As an academic institution, there’s no way we can get away from some degree of conformity, especially if the material being covered is hands-on. Students have to be in class on time or they miss the intention of the class and distract other students when they get there. Teachers have to keep attendance records so that the Department of Education feels OK about the loans and grants they give to help with tuition and so on and so on. There are ways, as mentioned in the last entry, to use the imposed structure as the springboard into the inquiry experience and the beginnings of self-empowerment. I used the metaphor of how a flute provides the structure for wind to become music when you blow on it. Let’s look at a couple of examples of how conformity events can actually be converted to inquiry events with a little creativity.

Upon application to our school students are required (by the state) to submit a biographical sketch in order to provide information about who they are, a description that might be relevant to the process of deciding whether or not they would be an acceptable candidate for attending our program. Since we have an open enrollment policy, questions that would affect a candidate’s actual acceptability, i.e. mental health or criminal history, are asked elsewhere in a direct manner, so the sketch really fits the classic definition of a conformity event. We’ve tried to convert this into an inquiry event by asking them to address their intentions, expectations, strengths, weak points, etc. We also ask individuals  to describe themselves as they believe someone else might see them. To write the sketch, the inquiry process at least has to begin. How much a student puts into it is really up to them but we have begun the process of providing a space for the student to question and learn about themselves.

Another example is the test taking procedure. We have to conform to the necessity of testing our students. It’s a state requirement, but a test can be a hoop to jump through and prove you have conformed in the way desired, or it can be something that helps clarify and focus the material in such a way that understanding is more probable or at least possible. We may take the test in class or at home. It may done with books open or closed. The students may be expected to help each other for a particular test or part of a test. We then go over and grade the test in class.  Each student grades their own test. This gives the student the opportunity to become clear about which areas need more attention, and if a student doesn’t do as well as they think they should they have the opportunity to take the test or something like it again.

I could go on, but the general idea is, when possible we take conformity events and convert them into inquiry events where the students change the rules of the game and begin to set their own standards and learn about themselves.

Another thing we can do to create a space where self-awareness becomes possible, is to set up exercises where little epiphanies or realizations happen. It’s like participating in a certain type of musical event or experiencing a piece of art that has the potency of a transcendent effect where the world stops and you stop existing as a fragment and come into the reality of relationship. The course doesn’t stop with the mechanical skills to apply different types of massage or the anatomical background for those skills. What is really going on is the possibility of self awareness in the context of touch. Massage is elevated to a relationship-based art form. I hope to continue in the next entry to show how, when offered with this intention, touch can be not only a tool for personal growth but a powerful force to change how we relate to the world in a much needed way.

I think if anything got me into this thing (my relationship to the Florida School of Massage), educational philosophy was it. There are a couple of stories and some coincidences and a little bit of discussion and the rest is just history. I was taking a course over at the university (UF) that I think was titled “Theory and Practice of Learning and Instruction”. I’m sure it was mandatory if you wanted to get an advanced degree in education, which I was starting to feel iffy about. The professor was an old guy from Yale with a thick New England accent and I really liked him, so there I was. The text was written by a guy from FSU who’s name was something like Gagne. Even though the text was pretty boring, what he did was great. He took a lot of stuff from cognitive psychology (how the brain processes information) and applied it to educational theory. We had to write a review of the literature research paper for the course, and I remember discovering John Dewey at a level that went way deeper than the ‘Dewey Decimal System’.  He is the same guy though.

Two other things were going on at the same time that felt somewhat coincidental. The first was, I was being offered a job teaching Anatomy and Physiology for the second time at the Florida School of Massage. I had a pretty good A&P background from undergraduate school and the current director and the A&P instructor where not getting along for the second time in as many years.

