Site blog: Gaia University E-Learning

Introduction to Alcohol Fuel at Naropa University

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 00:25:48 GMT

by tODD jONEs.

Alcohol Fuel - Overcoming Oil Addiction, Creating Clean Renewable Fuels, and Reversing Global Warming

by Todd W. Jones, M.A. Environmental Leadership
Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado
November 8, 6pm - 9pm

Peak Oil is upon us! Yet as a species, humans are addicted to poisonous petroleum products. In the cataclysmic aftermath of the oil geyser on the ocean floor of the Gulf of Mexico, it is up to us to make a change now.
The time has come to overcome the oil addiction. Like any addiction, the old unhealthy habits must be replaced by positive new patterns of behavior. We must reduce our dependence on oil and move to clean and renewable alternatives.
The way to survive Peak Oil in style is to grow plants for food and fuel. Using permaculture techniques to produce alcohol fuel locally, we can grow organic food, create jobs in the community, become energy independent, and make fossil fuels obsolete!
By growing plants intelligently, we can produce more food on less land and produce cheap and abundant plant based substitute for gasoline. In this way, we can sequester up to 11 times more carbon from the atmosphere than is released by burning the fuel! Yes, we can drive the same vehicles we own right now, produce less emissions, and even begin to reverse global warming by increasing our use of ethanol and reducing our use of gasoline.

Based on his studies with Ecologist, Permaculturist, and Distillation Expert, David Blume, (http://www.permaculture.com) Todd W. Jones, M.A. Environmental Leadership, will offer an exciting and eye-opening presentation about how to use plant matter and waste products to create clean and renewable fuel for our vehicles.
Learn the simple chemistry behind how plants store solar energy as sugars, starches, and cellulose and how this energy can be unlocked and distilled into alcohol - a clean, renewable, high-octane fuel that can be used to fuel vehicles, provide heat for homes, produce electricity, and much more!
Did you know... ?
that driving your car on 100% alcohol produces 98% less exhaust emissions?
that running your vehicle on alcohol actually cleans and extends the life of your engine?
that your car and all modern gasoline powered cars can run on at least 50% alcohol with NO modifications?
that you can purchase a flex fuel conversion kit and install it on your car to run alcohol, gasoline, or any mix of the two - for only a few hundred dollars?
that there are over 2000 E85 stations in the USA?
If you didn't know, don't feel discouraged - information about ethanol fuels has been withheld from the public, distorted and villified in the media. Learn what the Big Oil companies (and Monsanto) don't want you to know - a simple technology that they have been paying billions of dollars in propaganda and advertising campaigns to suppress... but now the time has come to raise awareness and make a powerful meaningful change.

"There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
-Victor Hugo

2010 Colorado Permaculture Convergence

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 23:57:39 GMT

by tODD jONEs.

Sunday, August 22
63rd Street Farm
Boulder, Colorado

See attached PDF for more info ->

NOTE: I will be offering an afternoon breakout session on Alcohol Fuel:

"Learn how to use Permaculture principles to produce inexpensive, clean, renewable alcohol fuel that you can run in your car right now. Learn how to synergize growing organic food and producing plant-based fuel to reduce dependence on poisonous petroleum products and raise awareness of the ecological, ethical, and sustainable alcohol fuel alternative.

Todd W. Jones teaches mycology, mushroom cultivation, and MycoRestoration as part of Permaculture Design Courses along the Colorado Front Range as well as working to raise awareness of the emerging Alcohol Fuel Revolution. "

The Chi of Wing Chun Kung Fu

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:17:57 GMT

by tODD jONEs.

The Chi of Wing Chun Kung Fu
led by Sifu Stephen Joffe

Syzygy Community House
August 28, 2010
9am - 5pm

See attached PDF for more info

Mushroom Cultivation and MycoRestoration Seminar

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 01:56:48 GMT

by tODD jONEs.

Syzygy Community House
September 19, 2010

http://www.syzygyhouse.com/events/mycorestoration2010.jpg

See link or attachment below for more info

PaLS a permaculture park adjacent to the ecovillage Lebensgarten Steyerberg

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:58:59 GMT

by Declan Kennedy.

