What? Or, Daresay the Clown is Noseless

Writer's block is like suffocation. You try and you try to find something to take in, something to release... yet there is nothing; not an ounce of substance to purge, arrange, or even to mutilate.

Writer's block is like starvation. You struggle and struggle not simply to find something to satisfy but to find satisfaction in the cavern of emptiness in which you find your self.

In other words, I feel as though I have nothing to say with a simultaneous impulse to speak. I've had the idea of making this blog reflect more personal matters, considering most of my writing is of an impersonal nature.

I go from the mountain of wisdom to the valley of indolence immediately. Choking on that which nourishes me. Sheathing thy heart in the presence of love. In darkness there is only dark.

Ashamed? Echoes of a life faded. Remnants of a phantasy gone. Rewrite to mend. Write as re-creation.

Struggles only to find rest. Rest only to make way for struggle. I lay down my pen to take up the world, come to find the world was there all along. Rest within struggle. Struggle within rest.

Absent of life in the vestibule of pain, no threads with which to take shelter and no drive with which to relate.

In vice, thy hands, crumble and work for no coronation nor the verbiage of one's bloodied brow.

Your daemon, my muse; evoke the unholy to reap the Eucharist.

Shrouded, enshrouded in veils of consortium - vast arrays of myopic shutters that betroth the vastness of expanseless self in confines of best regards and sacred distrust.

Truth, said the Greek, plays in your blindness - deceives you for amusement as tail chases dog; lighten up, fellow longstockings, let loose thy bind unto the pockets of sane.

These thoughts, those thoughts, the thoughts thought of in disparate space, evoke entrapment in an invocative way, way which suggests the way out is the way in in inverted schemes beyond cognitive time or mentated place.

Word, I assure you, insofar as assurance reinforces persuasion and supports engendered conviction, is at game with isness as it is.

Hip Hop and Heart

School has preoccupations. Namely: Commercialism. School as industry, as commercial entity.

This preoccupation is enacted thus: The message deemed of teaching worth is what the merchant demands the consumers and producers of their goods or services require for operation.  This is true whether the data is liberal or scientific or if it is theological or mystical. The force driving the requirement is nonetheless concerned with delivering their product (material or ideological) to others, at cost (financial, mental, or physiological). The conviction to deliver is the medium.

If, as McLuhan stated, the medium is the message then it is clearly recognized that trade-enforcing behavior is the message taught in school. To the commercial mind-set and life-style it is a logical message: This information moves money, which enables sustenance acquisition, which supports money movement, which acquires sustenance, and on and on; thus knowing this information is of critical importance and should be the basis of education.  

Simple. But irrational. Logic is not a means of deducing truth but of mapping and directing linguistic pursuits. Rationale is not synonymous with logic. Rationale is the act of rationing, of delivering and dividing attention among various basins in some ratio. In a logical system the aim is not truth but sound language - words which successfully bend the mind according to intent. In a rational system the aim is balance, accountability, and efficiency - economy, in a word.

There is a common, perpetuated, and propagated misconception - misinformation indeed. Perhaps disinformation... Economics as measured by monetary trade indices. Economics is not concerned with GDP or with sales and profits, stocks or bonds - those are the property of commerce.

Commerce and economics are not synonymous. Commerce is the propriety of merchants, it is involved with the trade, bargain, and sale of what on the surface are termed 'goods' or 'services' - on deeper inspection one sees these as abstractions or symbols (repositories and generators) of human attention and concern. Mercantilism is the edifice of supplying, restricting, and distributing consciousness. Schools are the mouthpiece of this contraption, wherein neurosocial conditioning engenders the personality platforms conducive to commerce.

Whereas commerce is focused on human financial acquisitions, the concentration of economics involves the arena in which commerce takes place. The focus of economics is objective resource rationing, the focus of commerce is polilogical resource control. School is the means of achieving this control by embedding conviction in the neurophysiology of students-to-be-consumers/workers.

It is not the aim of the teacher, nor the educational institution, to fashion commercial tenacity in upcoming generations. Although it is not the aim it is nonetheless the outcome. The cause of this current is the medium through which it passes: Commercialism, the very structure from which the school is given shape and takes form. The lessons of time and space taught by commercialism - which forge our conception of necessity, duty, and value and organize the structure of all  information - come laced with neural signals and social cues that denote a given attitude and affect.

Affect, attitude, space-time structuralization become the templates through which all experience is filtered. The content is irrelevant in that the act of receiving so thoroughly mutates the information as to render it entirely dissociated from its initial form and meaning. In this way Education is actually the embellishment of neurological habits of sensation. Who controls the habits controls the organism. But again, the purpose is not to gain control - the result is. The purpose is quite what is stated: learning, progress, success, etc. etc. But let us rekindle an elementary lesson pushed aside in elementary school...

The map is not the territory, The menu not the meal, The word not the truth. The word is not the truth. There are many levels of understanding, various platforms from which meaning is orchestrated and attributed significance in relation to the scale in application. There is a level where the word is the truth. That level is God(Buddha)-consciousness. And I assure you, my friend, if you THINK you are at that level it is GUARANTEED that you are not. At that level the word is truth because there is only truth. We are not at that level. We are not there because we are at the social level, where word is not truth; at the psychological level, where word is not truth; at the personal level, where word is not truth.

On these levels there exist subjects and objects of language, the spoken and the spoken of. At the G/B-C level there is not form and representation, there is only thusness - existence unabated and unconstrained. On these levels people mislead themselves unintentionally and thereby misdirect others under the guise of righteousness, hence: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." With commercialism embedded so thoroughly in the nervous system and language of human beings it is more likely that this underlying motive-mechanism acts as an amoeba.    
   