The second thing that was going on was that I was being profoundly influenced by a book called “Education and the Meaning of Life” by an Indian philosopher named Krishnamurti. When Krishnamurti was asked what he thought about human social evolution, he said there wasn’t any such thing and hadn’t been for at least as long as human history had been recorded. He railed about totalitarian governments and bureaucracies based on hierarchic exploitation as well as businesses that impose themselves on the people that work for them. I’m paraphrasing here, but I think you’ll be able to get the general idea. He then laid the lack of social evolution squarely on our educational systems and made a pretty good case for the idea that the only social change that could come from an educational system based on blind conformity could only happen if we would just destroy ourselves and get it over with.

Back in the class we were having a look at testing instruments, the devices we use to assess progress in our students. When we got to the ‘bell curve’, grades are based on a kind of competition with other students. The result is that a small percentage fail, a few excel and the majority land in the mediocre middle. Since this is all rather arbitrary because it really doesn’t have a lot to do with what you actually have learned, the  system encourages dishonest and unscrupulous behavior to get ahead. It didn’t take much of a leap to get back to Krishnamurti ranting about the educational system and the lack of human social evolution. I asked the professor why, given the assumption that our charter was to educate and enlighten, did we use such a testing instrument. He informed me in that thick New England accent that I had gotten the charter wrong. I’ll spare you the details but I found out that what we were really doing was preparing people to function in a system where a few people failed, a few excelled and most lived out their lives in the mediocre middle. More than a little alarmed that what I was doing in school was not preparing me for what I wanted to do with my life, I took the teaching job at FSM with full blessings and encouragement from my professor.

Krishnamurti’s rationale for the blame he placed on education was this: Most education is about preparing myself to conform to someone else’s standards in order to get ahead instead of evolving my own personal standards to live my life as a genuine person.  I found myself asking how a school can empower someone to be a genuine person when the school itself has a whole array of stuff that it has to conform to in order to just exist? What I came up with is what follows.

The word I like to use for the opposite of conformity is inquiry. Instead of trying to memorize and conform to somebody’s idea of how something is or what it is, I try to come to my own understanding of the thing. This is probably because I’m not very good at memorizing and I have a known problem with conformity. To understand something, I have to go through an inquiry process. I have to have a dialogue with myself to get at the meaning of the thing that I’m grappling with. Then to keep an open mind, I have to be willing to let it go and and start the process over again. Without an open mind, I might find myself trapped in an unchanging representation of the thing I’m questioning. This is a form of stupidity in that I’m no longer able to respond accurately to what  is really happening.

At any rate conformity is really not education. When you can’t get rid of it you have to find a way to use it as the springboard into the inquiry process in much the same way that the structure of a flute makes music out of the wind blowing.

I guess there’s going to have to be a part 2 to the entry on Educational Philosophy. In Part 2 I’d like to return to the structures that bring us to those ecstatic transcendental moments when we discover who we really are and live life to its fullest. This will eventually lead back to why poets and artists need to be in charge and how our inner poets and artists need to direct the course of our lives.

What we’re doing at the Florida School of Massage began with asking ourselves how we could have the greatest impact on life from the perspective that life on earth is an organismic experience based on symbiosis and co-operation. We had some experience with business management, we had some experience in education and we were continuing a lineage of expertise in the field of massage.

While a lot of our experience in business and education provided the ground for operating a school, a lot of it really gave us a pretty good idea of what we didn’t want to do. I also felt that something was missing in the approach that most people were taking in the practice of massage.  What was bothering me had to do with our old friend fragmentation.  At any rate, what the Florida School of Massage has to do with everything we’ve been talking about comes down to approximately three categories:

Business, Educational Philosophy, and the Practice of Massage.

A treatise probably could and should be written on each but for now I’ll try to keep it to the level of a practical introduction.  I’ll start with business.

