Hullo Billy,
Good to hear from you again. I share many of your views, including
"In my opinion, however, words tend to satisfy the intellect too quickly,
making us only "think" we understand. I have always felt that real learning
takes place in my body, not in my head."
My training as a Gestalt therapist has given me huge respect for the organic
nature of learning. Indeed, it was Wilber's No Boundary that helped me to
understand more clearly what I had intuitively found in Gestalt, which is
the reintegration of the body through the use of experiential experiments in
therapy.
Like you, I have had a background in education, and I agree that the best
learning occurs when I
"stop 'teaching' and start creating situations in which they could discover
things for themselves."
Pain and suffering are of course one of the main reasons people do the work
on themselves, but I am also very interested in those people who do
innovative and creative things not just as a reaction to negatives in their
lives. Robert Fritz has written a couple of interesting books on what drives
such creativity, and while I have some major concerns with his final
approach (which I find find very driven - no time to stop and smell the
roses) I admire much of his thinking.
The part of education that interests me is the lure of quality. This is the
carrot that gets me involved, rather than the stick of my painful awareness
that I need to move. And while pain can be a great stimulus to action, it is
no guarantee that my action will actually improve anything. Whereas the lure
is a pull in a very specific direction, and if Pirsig is right, and we
really do know quality when we see it, that is a big help. A good educator,
then, is aware of the level of development of the person he is educating,
and so can point towards those things which may just 'hook' the pupil into
self discovery and new growth.
I am not quite sure I follow you in your comments about the elimination of
variables. As I understand it, scientists do indeed eliminate as many
variables as possible from an experimental design to improve the chances of
finding a strong correlation between the variables they introduce and the
outcomes they measure. But in dreaming up an experiment, it is the lure of a
high quality experiment that operates to guide their choices. Pirsig was
wrong to suggest that we can only attend to what has quality for us, at
least in the direct sense of those words, since science deals with data that
has very low quality in itself. The quality comes in when the scientist is
clarifying the issue and designing the experiment(s) to test his hypothesis.
The data collection is merely a chore to provide evidence for or against his
hypothesis.
In ordinary life, as opposed to the highly structured activity of performing
experiments, the quality is what causes 'variables' to emerge. It is not
that we choose in a vacuum which variables we shall include and which we
shall ignore, but rather that those variables with quality emerge in our
awareness. Sure, there may be a variety of values that lure us towards
different variables, and those values may be competing. Here Pirsig's ideas
are useful to allow us to explore which values are at a higher level. Robert
Fritz does this in a more organised way.
Of course it is not always so simple. As a therapist, I work with people who
consistently choose low quality outcomes, possibly because in childhood they
were forced into patterns of behaviour that ignored their instinctive needs.
Now, as adults, they continue to make these programmed choices and fail to
contact those needs that still exist. My Gestalt work consists in
identifying the bodily clues to the suppressed needs, and assisting the
client to experiment with those, enabling them to reconnect with the wisdom
of their organism.
One of Pirsig's big blind spots, in my opinion, (understandable given his
treatment by the psychiatric establishment), was his unwillingness to deal
with the issue of neurosis. Neurosis is, almost by definition, choosing what
is of lower value for us. It flatly contradicts his assumption that we all
know quality when we see it. In many important respects, many of us don't.
That is one reason why personal development is so difficult. And why
teachers and therapists can be hugely helpful, if they are capable of
assisting us to contact the more valuable paths on offer.
Regards,
John B
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