Economics and Ecology are one study of a single topic: Resource utility.

Memo on YouTube

Not to substitute or exclude traditional practices of teaching, within charter or public schools, but as an auxiliary resource with which to benefit the educational process of both staff and students, YouTube is an educational resource that may be construed in a number of ways. We should be careful of information from all sources, neither passively accepting nor violently resisting the passage of experience. The mind deals with information the way the body handles pathogens and nutrients - any educational brew, depending on the individual’s prerogative, may become either medicine or miasma. While skepticism may abound regarding the content contained on YouTube, we should remember that immunity is developed not by isolation, nor from exposure, but by calculated familiarity. 

Students regularly engage this resource on their own time (a Pew study even places it as the 3^rd most visited website) and presumably in an uncritical manner. Nicholas Christakis points out that “the intellectual content of most conversation is trivial, and it certainly is not focused on complex ideas about philosophy or mathematics… We mostly think and talk about each other,” which he presumes is even true of scientists. Thus, it is barely an assumption to say that our students are not reflecting on their acquaintance with this technologically-based community. They are interacting in an entire matrix of stimulation and interpretation regularly and with great enthusiasm; to ignore this is to limit our potential as educators, to hinder their propensity for understanding, and in the most extreme circumstance, to threaten our citizenship and social integrity.

Rather than exiling other forms of education from our awareness, thereby factoring out a major player in the lives of students, the more logical thing to do is acknowledge its relational status and orient the way it is used to educational ends. YouTube is one of a number of such players, including Wikipedia and blogging, which are contributing to an emergent culture of technologically-based participation that has media not merely consumed but produced by the consumers (Web 2.0). The result of such a state under non-reflective and uncritical reciprocation may be akin to the state of media expressed by Andrew Keen: ‘Instead of Mozart, Van Gogh, or Hitchcock, all we get with the Web 2.0 revolution is more of ourselves.’ In other words, YouTube has the capacity to regenerate bias and misunderstanding as much as knowledge and open-mindedness. 

Peter Felten reports, unfortunately, that ‘the classroom is perhaps the only place where today’s students are not “blending, mixing, and matching knowledge drawn from diverse textual sources and communication media.”’ YouTube, as a medium that not only entails images but audio and textual information as well, is a powerful and simple tool available to us for making our classrooms a more engaging place that provides even the most reserved student the opportunity to fashion an understanding to share with and artfully compare to others’. YouTube gives students options for expressing their understanding and confusion in a number of ways: Theatrically, textually, aurally, and in combination. YouTube therefore represents a model of accommodation for different learning styles that engages students on multiple levels, with or without the educational benefits.

But, of course, our job as educators comes with the duty of ushering and preserving that benefit. I suggest to you that instead of leaving YouTube to the unvigilant discretion of students, it be incorporated in lessons and assignments as a method of supplementing instruction and as a catalyst for formulating and expressing understanding of projects and topics. By framing it as an educational resources and implementing it in such an environment, by explicitly talking about and implicitly demonstrating its educational impacts, we can make students much more aware of the role such YouTube, like textbooks and other educational resources, has its share of worthless and guileless information; it is unique in its utilization of, as Gunther Kress puts it, multiple modes of representation, which are at times enigmatic to those with a strict textual literacy.

By using YouTube in our classrooms we integrate the student’s school experience with their everyday lives; we make school a place not of social regimentation but of community enlivening. Important to keep in mind in this regard is not the form itself – YouTube – but the spirit from which it manifest: Participation. To learn one must live, and to live students need to feel they are part of their surroundings. The value of YouTube rests in one’s ability to extract this potential and put it to use.    

Top Ten.

10.) Simplicity. The most compelling experiences are often the simplest experiences.
9.) Conveyance. Any compelling design must be conveyed coherently to evoke an experience.
8.) Attitude. The attitude with which you approach your audience sets the stage for their experience.
7.) Consistency. Staying with the topic, being flexible enough to bend to questions yet reform them to the original discussion.
6.) Acclimate. The peculiarities of your audience determines what is compelling.
5.) Maintenance. People get bored, a compelling experience is throughout time - not one instant; even if it occurs in an instant, its impact lasts longer. 
4.) Generalization. A compelling experience is something everyone can have. Be general to achieve the greatest amount of success, not everyone is a specified expert of bodies of knowledge.
3.) Welcome. To evoke an experience in a person they have to be open to it and thus happens when you're welcoming to who they are and what they bring to the table.
2.) Fuel. Once they're in your home, how do you treat them? And how do they treat you? A compelling experience is like beauty defined by Howard Gardner: it is an experience to be revisited.
1.) Compel. When it comes down to it, be real; be straight forward and address a person as a person - the force and power that comes of being confronted in the hear and now is the one thing that transcends every compelling experience for everyone.

Fashioning an Education

The rudimentary nature of looks are so simple, they're often overlooked. We use metaphors like "change of face", "heart on sleeve", "big-boy pants", "big-girl hat", “playing your hand” and so on and so forth. Yet, what do these metaphors imply in an ontological way, if anything at all? 

Nearly every identifiable emotion has an associated facial structure (mask), body posture and hand gesture (costume and prop), tonal quality (presence or role), and a characteristic background or landscape (setting or condition). As in theater, these personal qualities set the cultural stage for and define the experience of the social play. To customary thought, this may seem backwards since – traditionally – these are cultural qualities set on the individual stage. But conceptualized in this way, one overlooks the simple idea that it is the individual which makes the culture and not the culture which makes the individual. A culture does not give you your face, you give culture your face and the people who constitute that culture either accept it by responding to it, or reject it by ignoring it. The individual becomes part of the culture – an initiate - once they, consciously or unconsciously, make use of the former and discard the latter. This filtering process helps create and maintain the boundaries that define a culture for what it is.

