which all the heavies do, hey! – maybe it just isn’t my karma to get enlightened this time around, not my fault, so why not pretend that I do know something?

•

This is just the tip of a whole iceberg of gruesome crud which I will spare you. Plenty more where that came from. And strange though it is to tell, although one might think that such feelings would have enough power to keep me flagellating myself indefinitely, in fact my arm seems to have gotten a bit tired, or some of the fun has begun to go out of it for me. Not that it isn’t always there, a trusted friend, ready to hand whenever I would like to welcome it back – but somehow, its hook isn’t set so deep in me anymore. It has moved from stage front towards the background, towards the wings.

•

And what is instead center stage? Well, it really isn’t anything different than what was there in 1983, is it? I mean, I am still believing that what is important in what is generally thought of a four separate enterprises – sciencephilosophyartreligion – this is instead one whatever it is, and it is linked to insight, and learning about it is possible in groups in which some strange horizontalization has taken place, and the asymmetry usually there between student and teacher has washed out, and we are all just learning together –

There’s a lot more like that too, should you wish to hear it. It is very hard to say just in what way it is not what it was in 1983. It is not that I now believe in different things, exactly – maybe a slightly better way to say it would be to say that the belief is in more of me. Or that it comes from a deeper place.
Maybe two things will help point to something just barely perceptible. Some twentieth-century painter, I think it was Max Ernst, but I don’t know for sure, he was asked: what do you tell young painters? He said: I tell them to quit. That way, only those who have to will keep on painting.
Or there is an expression in German: die Hand für etwas ins Feuer legen – “to put one’s hand in the fire for something.” To believe something so much that you would actually put your hand in the fire as a kind of demonstration of your degree of commitment to it.
Now I feel more of a chicken about physical pain than I imagine most people do, yet there are things I have seen in poems, say, or maybe even about all of this mooshing, which I would put my hand in the flames for (I’m not saying how long, mind you). However much this may be true, when push comes to shove, is in a way immaterial. I am just trying to find some way to describe what may be different in the Haj of 1997 from the one in 1983. I don’t think that there was much in the older one that he would have put his hand in the fire for.

•

Or maybe another way to talk around this feeling is to say that wanting has become somewhat irrelevant. I used to want to believe in mooshability, and was assailed by doubts guilt etc. Now, despite the continued presence of all that dark stuff, mooshability just is. It’s as if at times I become Mr. Moosh.

•

But what does all the above have to do with the title of this piece? Where does waking up come in? And what is this whole thing about, anyway? Believe me, I sympathize with such questions. I am getting there, doubtless not fast enough. But I have to tell one more story, from a kind book, a present from a kind friend: Seeking the Heart of Wisdom, by Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfeld. The book starts like this:

It is said that soon after his enlightenment, the Buddha passed a man on the road
who was struck by his extraordinary radiance and peacefulness. The man stopped
and asked, “My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?”

“No,” said the Buddha.
“Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?”
Again the Buddha answered, “No.”
“Are you a man?”
“No.”
“Well, my friend, what then are you?”
The Buddha replied, ”I am awake.”

And in fact, the word Buddha comes from the Sanskrit root, *bhudh, which means “to be awake.” When the ending -dha is added to it, a word is produced which means “one who has awakened.”

I am going to skip a lot of stuff about what it was that the Buddha awakened to, which is called in Sanskrit Dharma, and which we might quickly translate as “what is firm, or the Law,” or: “the way things are.” There are many books which talk about this much better than I know how to. Instead, what I want to talk about is how the Buddha passed this wisdom down to his students.
And there, the answer was, and still is today: from the deepest place in his heart to that same place in his student. The Buddha’s great insight and courage and determination had enabled him to completely purify his heart, and had also given him the ability to see clearly into the hearts of anyone who wanted to follow his teaching, and to tell when someone had truly understood, and embodied, all of it. And when that mystical point was reached, what happens is something that we who have not experienced this can only guess at: it is written that at that point, there ceases to be any difference between that Buddha and the student. They are One in their deepest heart of wisdom.
And what happened when one of the Buddha’s students, who had personally achieved this fusion with the Buddha, started teaching still other students? Well, the same thing: when one of the students’ students had achieved a pure heart, that fact would be revealed to the pure heart of her or his teacher, and again teacher and student would fuse into one. And thus arose the notion of lineage, and today there are Buddhist masters who can tell you who their teacher was, and who their teacher’s teacher was, and so on, all the way back 2500 years to the Buddha. There is an unbroken conduit of Light that radiates from the Buddha that comes down into the lives of these living masters today.