Business

I was the speaker at one our graduation ceremonies 15 or 20 years ago and it was about an hour before the ceremony and I hadn’t a clue what I was going to talk about when I found out one of the staff had borrowed the P. A. speaker wires and they were locked up in a storage shed across town and the key was unobtainable. The first thing I did was calm down and then I tried to locate some cables. Jeff Sims at Sims music had some cables but there was no way to get them to us so fast. Instead of trying to find someone to drive across town and back in 45 minutes I just got in my car and went. I turned on PBS and FreshAire was doing an interview on some kind of new business ethic guy. The expert being interviewed was explaining how it was no longer possible to follow your dreams and love what you do for a job. In corporate America you had to get tough and assert your boundaries clearly and under no circumstances mix what you loved doing with how you made a living. In fact this was not at all desirable. You should have two lives and make sure that your work life was the there to clearly support your other ‘real’ life and…and… and… I got really angry and thought the guy was a crock and then I knew what I was going to speak about. Life works if you let it.

I love my job and I could be wrong but I think most of the people I work with love their jobs too. That’s why some of us have worked in the same place for 20 years or more.

There are three ways I think we could use the business model more effectively as a way to live more as a part of the greater organism. Actually, there are at least three ways, and probably a whole lot more, but I’m going to try to stick to three. Well I won’t be too rigid about trying.

Most businesses run under the profit motif. There’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself. You have to make money to stay in business and you have to make enough so that you have a cushion to fall back on when times get lean. The problem is when you’re making money just for the sake of making money, primarily for the benefit of those people that have stock in the business. Again, there’s really nothing wrong with this, it’s just a matter of degree. A small community can make a living from a small business. If the intention is to empower the whole community, then the whole community is motivated by the better life they can lead. Every one at the school is a massage therapist. That means they could actually make enough to get food on the table just doing massage. There doesn’t have to be a dependency relationship between the business and the employee because I have the freedom to choose how much I work and what kind of work it is and this is constantly changing. It’s not unusual for someone to teach, do administrative work, go to a promotional event like a music festival and on and on all in the same day. We can love how we make a living as much as anything else we do. And I can take six months to have a baby if I want to.

That thing about being a massage therapist means we are economically empowered to do whatever we do on our own terms, and we do. Sometimes it’s a headache for people trying to manage things but mostly it’s a joy. And we can use the business as a springboard to support ourselves in a myriad of ways like promoting our individual businesses. It’s the same way we use conformity events in the educational model as the structural springboard setting our own standards and living our life on our own terms.

Management works the same way. I like to call what we do management from the bottom up. The person who does a particular job should know more about that job than the next person up on the supervisory chain. This doesn’t mean there’s not a hierarchy nor that people don’t have specific jobs for which they are responsible. It just means that a person in a supervisory capacity is informed by the person they are supervising, not the other way around. If the intention is toward the greater good, this turns into a consensus based on relationship and caring.

The third thing is that students get the opportunity to experience working with this kind of community work ethos and take it out into the world with them when they start their own businesses. Buckminster Fuller, the guy who invented the geodesic dome, said if you want to make big changes you do it first on a small level and then as long as you don’t limit the flow of information it’ll get copied on a larger scale. Incidentally, you should theoretically also reap the benefits of your own ideas for the better changes they make in the world.

 So … The main thing we do is teach people how to do massage. We give people the tools that empower them to live on their own terms. They do that in the context of empowering their clients to fix themselves and everybody gets empowered to do what they love for a living by doing what they love. It’s a conspiracy. Speaking of which there’s more to come on our favorite band and transpersonal psychology Czech style. It all fits.

By the way it was a great graduation ceremony.

I can see that if I spend this much time on the educational philosophy or the practice of massage at FSM and then roll the whole thing into some sort of summary statement, I’m going to have a couple of disproportionately long entries. There’s probably more to say about each of these other subjects, and I won’t even have gotten to Prague and the scars of Eastern European style communism and why artists and playwrights should be the leaders of countries. Now there’s a run-on thought for you and it’s a pretty sure thing that it ends with more on that later…

I’ve lied again. I said I would move this thing along to the role of the Florida School of Massage in the overall scheme of things and I’m not going todo it.  Forty-two years ago to this day, Josie and I formally committed ourselves to be married. We did it so that her mother would allow us to attend a rock festival in Canada called ‘Strawberry Fields’. The deal was that we told Josie’s mom that it didn’t matter if we were married because we loved each other. She got us to say that it didn’t matter and then in a rather conniving manner got us to commit to doing it for her on the grounds that it didn’t matter to us. We got married by a stream behind the Unitarian church with just my parents and Josie’s parents and her grandmother. Our first night found us in Niagara Falls. Truth is actually stranger than fiction. The festival was amazing. I won’t go into the details but we were treated like royalty – the mounted police dropped roses on the crowd – and the most auspicious beginning began.