Consider how simple it is to be considered a member of a culture: attend an institution, wear particular clothing, tote a particular hair ‘style’, drive a certain car, make use of certain technologies, employ peculiar mannerisms, and speak in an identifiable manner. Kevin D. Mitnick, in his book The Art of Deception, provides numerous stories of fraud that basically owe their success to enacting this simple fact. One example is of Stanley Mark Rifkin: 

One day in 1978, Rifkin moseyed over to [Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles, California] Security Pacific’s authorized-personnel-only wire-transfer room, where the staff sent and received transfers totaling several billion dollars every day. 

He was working for a company under contract to develop a backup system for the wire room’s data in case their main computer ever went down. That role gave him access to the transfer procedures, including how bank officials arranged for a transfer to be sent. He had learned that bank officers who were authorized to order wire transfers would be given a closely guarded daily code each morning to use when calling the wire room.

In the wire room the clerks saved themselves the trouble of trying to memorize each day’s code: They wrote down the code on a slip of paper and posted it where they could see it easily. This particular November day Rifkin had a specific reason for his visit. He wanted to get a glance at that paper.

Arriving in the wire room, he took some notes on operating procedures, supposedly to make sure the backup system would mesh properly with the regular systems. Meanwhile, he surreptitiously read the security code from the posted slip of paper, and memorized it. A few minutes later he walked out. As he said afterward, he felt as if he had just won the lottery.

Leaving the room at about 3 o`clock in the afternoon, he headed straight for the pay phone in the building’s marble lobby, where he deposited a coin and dialed into the wire-transfer room. He then changed hats, transforming himself from Stanley Rifkin, bank consultant, into Mike Hansen, a member of the bank’s International Department.

According to one source, the conversation went something like this:

“Hi, this is Mike Hansen in International,” he said to the young woman who answered the phone.

She asked for the office number. That was standard procedure, and he was prepared: “286,” he said.

The girl then asked, “Okay, what’s the code?”

Rifkin has said that his adrenaline-powered heartbeat “picked up its pace” at this point. He responded smoothly, “4789.” Then he went on to give instructions for wiring “Ten million, two-hundred thousand dollars exactly” to the Irving Trust Company in New York, for credit of the Wozchod Handels Bank of Zurich, Switzerland, where he had already established an account.

The girl then said, “Okay, I got that. And now I need the interoffice settlement number.”

Rifkin broke out in a sweat; this was a question he hadn’t anticipated, something that had slipped through the cracks in his research. But he managed to stay in character, acted as if everything was fine, and on the spot answered without missing a beat, “Let me check; I’ll call you right back.” He changed hats once again to call another department at the bank, this time claiming to be an employee in the wire-transfer room. He obtained the settlement number and called the girl back.

She took the number and said, “Thanks.”

A few days later Rifkin flew to Switzerland, picked up his cash, and handed over $8 million to a Russian agency for a pile of diamonds. He flew back, passed through U.S. Customs with the stones hidden in a money belt. He had pulled off the biggest bank heist in history – and done it without using a gun, even without a computer…

Rifkin’s story highlights the importance of fashion in the operation of today’s society. He was taken as a member of the bank culture by his role as a contracted employee, by his virtual position as Mike Hansen – which was reinforced by the gestures of knowing the code, and by his fluency of terminology. In other words, his fashion defined his character. 

On the contrary, it was his ‘inner’ fashion that defined his outfit – his ‘outer’ aesthetic. Our metaphors of hats, pants, sleeves, and masks are in fact references to psychic equipment. Few could do what Rifkin did; not because of the insufficience of their material fashion – again, Rifkin’s success was achieved even without a computer - but because of the poverty of their psychological fashion.

While the Rifkin story does well to demonstrate the illusive nature of presentation, Postrel reminds us that “declaring surfaces false and worthless is merely another form of deception.” Certainly surfaces and aesthetics do a lot to inform, and as Liz Twitchell remarked of fashionable luxuries, they are “incredibly powerful.” Ethnobotanist Terence McKenna – whom The Village Voice called the “Copernicus of consciousness”, in his Food of the Gods (1993), remarks on the power of the esthetic: 

 

It is difficult for most people born into a society of abundance, sensual gratification, and high-definition TV to imagine the stultifying dullness of most of the societies of the past. The “splendor” of the great societies of the past was essentially just a display of variety – variety in colors, fabrics, materials, and visual design. Such displays of variety were particularly the prerogative of the ruler and the court. The novelty of the costumes and the appointments of the court was somehow a direct index of its power. Thus it was when the emerging bourgeois of the late Middle Ages began importing dyes and spices, silks and fine manufactured objects into Europe.

I can personally attest to the power of color and variety over the human imagination. My periods of jungle isolation doing fieldwork in the Upper Amazon taught me how quickly the bewildering multiplicity of civilized life can be forgotten and then hungered for almost like the withdrawal from a powerful drug. After weeks in the jungle one’s mind is filled with plans for the restaurants to be visited once back in civilization, the music to be heard, the movies seen. Once, after many days in the rain forest, I went to a village to ask permission to make plant collections in the tribal area. The only “high-tech” intrusion into the primitive circumstances of the tribe was a cheesecake calendar brought from Iquitos and profoundly affixed to the thatched wall directly behind the headman of the village. As I talked with him my gaze returned again and again to the calendar, not the content but the colors. Magenta, cyan, and apricot – the terrible and obsessive attraction to variety was as haunting as the lure of any drug!