•

The Buddhists say that we are all already Buddhas, but that we don’t know it. All the work that we do on ourselves is to help us to wake up and remember who, in our deepest essence, we most truly are. They say that each of us has a sleeping Buddha in us, and that we can wake that Buddha up.

•

OK, you may say, but what does all of this have to do with Maezumi Roshi in 1983? Well back then, I believed something which was wrong, I now think: that when we awake, we are roshis or gurus or Perfect Masters, or whatnot. I believed this fervently, despite many cautionary warnings in the Zen literature, like the famous story:

Before I studied Zen, a mountain was a mountain,
a tree was a tree, and a lake was a lake.

Then I studied Zen for a while, and a mountain was no longer a mountain,
a tree was no longer a tree, and a lake no longer a lake.

I continued my studies, and a mountain is again a mountain,
a tree a tree, and a lake a lake.

So what I had expected to happen, through hanging out with Zen, namely that I was going to become a roshi, that didn’t happen. Instead, Maezumi Roshi, with his endless kindness and insight, saw that inside of me, there was sleeping a potential Moosher of Art and Science. With his great wisdom and compassion, he saw all kinds of different flavors of Buddhahood in the different people who were drawn to him to study. Some he would see could wake up to become pure bakers, or mothers, or dancers, or bus drivers, or flutists, or . . . or even mooshers. To each his koan.
And what matters in this inner transformation is not the profession of the awakened being – what matters is only that their heart is pure. The rest is just trapping. And anyway, as soon as you have “solved” one koan, there is another fiercer one right behind it, and it will come into your living room, invisibly, and wait for you to gradually become aware of its unshakability.

•

So what we learn is not to become anything special. Rather, since each of us is unique, each of us has to find that special thing in us which we can so merge with that we will end up being identical with it. The result of that experiment is on one level that we have become a transcendent baker, or whatever. But far more importantly, what we have learned is: the Possibility of Awakening. We learn that we can find a way to turn our senses inward, to find out what we truly cannot help doing, what we must do even if more famous, etc., people around us tell us to quit. What we would put our hands in the fire for. If we have learned that once, then, should we wish to continue on the pathless path, a dharma friend who is further along than we are can help us to look again within us, in an even deeper place (there seem to be no final places, which you can arrive at and have no even deeper places to wake up into).

•

So why all the above? What is this leading up to?
It is probably too late in the day to say anything like “briefly, . . . ,” but what I am vitally concerned with is our educational institutions. Most schools and colleges think that education consists in teaching stuff, whether the stuff is driver ed or Italian, or calc or accounting. But I think that to believe this is to make just the same mistake I made, when I thought that waking up was necessarily to wake up to being a guru, roshi, whatever. No.
Learning is, always and only, about waking up. I am a linguist. What I must do, when I teach linguistics, is to show to the students what it is like to live the life of someone who cannot help being a linguist, who would be a linguist even if he drove a hack forty hours a week to earn a living, someone who is permanently addicted to the beauty of language. I show them myself and my fascination, not in order that they learn about what allophones are, or what chômeurization is, or anything concrete like that at all. Rather, I live this love for language in their presence, and I invite them to ask: is there anything like that in me? Do language and I have any business together? If so, they can come to me, and ask: what is my next step? And if not, simply not. No blame whatsoever. On to the next class.
My first linguistics teacher, Bernard Bloch, a brilliant linguist and teacher who was the head of the graduate linguistics program at Yale, was the alarm clock who woke me up to my linguisthood. There was a sleeping linguist in me, and he sensed that, and after he had awoken him, he had the bad luck to let me into a handcrafted major in linguistics at Yale, which had no undergraduate program in linguistics. I was to take some graduate courses, do some reading courses, and generally behave like linguistics inebriates behave. I, however, had different agendas, and proceeded to waste his time while I was at Yale, playing football, poker, and being on the radio station, doing essentially no studying. But he gritted his teeth and bore up through my dismal scholastics at Yale; I think he may have known that the hook was set so deep that sometime I might really settle down and start to think.
This all by the boards. I am here suggesting fundamentally just this. What happened in Linguistics 20, in my freshman year at Yale, was that there was in me a sleeping linguist, a linguist in ovo, one who did not know there was a possibility of waking out of the sleep in which he was wrapped. Within Bernard Bloch, there was not only an awakened linguist, but there was also his own sleeping linguist, who had been there until his teachers (I think that Raven McDavid and Leonard Bloomfield were some of them) had called to that sleeping and playful Essence of Linguisthood within him. I think of these sleeping linguist-buddhas, baker-buddhas, nurse-buddhas, whatever, as little kids, say around five or six, who love to get together and play. They called to Bernard Bloch’s linguist-kid, and awoke him, and he later, in 1956, called to me, and awoke mine.