Permaculture Park at Lebensgarten Steyerberg - PaLS - is a practical application of permaculture design principles on a piece of land, zoned by the county’s planning authorities for farming, immediately west of the rows of houses where most of the members of Lebensgarten eco-village live. PaLS is a research and demonstration project that will add to the food security of the community. To show guests and friends from our bio-region, it is hoped what can be done with very sandy soil through new methods of organic soil improvement, e.g. composting, use and multiplication of effective micro-organisms, re-mineralization, worm-production, mulching, Terra Preta, etc.. The original plot is 5.2 hectares (approx. 13 acres).

The relatively dense settlement which is now Lebensgarten was built in 1939 and now been converted into an eco-village over the last 25 years. These row houses have each got a tiny garden. These are seen to be Zone 1 and 2 as defined in the permaculture system. Zone 2 will also be along the east side of the new plot where 20 out of 100 members have committed to and have been working in 2009 with organic and permaculture methods to augment their food supply. Furthermore, a professional gardening couple from the nearby village of Steyerberg and a French farmer with 15 years of experience in the mountains near Lyon have taken larger plots of 500 sqm. and 5000 sqm., respectively, for polycultural vegetable production - mostly for sale - through our co-op shop in the community but also further afield to interested people in the region. This is seen as Zone 3 and is augmented with herbs, berries, bushes and fruit trees in curved stripes between the vegetable beds. Zone 4 will be mainly in the direction of a large forest garden to the North of the vegetable area. Further North, there is 2.8 hectares of woods, mainly pine and oaks, that rounds off the project with a Zone 5.

The projects started in Feb. 2009 and already in the summer and autumn we had bumper crops of vegetables, mainly because of the methods we are using but also because I had coved the whole 5.2 hectares with different types of green manure over the last 5 years and brought in tons of compost which were spread evenly over the open fields before any planting got going. These four people (the 2 gardeners, the farmer and I) are taking the focus for the design and the development. The other 17 amateurs (from the Latin: amore = to love), i.e. loving gardeners are the projects willing workers when the needs is there for elements that support their preoccupation but do not belong to their 'allotments'. Hedges, swales, ponds and buildings belong to this communal part of the project. We have done a tailor-made Permaculture course for all participants over the winter months of 2009/10. Lebensgarten has 4 recognized Permaculture Designers who act as PDC teachers all over Germany and Europe over the past years but had never done an internal course for the members of Lebensgarten.

We are planning energy-plus buildings - but only farm buildings - as the plot is not zoned for housing by the county of Nienburg/Weser. To change this would cause huge expenses. This type of development was seen as not necessary and is not really desired by more than half of our eco-village members. They want the open, productive countryside immediately beside the dense housing area.

The first building will house a mixture between vegetable preparation and storage spaces with a lean-to chicken-heated greenhouse mainly to the South, an open roof for a mini-tractor and to cover the water pump, a humus toilet and solar shower, a potting shed, a potter’s workshop and possibly a shed for 2 donkeys. We envisage the roofs as a combination of glass and PV cells - to the South - and traditional roof-tiles of the region - to the North, but this could change as the design develops. Greenhouse walls to the South will be double-glazed, to the North mainly straw-bale construction with mud rendering. Other interior walls will be solid mud for heat-storage in the winter – and the floors will be mostly rammed-earth.

Our local planning laws allow a farmer to build on his land when he or she can prove that this is necessary for the production method. This could happen later, although at present nobody is willing to invest that much. However, this farmyard would be easy to argue from the permacultural point-of-view and might be the case in the future, as all four of the focus team are officially recognized as vegetable-farmers.

As the discussion is going, at present, out cash crop could be from an oil press and a cold press for fruit and vegetable juices (this would demand another two small rooms in our present building project). The next commercial presses are more than 70 kms. away - and it is not always guaranteed that you get back the juice from your fruits. Also we hope to be able to install the PV arrays, paying them off immediately through donations, and thereby have a regular income from selling electricity to the grid. This ‘surplus’ income will be used for all the amenities and elements that are not considered to generate income, such as park facilities.