Postrel brings up the argument of surface and substance, acknowledging a tie between the two but propagating a view that the sensual is itself of value aside from application. To objectify this subject let’s look at natural configurations. The aesthetic of a flower, its fragrance for instance, is related to its pollination; the design of a tree, related to its climate; pleasurable tastes are either acquired or index of palpability; the song of bird and the chattering of baboons are integral parts of ecological resonance and the regulation of botanical and animal harmony. There is no aesthetic for aesthetics’ sake; there is structure based on function, rooted in body – organization not for ornamentation but for operational applications. The façade of something may indeed serve an applicable operation – as in membranes - and thus derives its esthetic from said functional organization. When you have aesthetic for its own sake you have wasted resources. The stoves Postrel mentions are cute, but the people who covet those resources are harboring something that someone else could very well make good use of. Surface is the sword; self is the weapon. Yet, in favor or the merely aesthetic, Postrel argues: “Sensory pleasure works to commercial and personal advantage because aesthetics has an intrinsic value. People seek it out, they reward those who offer new-and-improved pleasures, and they identify with those who share their tastes.” Certainly this is the argument of addicts; that their addiction is justified by the pleasure derived from ritual uses. As McKenna points out, deprivation of sensual stimulation resounds in a withdrawal similar to that of a drug. The aesthetic acts upon the nervous system in a similar way that chemical compounds do; the spatial configuration produces an identifiable and evocable neurophenomenological response, which is reinforced by repeated exposure to said stimuli. McKenna’s account of Amazonian isolation shows just how similar the two really are. 

Postrel denounces critics of aesthetics such as Riefenstahl, Ewen, Bell, Adorno, Horkheimer, McNealy, Loos, and Naomi Wolf: “The preachers – secular and religions, contemporary and historical – tell us that surfaces are meaningless, misleading distractions of no genuine value… We ignore the preachers and behave as if aesthetics does have real value,” which it most certainly does; just consider Rifkin’s employment of that value at the bank. “We define our real selves as the ones wearing makeup and high heels. We judge people, places, and things at least in part by how they look. We care about surfaces.” Again, if this was not true, Rifkin would have had no success. “But we are not only aesthetic consumers. We are also producers, subject to the critical eyes of others. And that makes us worry.” We are producers in the sense that we stylize fashion to fit our particular schema, in the sense that it is our aesthetic taste which drives the industry of fashion – we produce the blueprint that marketing agencies and advertising firms capitalize on. In this way, the aesthetic component of social organization and cultural definition is a means of buying and selling your self.  

Wong and Henriksen point out that ‘all of our conscious acts, even the act of not acting, are existential choices, or “fashion statements.” To fashion something, be it an idea, an artifact, or so forth, is to give meaning to one’s existence.’ Thus, as Helen Lee discusses in her Tao of Beauty (1999), function and fashion are inherently complements; hence the alchemical axiom: as above, so below. As a Chinese proverb states, an empty well gives no water. “The concepts of health and beauty are inseparable, focusing on the total well-being of the body’s internal and external functions. To have optimum health and beauty, a great physique and youthful appearance has to start with the body’s inner health, which includes maintaining the balance of yin and yang, chi, and blood action.” 

“At times, the experience of” fashioning “can be characterized by excessiveness and easily spill over to gluttony. And, yes, shopping can be mind-numbingly dull and can resemble a trancelike state of mind. However, in the moments when shopping becomes an act of fashion-ing it is an intensely human and vital experience filled with imagination, anticipation, inquiry, and reflection.” In an act of fashioning, “we move back and forth between what is and what could be, we feel movement, growth, and greater sense of vitality.” In terms of commercial fashion, this “experience continues beyond the advertisement to the product itself. The power of the ads is related to the degree that the imaginative bridge spans reality and a conceivable possibility… To the degree that “to exist” means to live, the stretching of existence from what is to what could be is literally, to expand what it means to be alive.” Wong and Henriksen liken the experience of school to the experience of fashion: “Both involve the awakening of perception, the engagement of both thinking and feeling, and the interchange of viewpoints and experiences with others.” I would like to interject, if I may, with Lee’s insights: “When we take the time – even if it’s just a few moments a day – to revitalize ourselves, we have so much more to share with those around us.”

Fashioning, then, is about altered states of consciousness. The shop is a device for entrancing the shopper; shopping is not it self fashioning. When the rite of purchase is re-cognized by the acting individual as an act of fashion-ing, then there is a shift in consciousness signified by the felt experience of movement, growth, vitality, and connection to the imagination. To fashion one’s self is to enliven one’s self, to coagulate states of consciousness as to expand one’s awareness, command, and understanding of the possible. Fashioning, like education, involves the conscious participation of an individual, which is altered in an act of participating. The psychic devices known as the persona (mask, costume, mannerism) and the archetypes (role, character) are the substance and the surface of fashion, which are regulated by the consciously fashionable: They begin their day by consciously making-up their face, their body, and their behavior - thereby they go about embodying a role that they have actively participated in making. These devices are used by everyone, but the unfashionable – individuals usurped by Madison Avenue, Pennsylvania Avenue, and Wall St. – are servants to their unconscious constitutions. 