We were just watching an adventure of Robin Hood to celebrate our anniversary. The episode  was called ‘The Fire’. In this episode the sheriff and Robin actually fought together to keep the forest from burning. It reminded me of a meditation we got from the Dalai Lama back in 1992. We were at a retreat that had to do with the sixth chapter of Shantideva’s classic work on ‘The Bodhisattva’s Way of Life’. The whole week was devoted to the use of patience as an antidote for anger. I won’t go through the entire meditation but at one point you see your enemy as your ally. You imagine a situation where this most despicable of enemy’s might be your ally, where some common cause brought out your mutual strengths and commonalities. In this situation you see your enemy as a friend who’s strengths support you in a common cause.

Robin and the sheriff certainly were an unlikely alliance, but given the circumstances they had no choice. Given the circumstances at hand today on a global level, we have no choice but we must begin by seeing each other’s strengths as our own.

That, of course, brings us back to fragmentation. We’ve got to get past this thing where we see ourselves as separate parts. It is happening, and there is momentum in the direction of cooperation and compromise. The recent supreme court decision on health care is movement in the direction of symbiosis. You can find all the many ways that we fail if you look. You can also find some hope for a better tomorrow. If you’re not willing to look for it, you won’t find it.

We were at an empowerment that His Holiness was conducting just before one of our thirty something  anniversaries. We had front row seats for an event at a stadium in Toronto that we were sponsoring. Some one asked the Dalai Lama how he was able to maintain his overwhelming impression of joy in spite of how much worse the world was from day to day. His Holiness sat back and organized his thoughts and then responded. He said, ” Actually I disagree with you. The world is a better place than it was fifty years ago”. He then gave a litany of examples of how the world is a better place and how there is a great possibility that we will be able to come through the current crisis. Examples ranged from television being a good thing because it brings the reality of war into our living rooms, to the fact that a hundred years ago people were so environmentally unconscious that they would shoot another species into extinction for sport.

The world is a better place, and though it is challenging, we need to see each other as a part of the same organism that we are – as allies who’s strengths are our own. It’s our 42nd anniversary of being coerced into love’s formality in marriage.. 42 is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. More on that later. . .

A few posts back, we explored how the brain, or at least the thinking part of the human brain, gets wired from birth by a combination of a genetic wiring diagram coming into contact with environmental stimuli. If you take away the environmental stimuli, the wiring doesn’t happen. We know this is true because of the case of “Genie”, a girl who was kept in a dark room strapped to a potty for the first 13 years of her life. Her brain was irreparably damaged by sensory deprivation during the critical time when the wiring process should have been happening. We used to think that the wiring stopped at some point. However, recent acknowledgement of studies with recovering brain injury victims and a host of other pathological situations, indicate that this process continues throughout a persons life. Moshe Feldenkrais postulated that this was the case over forty years ago and based much of his movement therapy on this belief. The first few years are, nevertheless, critical to overall neurological development. The reverse of Genie’s situation is also true. Children with large parts of their brains missing, can rewire their brains and function beyond medical expectations when given the right learning opportunities . Elizabeth, who was working with Feldenkrais at the time of his death, was diagnosed with global brain damage as an infant. After Feldenkrais’ death she continued working with Anat Baniel and today in her thirties, she is married, has two graduate degrees and plays the violin.