The idea behind the design at present is that special attention is being paid to aesthetics so that the whole project is considered a feast for the eyes as well as being a productive contribution to the regeneration of Nature in this region.

Prof. Declan Kennedy

Tacit-to-Explicit-and-back for Liberation

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:06:07 GMT

by Patrick Gibbs.

I have Wept, now I may Think

1:26 a.m. - Tuesday, December 2, 2008

My RC class was from 7:00-9:30 this evening, and I had two great 6-minute client sessions, and during the second I wept as my heart broke for a friend. I am now thinking more clearly than I was before. Wonderful!

And now I've read parts of an essay that make me leap from my chair proclaiming the joyous truth and wonderful promise of the ideas therein!!

I am reading "Perspectives on Dialogue: Making talk developmental for individuals and organizations" by Nancy M. Dixon (1996, Center for Creative Leadership), and her language leads me to believe that she practices Re-evaluation Counseling (though she never mentions it in the essay). I have read the preface, the introduction, and the end of the final section of practical observations and dialogic practices in the workplace, and during that reading I have come to a few thoughts. Here's the first:

Tacit to Explicit and Back for Liberation:

Ethan Roland introduced me to the concept that there is tacit knowledge (practiced, unstructured, unconscious, undocumented) and explicit knowledge (spoken, written, consciously recognized). People learn tacit knowledge through experience, and they learn explicit knowledge through instruction, and perhaps through reflection on and evaluation of their experience.

Ethan told me that the article he read about tacit/explicit knowledge argued that the most important processes in this realm are the transformation of knowledge from tacit to explicit and from explicit to tacit (that means that tacit-to-tacit and explicit-to-explicit aren't as important). We both wondered "Why would that be the case? It makes sense, but we're not quite sure why it makes sense." Now, I am looking at a chart in the middle of this essay, and it says that Paolo Freire's purpose with dialogue is "To free groups and individuals from the tacit assumptions that keep them oppressed" (p. 27).

Ah ha!!

I connect this with an essay I read a year and a half ago (while studying sovereignty and democratization with advising from Alejandro Velasco at Hampshire College), "Emergent Publics: An essay about democracy and social movements" by Ian Angus. Angus wrote about the process of democracy as the process of new social movements constantly arising and speaking their truth and thus changing society's perception of reality -- in other words, the social movement is a group of people taking their tacit knowledge (their life experience) and making it explicit to the rest of society (usually with a demand that justice and humanity must be sought). And, to continue the cycle beyond what I remember Angus writing, I think that real change is achieved when the rest of society takes that newly-explicit knowledge and makes it tacit or (if that is not possible because I can never completely feel and know any experience but my own) begins to integrate the shared explicit knowledge into actions and thus builds new tacit knowledge that includes the explicit knowledge shared by the social movement. (Hurrah! Some sense, some meaning!)

Perhaps you wonder "When has that happened, eh?" Well, it's happened in me -- the many things I've learned about racism and the many times that people have shared with me about the effects of racism on them and me and us, and the many times that I've reflected on my experience and seen racism more clearly because of that reflection... all that explicit knowledge has lead me to new tacit knowledges, practiced knowledges, ways of interacting that I cannot completely explain in words yet others can sense when they interact with me (I have been told this a few times). And that, I suppose, is tacit knowledge, enacted knowledge, embodied knowledge. And that is transformation in me. (Now I carry on the cycle, here in these words and in other activities, by making my tacit knowledge explicit and sharing it along with the explicit knowledge that has been shared with me. Often I share that second-hand explicit knowledge with a first-hand explicit addition of "What this means to me, how I have re-shaped my life based on my understanding of this," and that personalization is what really touches many people. Perhaps by 'personalization' I mean 'creation of meaning' or 'meaning-making' -- I say 'perhaps' because I read those phrases and don't quite know what they mean.)

So, liberation necessitates the recognition and articulation of our tacit knowledge (personally, institutionally, and culturally), and our integration of the shared explicit knowledge of others into our tacit knowledge.

Whoa.