“While cosmetics and skin care can enhance a [person’s] outer appearance, real beauty must be solidly based in balance and health. Strong, glossy hair; clear, bright eyes; firm, glowing skin; and strong, pink fingernails – these are the foundations that makeup merely plays up. Nothing can be enhanced that isn’t intrinsically there. This is why the road to beauty… is inextricably linked to optimal health.” This is the distinction between the fashionable and the unfashionable. The former does not think about being fashionable, their actions are saturated with their conscious involvement; their mental activity is not thought per se, but a meditation – a familiarization of self with self. The latter is unconsciously projecting their health unto objects through thought, ascribing quality to experience rather than experiencing quality through involvement. 

Fashion, like anything and anyone, has a creative (yang) and a deconstructive (yin) nature. All has the potential to be and to not be. To quote Kahlil Gibran: “I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each of you, so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.” As above (mind, ideal), So below (body, action). For a person to fashion their own self-image, as Wong and Henrikson propose is the purpose of education, then noticing this duality is paramount, because people tend to focus on one and not the other. To re-cognize how, when, where, why, and with what one is fashioning one’s self is to stand as the apex of real and possible – to be the bridge between imagination and actualization. 

But how does one do this? Schooling and shopping both have had their test runs and have shown to do nothing but clothe the individual insufficiently such that they must return for more equipment. This is because the aesthetic is attributed to the form. They are not the same. Aesthetic is an experience, whereas form is the object of that experience. For instance, clothing is used as an instrument for subjective feeling; you wear pajamas to feel comfortable, a tight shirt or short dress to feel sexy, a business suit or fancy attire to feel in command. The feeling is the aesthetic experience, misattributed to the form of the object that it is associated with. By attributing the experience to the object a person restricts their self-esteem to this outfit and that outlet, their comfort to this blouse and that boutique, their love to this necklace and that new look. People are, in effect, giving themselves up psychologically to nearly anything and everything that provides sensual gratification as deemed acceptable by the culture. Fashion, on the other hand, puts one at the levers of projection and retainment. 

Fashioning in the iconic sense of the word – through clothes and concepts – is merely disembodied aesthetic, chasing one’s own tail. The target is not the object of fashion (concept or clothing) but the experience, the state of consciousness associated with the item. The acquisition, mindful or mindless, of fashion items – be it clothing or concepts – is antithetical to education. There is no item of fashion, no clothing or concept that does not derive from inside the individual. And if fashioning is anything at all, it is regulating and cooperating this internal environment (like with instrumental clothing). Western thought lacks any models (as far as I know) for understanding and effectively fashioning the inner self; furthermore, the concept of an inner self is highly abstracted in this tradition. Thankfully, I have had the opportunity to become part of another tradition of perception and expression. 

Qigong is a centuries old method of willfully altering one’s state of consciousness, of fashioning the inner self. What is the inner self? Well, by rhetorical implications, it is the self inside of you. What is inside of you? A heart, a spleen, lungs, kidneys, a liver, small intestines, a stomach and pancreas, a large intestine, a bladder, and a gall bladder. There is also (among others) muscle tissue, bone marrow, blood and plasma, excretory compounds, neurochemicals, and nervous tissue. 

Qigong, which is the root of ancient Chinese medicine, is a meditative practice. Meditation “is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes. We provide space through the simple discipline of doing nothing… So meditation is a way of churning out the neuroses of mind and using them as part of our practice. Like manure, we do not throw our neurosis away, but we spread them on our garden, they become part of our richness.” Yet, it should be understood that meditation is nothing special or mystical, nothing foreign; nothing exclusive to this region or that religion. Meditation is consciously being human, a cooperation of the “faculties,” as the tradition of Western philosophy likes to call them, of perception and expression. 

The functioning of these “faculties” already occurs subconsciously, as when one becomes hungry at the sight of food or happy at the sound of good music, thoughtful in response to a teacher’s statements or tired following a long day. The “Zen” states of mind are little more than consciously tuning out sensory information as one subconsciously tunes-out background noise while conversing in a loud environment or focusing on something in the visual field at the distortion of surrounding stimuli. The subconscious means of exciting and inhibiting these (re)actions is linked to, or rooted in, the world we perceive to be outside of our selves – objects and events that consistently produce identifiable experiences. In this respect, we establish connections between how we feel, act, and believe relative to the constitution of the space around us – similar to the way a computer keyboard is wired to produce an ‘f’ when one presses the f key. But this relationship has faulty wiring because it lacks proper grounding; hence why the student and the shopper must always return to school and store. 

Meditation is like rewiring an electrical system, which comes together at a central circuit board or manifold – like the circuit breaker of a house. An electrical circuit requires two points of contact to function according to its intended purpose – a source and a return (also known as “Earth ground”). Consider what happens if you turn off the circuit in your house to which your refrigerator is connected – it also turns off because it no longer has a source or a return. Sensation and action work in a similar fashion, where you – the individual – are the manifold that enables the circuitry. Your environment is a seemingly endless supply (source) of information (or energy), which becomes subconsciously connected in the manifold of your psyche to appliances or faculties, if you will, that utilize the information in different ways and either drain the electrical system of energy (like televisions and toasters), cycle the energy (like the circuit breaker or an internet hub), or impart additional energy to the system (like generators or amplifiers for the signal of wireless internet). Environment does not simply refer to the external but to the internal landscape as well – to your thoughts and emotions.

Meditation, based on the formulae, reconstitutes the associations that have been subconsciously established throughout one’s life. Rather than being made sad or happy, one makes one’s self sad or happy – like changing the song on the radio, which acts like an external regulation device for one’s internal state (again, like instrumental clothing). Meditation puts this regulation inside an individual so they are no longer subject to the woes and boons of external conditions. 