So, where are we? That depends to a great extent on how you see and experience the world. If you live in a fragmented world, you experience yourself as a separate entity that has recently been born and will soon die. Your experience of the world is based on preconceived static unrealities that have been passed down from the beginnings of thought as we know it. If you experience yourself as a part of the planetary organism, then you will find that rather than a static bit that stops and starts, you are an integral part of a radical change in the planetary wiring mechanism. This change is comparable to what happens when the human brain reaches a significant point in the learning process that takes it to a new level of functioning. The political and economic shift to a paradigm based on the free flow of information is perhaps unparalleled in all human experience. In the next post, we’ll look at the Florida School of Massage as a model for small business and education. We will examine how fragmented thought can be transformed by personal empowerment at multiple levels. This is really just the beginning.

 I just made a post this morning and already someone has asked me to clarify the inclusion of a snap shot of me. I intentionally made it look dated with a frame that reinforced the idea that it was a snap shot. Fragmentation is like taking a snap shot of someone and not letting it change. I’m not just talking about how a person looks. This includes how they think, feel, and relate to the world in a myriad of ways. The snap shot of me is a perfect example of fragmentation, because no matter how much I or anybody else clings to the image in that picture as me, I am no more that person today than I am Nikita Kruschev or the hundredth monkey. I have changed, and changed again, and every time I wake up I am a different person. To accept life whole, is to accept that everything is continually changing. Even my most profound memories change in some slight way every time I revisit them and reorganize them into whatever my current belief system is. So much for the snap shot.

 As for the hundredth monkey, someone sent me a reply expressing the disappointment they felt about the fraud that took place in the reporting of the hundredth monkey research. They then suggested some sources for me to check out that might convince me that the phenomenon was real. I want to make it clear, I never said that the hundredth monkey phenomenon wasn’t real. I’m sure that once something becomes known to a certain critical extent, knowledge of the thing increases at an exponentially accelerated rate. I don’t know how, but I’m almost positive you could work it out with a statistical proof. I really don’t need to be convinced. My point was actually that falsified research discredits what might be perfectly good ideas, particularly if those ideas are anywhere near the edge of our collective understanding.

One more thing I’d like to say is something about the process of writing a blog. It’s been a lot more fun than I thought it would be and it’s taken a lot more time than I thought it would take. I haven’t made a post for a while for reasons that mostly have to do with time but I still intend to make a few more points  about the philosophical basis for the Florida School of Massage.  I’ve gotten quite a few questions about the process of writing a blog that I’m not really qualified to answer. I’ve had a lot of help from people that know what they’re doing.  Questions I can answer, are those about the subject matter, especially if they are in English. By the way please make your comments in English. Translation is also not one of my strong spots.  The last thing I want to say is thanks for all of the kindness and support I’ve gotten.  That’s all that really matters.

It works something like this. I injure a joint and immediately contract all the muscles that cross that joint to stabilize and protect it. This much is an intelligent, in the moment and useful response to the situation. What follows is not. This is where the fragmentation comes in. I take a mental picture of what was going on in the joint at the time of the injury then I freeze it. I solidify it. I treat my injury as if it is a solid thing that doesn’t change and limit my responses to the situation to those that are within the range of not changing and for that reason I limit the possibility of change. In this case the healing of the joint is limited or actually interfered with by the way I hold and protect it. It’s possible to maintain a “bum” shoulder or a “bad” ankle for the rest of your life.

This process is bad enough when applied to a body process like allowing an injury to heal but when it is applied to other people as groups or individuals we step out of relationship and doom ourselves  to a seemingly unchanging illusionary experience of reality. We live in a world where the information necessary for problem solving, growth, and a fully empowered experience is limited to what we don’t know already. Bad tidings for the future. Bad experience of the present. Bad. Bad. Wrong magazine subscription.

It works the same way with people as it does with shoulder injuries. Somebody says something that hurts my feelings or pisses me off. In all likelihood it wasn’t even their intention to cause hurt but even if it was I’m going to label them. Now this person is a jerk and I’m going to ignore any information to the contrary which precludes the possibility  of working together or being in any kind of real relationship.