(...so... got you thinkin'?... write a blog post in response, and include a link back to this post... or write a forum post and link back to this... here's the link to get to this post: http://gel.gaiauniversity.org/blog/index.php?filtertype=site&filterselect=0&tagid=493)

Gaia U is a hacker... and related connections

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:43:57 GMT

by Patrick Gibbs.

080919

Sept 19, 2008, begun at 13:43

(Note: Moodle is not displaying the indentations properly, so some of the structure of my thought is not conveyed. I'll see if I can find a workaround.)

Yesterday I read the latter half of Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (1992, by Daniel Quinn), and this morning I read the preface and part of the first chapter of The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (1986, by Langdon Winner).

Winner writes about two things that I'll address here: 1) the fact that there was (at the time of his writing in 1986) no firm academic field of philosophy of technology, and 2) that, in mainstream thought, people are thought to be interested in either making or using technology, not both.

Quinn writes about the difference between Taker culture (those who know good and evil) and Leaver culture (those who live in the hands of the gods). Taker culture is focused on conquering and ruling the world so that when the gods send a drought, the humans can scoff at the will of the gods by using their technology to continue living -- and their technique is to kill off any beings or species that compete with humans for food, waging war on the entire community of life.

WHEREAS: Also, during the past week I have been part of an email conversation focused on switching the Gaia University E-Learning website (a.k.a. the GEL site) to a different software. Specifically, the most basic disagreement is that the software proposed by an associate is not licensed under a recognized free open source software license (Dolphin is under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, which Creative Commons itself dis-recommends for software licensing). As far as I know, Gaia University is committed to using only free/libre open source software (FLOSS). I am committed to it since I see that there are important positive effects on social systems and power relations when FLOSS is used instead of proprietary closed source software or something in between.

WHEREAS: I find it relevant to discuss the term hacker. From my readings, I've found that one of the most widely-accepted meanings of hacker in the early days was "someone who is very good at what they do," and there was an accompanying sense that a hacker is someone consistently engaged in action learning and consistently engaged in modifying their technology to meet their needs (this modification bit is very important). We can see this meaning of hacker used today in the Lifehacker.com website (and many other places).

So, it seems that this sort of hacker is engaged in both the making and the using of a technology (i.e. tool), bridging the making/using divide that Langdon Winner wrote about. This is one of the most important principles of FLOSS -- it is a community of users that work together to improve the tool that they all use. This is also the way action learning is implemented in Gaia University -- the learner reflects on past methods of learning and -- using that self-awareness and consciousness -- designs her next process of learning. In this way, the learning process is engaged in as a computer hacker engages in computing (i.e. with an eye towards reflective modification of the tool/learning process/computer program), and I can say that Gaia University associates (a.k.a. students) are hackers of the university world (or maybe Gaia University is a hacker institution).

Related thoughts are presented in The Art of Free Cooperation (2007, edited by Geert Lovink and Trebor Scholz), in an essay and chart by Howard Rheingold (editor of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog) entitled "Technologies of Cooperation." In the chart, in the space where "knowledge collectives" and "rules" intersect, Rheingold uses the title "from gatekeeping to content update and repair," and writes, "mutual monitoring: doing one's own work requires checking another's work; ease of repairing and updating the commons." Here I see the explicit unification of making and using, just as with FLOSS. Earlier I mentioned action learning as learning with consciousness and iterative design cycles, and here we see action working (for lack of a better term) as work that explicitly requires review and editing of another person's work.

Side note: Rheingold was also a participant in the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, known as the WELL, which is known as one of the first and longest-lasting virtual communities (started in 1985), and in 1998 he wrote The Heart of the WELL. The original servers that the WELL ran on were housed and maintained at The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee, USA, where Gaia University meets each fall.