In a meditative practice, relative to the tradition, we focus on a concept – say, creativity – and relate it to our bodies and its refined state (the elements). Creativity corresponds to the fire element; fire is constructive, creative, and procreative – fire is used in the forging of metals, in the driving of engine pistons, in the life-cycle as the source of light (the sun is a ball of fire after all) for photosynthesis, and so on. Every element has an active (positive, like an electrical charge) and passive (negative, again like a charge – not in ethical terms) side; the aforementioned is the active side of fire. The passive side of fire is decomposing and destructive, as seen when forests are set ablaze or controlled demolitions are performed. This element is found within your body at your solar plexus, which is involved in the process of digestion and body temperature regulation. So while many people find sources of creativity in the social realm of cities and movie theaters, or the home realm of television and internet cinema, meditation enables one to access a creative space within one’s self, a route to a direct source of creativity. When you’re doing X (e.g. putting on artistic dress) to achieve Y (e.g. start writing or painting) this is essentially the same thing as sitting down and focusing on your solar plexus. The sole difference is that through reaffirmed associations, you have subconsciously designated those spatial configurations to be your place of inspiration and creative ability. The same is true of meditation, but it is the solar plexus which becomes one’s source of creativity by chosen and reinforced associations, not the clothes. 

This organization is in contrast to another elemental organization, where each element is associated with an organ system and cardinal direction (role), a color (costume), a sound (tonal quality), a body posture (gesture, mannerism), an emotion (character), and the time of day and year (condition, setting). By fashioning one’s self with these elements, one’s inner glow radiates outward – as is the idea with material fashion, yet we speak literally here.    

A Music of Education

For students to learn the student must be involved. A Native American proverb states: ‘Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may not remember… Involve me and I’ll understand.’ While class attendance becomes a factor in the grading scale and certified associations become virtually a substitute for demonstrable skill or personal integrity, shadows are cast unto conscious attendance and individual capacity. Even if a student is physically present and apparently attentive, it does not follow that they are consciously involved in the happenings of their environment; it does not follow that because someone has a degree or certificate that they are capable of applying the information they supposedly acquired. How then, considering the vitality of involvement in education, is it possible to gauge and correlate a student’s involvement relative to the content of their temporal and spatial (psychological) environment?

Some common methods of measuring a student’s understanding are standardized testing, benchmark assessments (local, state, and federal), multiple-choice and essay examinations, class discussions, unit-based assignments, topic-oriented projects, and individual or group presentations. There is obscurity in these methods, which may be brought to the forefront by studies such as the Josephson Institute’s survey , which revealed that 75-98% of college students surveyed admitted to cheating at some point in their college careers. This means that 75-98% of students were graded inaccurately at some point or another and subsequently received degrees and, subsequently, socioeconomic positions invalidly. The methods of measuring, then, are not reflections of a student’s understanding or skill per se, but of the student’s ability to provide standardized answers and demonstrate mass-produced ‘intelligence’.

The methods of assessing intelligence itself were shown by T. Anne Cleary (1968) to be relative to the content of the assessment and experiences of the individuals involved, rather than an expression of a person’s abilities and/or understanding. It is quite simple: If you define intelligence to be some degree of accumulation of particular information, then anyone void of this information is rendered unintelligent. Yet, this measure says nothing of their understanding of the information that they have become familiar with in their experience of their life and thus, this measure says little, if nothing, of the person’s learning abilities or comprehension and analysis skills. Furthermore, a language-based (verbal, written, or electronic) assessment does little more than reflect an individual’s performance under the conditions of the grammatical and interpersonal environment, respectively. It is like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: as one property is measured, the less accurately may another property be known.

“We are not, any of us, to be found in sets of tasks or lists of attributes; we cannot be defined or classified. We can be known only in the singular unfolding of our unique stories within the context of everyday events.” –Vivian Gussin Paley, from Must Teachers Also be Writers?

“You are not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet… You’re not your f_(%ing khakis. You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.” –Tyler Durden, from David Fincher’s film, Fight Club

“You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world” – what this means is that you “cannot be defined or classified,” because you are made of the same prima materia from which Heisenberg derived the principle and which lead Henry David Thoreau to state: "Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself." Amazonian shamans have time and again tried to explain this to anthropological researchers, responding to prompts of psychological assessments with answers unrelated to the question but regarding the nature of life and the researcher’s place there and then. These answers, unsurprisingly, have, time and again, been interpreted by the intellect worshiping servants of logic of Western academia to be testament to the Shaman’s role as trickster and as mentally deranged. Trickster? Yes. Deranged? No more than the next human.

“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.” –Albert Einstein (1)

"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." - Albert Einstein (2)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” -Albert Einstein (3)

Aaron Copland (Harvard professor, 1945 Pulitzer prize winner, Director of League of Composers from 1948-1951, 1964 Presidential Medal of Freedom award winner, and much more) said that the “imaginative mind is essential to the creation of art in any medium,” which I would like to combine with another Einstein line: “The greatest scientists are artists as well.”

Music is the art of the imagination, it expresses our inner lives from which we derive meaning anywhere and everywhere else. Learning experiences can themselves become musical if we learn, by studying music and by studying those who study music (especially ourselves). Music is capable of saying more than word, because as logic, word is limited. Music is direct communication, and according to Columbia University physicist Brian Green: “At the heart of matter is music.”
So let’s teach through the heart.