•

If anything like the above is what happens in the process of forming people, then it suggests consequences of the most profound kind for the educational system. First and foremost, waking up is an event wrapped in friendship and playfulness, which is not to say in the least that it does not involve intense seriousness and immense quantities of hard work, as anyone who has watched kids build sand castles at the beach well knows. As far as I can tell, the greatest impediment to this process is fear. I think that as soon as obligations, like homework, exams, grades – all those good things which we all know are absolutely indispensable to conducting a class – as soon as those come in, the possibilities of successful wakings up are shrunken greatly. They do not go away entirely – look at me – I woke up in a regularly structured class with homework, exams, the whole schmier. How come it worked for me? How come I woke up?

•

I think that I woke up despite the system, not because it promoted the awakening process. And yes there are many people who have had the fantastic good fortune to have awoken to their callings in standardly structured classes. But I am impressed, and saddened, by the huge numbers of people who have not awoken to the Possibility of Awakening, and who either drop out, in the most radical cases, or who go through life desafinados, slightly out of tune, not radiantly realized, not having found their true calling. Our failure to these people may not be as dramatic and visible as it is in the case of a high-school dropout, but the human loss is devastating. The number of people who hate their work is so high that it is not an accidental fact that the day of the week and time when most Americans die is Monday at 9 AM.

•

I think it is about time for a quote from James Thurber:

It is better to know some of the questions
than all of the answers

James Thurber

Quoted in Patricia St. John,
The Secret Language of Dolphins,
Summit Books, New York, p. 11. (1991)

•

There are surely many subordinate questions which must be asked if we make the following question the one that is central for us:

What must we do in order to maximize the opportunities
for waking up in our educational institutions?

But I will not try to imagine them now. Here I invite your contributions.

And I will end as I started, with Zen – a quote from Leonard Cohen, a long-time student. This quote belies what I said at the outset – that words are useless. When they are very good, words can point, clearly, at what lies beyond language. I like an ending that destroys the beginning. It seems a nice way out of some of the tangles that writing anything like this brings, inexorably, with it.

•

What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid, bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Leonard Cohen

Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
Pantheon Books, New York (1993).

Quoted in:

the other side of waiting. An interview with Leonard Cohen, conducted at his Montreal home by Toronto journalist Cindy Bisaillon

Shambhala Sun, January 1994, p. 50

•

Always before your voice my soul
half-beautiful and wholly droll
is as some smooth and awkward foal,
whereof young moons begin
the newness of his skin,

so of my stupid sincere youth
the exquisite failure uncouth
discovers a trembling and smooth
Unstrength, against the strong
silences of your song;

or as a single lamb whose sheen
of full unsheared fleece is mean
beside its lovelier friends, between
your thoughts more white than wool
My thought is sorrowful:

but my heart smote in trembling thirds
of anguish quivers to your words,
As to a flight of thirty birds
shakes with a thickening fright
the sudden fooled light.

it is the autumn of a year:
When through the thin air stooped with fear,
across the harvest whitely peer
empty of surprise
death’s faultless eyes

(whose hand my folded soul shall know
while on hills do frailly go
The peaceful terrors of the snow,
and before your dead face
which sleeps, a dream shall pass)

and these my days their sounds and flowers
Fall in a pride of petaled hours,
like flowers at the feet of mowers
whose bodies strong with love
through meadows hugely move

yet what am i that such and such
mysteries very simply touch
me, whose heart-wholeness overmuch
Expects of your hair pale,
a terror musical?

while in an earthless hour my fond
soul seriously yearns beyond
this fern of sunset frond on frond
opening in a rare
Slowness of gloried air…

The flute of morning stilled in noon-
noon the implacable bassoon-
now Twilight seeks the thrill of moon,
washed with a wild and thin
despair of violin

E.E. Cummings

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