As I mentioned, FLOSS succeeds and evolves in communities of maker/users. However, as FLOSS gains popularity among mainstream computer consumer/users, conflicts are arising, and some are calling it a crisis. The recent case of KDE 4.0 is often cited as a telling example, as in this article by Bruce Byfield http://www.linux.com/feature/141769 . The disconnect is that FLOSS is based on participation of all maker/users (even those who don't write software code participate in the project by testing software, filing bug reports, and helping other users, often in online forums), whereas proprietary software is based on consumers paying for a product and not maintaining any communication with the software engineers who created it. In the consumer model, some users find it necessary to act angry and indignant when software has a glitch, because they think that nice quiet people don't get good service. When KDE 4.0 was released, it was clearly labeled as a testing release with many bugs, but users new to the FLOSS system ignored those labels and started insulting the people that contribute to KDE.

So, what happens when I look at our educational systems through that lens? I see that in almost all schools (from pre-k through doctoral programs) learners are not asked to participate in the design of their institutions or give any feedback to their teachers, and (based on my thoughts and on conversations with teachers) a primary reason is that the learning processes are closed source in the sense that learners are not taught about the process of learning itself. When I don't know how learning works, and I've never been given the encouragement or techniques to reflect on how I learn, then I cannot give very meaningful feedback to my teachers.

Some schools are different. I don't know much about elementary schooling, though I've heard that Montessori methods and free school methods engage the learners in the learning process -- I'll say they use an open source, hacker mentality. My first college, Hampshire College, went halfway. I was asked to put together my learning pathway, and I had minimal support in learning how to craft my learning pathway. In courses, we were given evaluations to fill out at the end of each semester, giving feedback about the course and the professor. In a few courses, professors engaged students in creating the syllabus. In general, I found Hampshire to function from a background thought that making/usingmaker/users. is useful, but the college provided very little support for the process, and spent pretty much no energy to teach students how to act as

Gaia University has been a rather sincere application of hacker mentality to learning (and I think I'm the first to name it as such), and there is still much potential to realize and much to be learned by delving deeper into a hacker mentality. In my experience, I am receiving the support that I need to shift from a consumer/learner system to a designer/learner system. I also work for Gaia University as the GEL site steward (I use the term steward instead of the term administrator), and in that capacity I've helped Gaia U use FLOSS.

Who else is hacking learning? One project I just came across is the JW Foundation Book Program: Josh Waitzkin -- popularly known as the child chess prodigy portrayed in the film Searching for Bobby Fisher -- is now pushing for educational changes that help learners follow their passions , and has written a book entitled The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (2008) and started the JW Foundation to spread the ideas. The book program gives copies of the book to schools, non-profits, and community groups for free, and asks that in return, those readers send in a progress report after six months. This feedback from readers (especially readers who are applying the ideas in learning situations) will soon be used to create a free online learning space that explains the ideas in the book. (Also, they've set up a nifty financial loop: the JW Foundation purchases copies of the book, then the royalties from those purchases go to Josh Waitzkin, who then gives those royalties back to the JW Foundation.) Here's an excerpt from the JW Foundation website:

"If I have learned anything in a lifetime of world-class competition, it is that learners and performers thrive when their growth process is uniquely tailored to their own personal nuance of character. Teachers must listen first. Students should gain a keen introspective awareness of their natural strengths and weaknesses, and build a game, a career, a way of life around that awareness."

- http://www.jwfoundation.com/the_art_of_learning.html

Here I am reminded of a method that Ed Hallowell describes in Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most Out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder (2005): a five step process for promoting strengths: connection --> play --> practice --> mastery --> recognition (which renews connection, and the cycle begins again). From the little I've read about Waitzkin's philosophy, connection and play are huge pieces of it. And then there's the shirt that alpha lo created for Gaia University that says, "passion initiated, project based, process oriented, peer supported." Bam! Wow! This all points in the same direction!

So, how can can we use design processes to improve our lives while living in the hands of the gods? Another approach to the question is, How can we live in accordance with the peace-keeping law of limited competition? The latter question is somewhat answered for us: don't wage war. So now how do I interpret that?

In what practice does the human take only what the human needs and foster other life while doing so? Perhaps permaculture is a piece of it... I think that integrative eco-social design (IESD) is certainly a piece (permaculture is a field within IESD). I think that hacking is a design process... it's a way of approaching design. Maybe permaculture is ecosystem hacking?