1.) Einstein, Albert. Out of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed through His Own Words. New York: Wings, 1993.
2.) Miller, G. Tyler, and Scott Spoolman. Living in the Environment: Concepts, Connections, and Solutions. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole, 2009. Pg. 51
3.) Einstein, Albert. Einstein on Cosmic Religion: And Other Opinions and Aphorisms. Ed. Bernard Shaw. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009. Pg. 97

Mus(e)ic

Music and the practice of education are in effect one enterprise. One, however, is missing out on the tricks and treasures of the other.

In What Makes Music Great the discussion is about the opening notes of a song. They discuss how Gerschwin’s Rhapsody in Blue puts you right in the middle of the piece in 15 seconds. I would like to add that James Joyce, in his 1939 Finnegan’s Wake, incorporates a similar exposition by expressing the entire book in the first two paragraphs; arguably, the whole book in the first word. Richard Strauss’ performance of Don Juan “puts you right in the middle of that world [Don Juan’s]… again, in the first few seconds.” Of Copland’s Appalachian Spring: “It’s just a few simple notes, and you hear the sun rising… you’re right there.” Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30, Op. 109 takes the “audience on a journey that they were not prepared to take.” Music has this quality of experience to it, of conjuring images and stories in people’s minds. While other information mediums share this capacity, as demonstrated in Austin Osman Spare’s self-portrait, music bares a uniquely intimate relationship with human experience.

Dr. Hans Jenny demonstrated in the 1960s that different sound vibrations cause matter to arrange itself in particular morphologies. This phenomenon, the study of which is known as cymatics, is an empirical and visual example of the intimacy music has not only to human experience, but to the composition of atomic structures. Deciphered in this light, saying that one is “moved” by music is much more literal. The forms that music imposes upon matter are known as Chladni patterns, which could be considered as diagrams or maps of sound that are specific to the relationship between the material and the vibration. It is nothing new to say that music has equally traceable relationships to human experience, there’s just an alteration in the modes of interpreting. Although music has visual diagrams, music is far simpler to understand in the ways we describe our experience. As expressed earlier, and as per casual conversations, music is described as enacting or appointing an entire world on the stage of the theater in one’s mind.

Music is a means of extracting a world within the musician and exhibiting it in the world around them. Music in part is a means of communicating this internal experience, and even in transferring experience. For example, please bear with me in considering the Canadian avant-garde metal band Unexpect’s The Quantum Symphony. Whether or not you find a hook to catch, a note to taste, or a rhythm to bob to, you find yourself in an experience that could be described as discord, discomfort, or even as maddening. Despite any acquired means of interpretation, the music imparts a noticeable impact on one’s experience. I had the pleasure of contrasting The Quantum Symphony with the symphony of robins, wind, and automobiles in my backyard. I noticed that my chest became heavier and my heart rate rose while listening to Unexpect compared to the birds and the wind. The world of discord and hyperstylistic coagulations immediately takes effect on my experience, the song effectively acting as a means of not only communicating experience, but of transferring or sharing direct experience to some degree (based on how well I comprehend the sound).

This transfer of experience accounts for “hearing the sun rise,” as it was stated above. This is not a typical way of speaking about experience, yet it is readily understood when talking in terms of music. Such connection between sound and sight is typical when talking about music, yet it seems irrational to inquire as to what green smells like, or what pessimism tastes like. Boundaries exist between our senses, and these boundaries are expressed in our grammar. Yet, our grammar is limiting our senses. Consider Billy Collin’s Introduction to Poetry:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Thinking about poetry in this way, one is given a plethora of interrelating sensual information. Art is a means of creating and sharing subjective experience, but the definition and intensity of this experience has been restricted for one reason or another. Avant-garde, through juxtapositions and reassociations, is a means of exploiting this complacency or diminished threshold for interrelation. To borrow from my experience as a personal trainer, it is similar to the development of one’s muscular system. When one starts exercising there is a low tolerance for pain and a short capacity for endurance. Over time these both progress, but one’s pain tolerance and endurance capacity may plateau if the same exercises are repeated without variation; in other words, without shocking the system there is no progress or development – there is no life to the activity. The hook in a song works in a similar way. A hook, according to Monaco and Riordan, is “a musical or lyrical phrase that stands out and is easily remembered.” The hook is ‘a bit of music or words so compelling that it worms its way into one’s memory and won’t go away… A radio listener, passing by, so to speak, is caught or trapped by ‘a “catch” phrase or melody line’ and may become hooked in the addictive sense as a result of the hook’s memorability and recurrence.’ The hook’s attractiveness, its repetition, is powerless without its opposite: change. As a musical piece may become uninteresting by lack of change or by too much change, and as the muscular system plateaus in response to stasis, one’s sensual manifolds are susceptible to weathering and require calibration and attunements.

Claude Debussy once said that “music is the space between the notes.” That is, the arrangement of notes is what makes the music. Consider The Quantum Symphony again. Within this piece there are examples of a number of musical genres or styles, from classical and jazz to circus and folk music, but one would not categorize the song under any of these labels. This in fact is the problem for Avant-garde art: it is transdefinite. Avant-garde art, as exemplified in The Quantum Symphony, transcends or dissolves the linguistic boundaries between “forms” of art and experience. Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, and Merz all coincide in this matter – on purpose. The people behind this artwork recognize art's ability to rearrange the machinery of perception and, in a manner according to Isaac Newton’s 3rd law, reacted with equal and opposite force to the historical momentum of the conventional perception of art. The artists associated with these movements saw art as being so far pushed into this form and that form, so far removed from the sensual interrelations that defined their experience of art and reacted in equal force to rebalance the scales in the art and human community.