When the process is expanded from individuals to groups of people it becomes even more dangerous. Ethnic, religious, political and all manner of other group identities become static shadows of real people and it doesn’t matter if I’m Identifying someone else with a false label or myself. It doesn’t even matter if the group in question gets a good approval rating or not. It’s just as unreal and just as limiting in terms of the exchange of information and communication.

I’m going to make a big leap here and it’s not the kind of thing you can back up with data. At least I don’t have the data and I can’t think what it would be but it does seem logical in the light of the last couple posts. I was at a Grateful Dead concert once and deeply under the influence of the sound man’s electronic spell when I had what I thought to be a profound revalation about the name of the band. I’d heard that it was inspired by one of the headings in a collection of folk ballads that referenced the “Grateful Dead” in the title. I got a copy of “Child’s Ballads” which is where it was supposed to have come from but I never could find it. Anyway, it occurred to me that if you took the name quite literally and in light of one of the group’s comments about playing as a single entity of which each member was a part, that the name could be related to what it might be like to live life in an un-fragmented mode, where every moment is the present and no one is clinging to a static picture of their self or of any one else. What happens when we let go of who we think we are based on past and future fictions and move completely into the present, into what T.S. Elliot referred to as “a condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything”?  In their video series on “the transformation of man”, I am also reminded of Indian philosopherJ. Krishnamurti asking the western psychiatrist David Schoenburg if there was anything stopping him from making such a change and coming completely into relationship in the moment.

The leap I’m making is in proposing that such a shift would indeed be a radical transformation but only necessary if the magazine we subscribe to is the one where humanity remains a part of the picture. More on that later. We’re getting close. I promise.

The second thing going on is the information revolution. Never before has the flow of information accelerated at the rate at which it’s happening today. The wiring of the internet is like the wiring of a planetary cerebral cortex impeded only by those that don’t yet realize what they’re in the middle of. The consequences of this chain of reactions is almost as hard to imagine as the catastrophe of the environmental conditions we could be setting off, but it sure is a future that’s a lot more fun to let the imagination loose on.

So here’s what the dramatic transformation boils down to: Either we get it together or we don’t.  We can create an environmental/economic scenario that we cannot continue as a species.  Or, we could use the unstoppable flow of information at our disposal to collectively co-create something that could eliminate suffering itself.

I like to think of these choices like magazine subscriptions.  I think it’s clear which magazine is which. The question is, which one are you going to subscribe to.  Where we put our time and attention will determine our future, but either way it looks like a pretty big transition is underway.

I’m not really interested in magazine number one. I’d like to use this blog to explore ways that we can actually pull off the transformation in the second scenario, magazine two. For instance, how do we make a collective decision without becoming a totalitarian government? Where does art and individual freedom fit into the scenario, and why are they necessary? How do we return from the fragmented version of human interaction that most of us live in, to human interaction based on kindness and relationship?

And on, and on, and on . . .

PD

Everybody that works at the school is a massage therapist. Whether we teach, do administrative work or set the rooms up in the morning, we all do massage. And most of us “found ourselves” during our experience of attending massage school. We don’t work at the school because we have to, we work there because we get to. I like to say we live in abundance but close to the line and that feels like a good place to be.

When I became the caretaker for the Florida School of Massage in 1987, there were three things I wanted to see if we could pull off. First, I wanted to continue to base the educational model on inquiry into one’s own experience rather than conformity to someone else’s standards.  Second, I wanted to invent an anatomy training based on the interface between consciousness and matter, rather than as a training program for the health care system. There are lots of great texts that are already do this quite well.  Lastly, I wanted to see if we could use FSM as a vehicle for creating the kind of transformation that will enable us to continue as a species. I’m interested in what we are at lots of levels: individual, organismic and among other things, magic. As Wavy Gravy said, “It’s all done with people folks, the mirror told me so this morning.”

In the next post I hope to explore what I see as a necessary transformation in human consciousness. The transformation is a forgone conclusion as I see it. In fact, It’s already happening and we’ve already started discussing what it’s about. Whether humanity gets to participate in the next part of the planetary adventure is the big question. I hope to find some clues as we continue.

More on that later…

PD