While basically any art form has the potential to calibrate and attune one’s perceptual boundaries, music stands out above the rest. Again, this is due to the intimacy shared between it and the structure which matter assumes. Music’s potential, power, or ability to incorporate aspects of the other senses demonstrates the potential that the human mind has for synesthetic understanding. Synesthesia is defined as a sensation “produced at a point other than or remote from the point of stimulation, as of a color from hearing a certain sound.” Synesthetes see their thoughts projected in three-dimensional space, they taste sounds, they hear light, they feel scent, and they smell emotion. While this sounds profound and even mystical, it is not; everyone experiences this transboundary interrelation, just with little if any notice. Take for instance the common phrase “I see what you mean.” This is used in conversations with no explicit visual aids, yet the expression still seems valid. Why? Because there is an implicit imagery that the individual perceives through what has been called the third eye: the pineal gland.

Writing is similarly a form of art, lost in academia due to its strict delineation between scientific prose and poetic verse. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche states: “A noble education has to include dancing in every form, being able to dance with your feet, with concepts, with words; do I still have to say that you need to be able to do it with a pen too – that you need to learn to write?” All forms of art are just that – forms, morphs, facades, surface ornamentation. The common cord beneath them is human experience; each is capable of evoking imagery, olfaction, taste, sound, tactile sensations, and all in relation to an undercurrent of emotion. There are many directions by which to approach teaching and by which to come to understanding; the typical approach to understanding and teaching human experience is by separating and categorizing objects of experience in their related sense domain.

Music subtly bridges these boundaries that we subconsciously impose within and between ourselves. If the practice of education may institute anything from the practice of music, be it the understanding that red is not just red – it is also the color of the swastika, that the swastika is not just a Nazi psychosocial device, but a Hindu visual instrument for self-transformation; be it the rudimentary focus on posture during practice; be it the ability to adapt to multiple modalities of expression (genre of music/points of view); be it the lively and energetic atmosphere (aura) generated by music. If education may learn anything from music, be it the relationship between form and funk; the way matter interacts with sound to manifest structure. If music is the space in between the notes, and notes are pitched sounds, then music is life; music is an encapsulated microcosm, reflective of the macrocosmic sphere of relationships around it. There is music in word, in gesture, in walking, in breathing; there is music in silence. Meaningful music is music which “moves” you not physically, but internally – emotionally; this may then transduce into kinesthetic resonance, or vice versa. Think about being told no when you want something, you are moved from an emotional state of anticipation to disappointment (physiologically, from bouncing up and down to crying and yelling) and your experience, your world, is altered in accord with that movement; just like my world was altered with the aural movements of The Quantum Symphony.

This capacity to regulate internal movements is rather simple to achieve. A simple suggestion may serve to influence someone's mental state and or the focus of attention. Saying something as simple and unintentional as “think of your toes”, automatically diverts some level of your awareness and energy to your toes. By a simple acoustic representation, an auditory reference to some thing, attention and energy have been diverted and your mind has been unwillingly influenced, remotely controlled. In this case the representation, the medium of reference, is pictorial symbolism - visual stimuli; psychoactive abstractions of thought. Is it any wonder, then, how music produces the powerful ‘hooks’ so definitive of “pop” music? It is because the content is arranged to do so. There is an inherent experience programmed right into the music – and I am not talking about subliminal messaging, but that multiple people may listen to Copland’s Appalachian Spring and independently experience similar imagery and storylines. Music as experience transfer. I sent the following poem to a friend a few weeks ago:

a shallow wind passing over the mountain
the tiger eyes the moon
blossoms billow...
beyond the mountain lay the village
where children laugh and play
where music and dance conjoin
together, the skies rain and the people sing
together, the tides shift and the sun beams

entirety, in consecrated thusness
veiled, or unveiled

the crane flies west
towards snowcapped peaks

a river flowing, cradling the stars
the tiger comes to drink

I wrote the poem immediately in response to her challenge for me to put into words a key I found in my basement. The conversation (through facebook) that immediately followed shows the transference:

Her: Carefully chosen, poetic words. I'm impressed, but why those words?
Me: That’s the key filtered through me. I didn’t really choose. I just observed. Could you see any imagery?
Her: Yeah I can. It's interesting.
Me: What is the color of the sky?
Her: I want to say, orange.
Me: Why do you want to say that? Say what it is, not what you want.
Her: I feel like it should be orange, but it's really dark blue.

In my mind, the color of the sky was dark blue. Everyone shares this capacity, but artists are more readily capable of applying and adapting it. I myself am an instructor in the martial arts Jeet Kune Do and Qi Gong, my friend is an aspiring actress and vocalist. The factors that play into the sharing of experience are the projecting artist’s capacity to render and share a coherent virtual reality in their own mind in relation to the screening artist’s ability to suspend their want and thereby to see, not look; to see both their want and the thing itself in perspective of where each belongs. To share experience like this is essentially to dissolve a boundary between minds, a function that spoken language has played since the utterance of the first word.

We experience not in 3 dimensions, but in 5: sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing. The three-dimensional model of length, width, and depth are particular to sight; sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami are particular to taste; pressure, vibrations, texture, temperature, and spatial relations are particular to touch; odors and fragrances, particular to smell; and amplitude, frequency, and cadence are particular to sound. We experience meaning when there is a connection made between these boundaries, like connecting a word with a concept, or a concept like engineering with the activity of constructing. Education is about the development of the synesthetic mind, the human being integrated in their capacity to interpret and alter their experience and their environment. Educators may do this by first studying their own music; that is, listening to the beat they play on the instrument of their history. Vivian Paley provides an example: "apparently I needed classroom after classroom of young children demanding to be heard before I could identify my own voice and imagine my own questions."