Quinn's characters say that when we apply the peace-keeping law, then creation goes on forever (in the form of evolution through natural selection)... and they say that if we look around, we can see that other species are show signs of self-awareness, and if life on earth continues evolving then eventually many species will achieve self-awareness and intelligence. Looking at it this way, the characters arrive at the thought that human destiny is to learn from our mistake (arrogantly ignoring the gods and the peace-keeping law) so that creation goes on (instead of us destroying it) and so that other species may learn from our mistake as they evolve self-awareness, and eventually the garden of the world will be full of self-aware animals.

Quinn's characters say that Leavers pass on information about what works well for them (as humans wishing to thrive), whereas the Takers only pass on information about production. I see the Leavers as hackers of life, and the Takers as people who firmly separate making from using, production from consumption, consumption from the consequences of production. As we strive for wisdom of what works well for us humans in a particular place, we are approaching life with a mind-set of action learning, hacking, and free/libre open source knowledge, and guided by our passion and the wisdom of our culture.

Human design in the hands of the gods. That's what I'm getting at!!

The Best Place to Store My Catch is In My Neighbor's Belly (http://www.cooperationcommons.com/cooperationcommons/blog/robert-link/460-the-literacy-of-cooperation-video-1-entry-2)

Note: The peace-keeping law is called the Law of Limited Competition in later books by Quinn. It is articulated most clearly in Ishmael in this way:

"You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food."

APPENDIX: an extra draft paragraph

To return to "living in the hands of the gods"... In Ishmael, the characters come to an understanding that the Takers (those who know good and evil) abandon the gods (i.e. Gaia, the ecosystem, evolution by natural selection, etc.) by taking control of food production through exterminating competitors, and by seeking to take control of every single aspect of life on earth. Langdon Winner is interested in "Searching for Limits" on technology, specifically by articulating principles and sticking to them. This seems akin to the way the Leavers (those who live in the hands of the gods) recognize "the peace-keeping law" (limited competition, no warfare allowed) and use it as a design constraint as they create their cultures. (The peace-keeping law is seen to be as permanent and unchanging as the law of gravity, so any community that disobeys it will inevitably die, just as one who ignores gravity will walk off a cliff, mistakenly think she is flying, and die upon hitting the ground.)

* * * * * * *

On the process of writing the above text...

Last night I finished reading Ishmael, and after breakfast/lunch (I arose at 11:30) I read the preface and the first half of the first chapter of The Whale and the Reactor, and then I began writing. Last night, when I finished reading Ishmael I laughed for about 30 minutes. I laughed about all the amazing connections and implications of the ideas I had just read. I laughed in the way I do when the connectedness of life flows up and imbues everything around me and within me. And the piece I wrote today is an expression of some of those connections, and I laughed deeply for a while after writing it.

Then, as I was laughing, I returned to thinking about what it might be like if Josh Waitzkin became involved with Gaia University. I pictured myself telling a story, and the story began... This story begins in 1982. A mother and her son were walking through Washington Square Park in New York City, and the boy, who was 6 years old, saw people playing chess. The boy's name is Josh Waitzkin. That week a few friends showed him more about chess, and seven years later he was a National Master in chess, and three years after that he was an International Master -- he was 16. That year, when Josh was 16, a movie about his life as a child chess prodigy was released, titled Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Josh's relationship to chess began to be ruined by the distracting fame brought by the movie. Five years later Josh began learning Tai Chi, and six years after that he won the World Championship of Tai Chi Chuan Push Hands. That was the year 2004.

That year, 2004, was the year that Gaia University began to come into being. While Josh was preparing for the World Championship of Tai Chi, two people met while visiting Findhorn community (which is in Scotland). Those two people are Liora Adler and Andy Langford, and two years after they met, Gaia University accepted its first associates (Gaia's term for students).

Now it is 2008. More precisely, I am sitting at my house in Amherst, MA, USA, where it is 12:39 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, September 20, 2008.Then the story skips ahead into the future, and Josh and Gaia University connect, and Josh brings his thoughts about the Art of Learning. Maybe he hears about the Art of Mentoring from Ethan. Maybe he decides to participate in an orientation.

Now it has been a few hours since I wrote the hacker-learning-life piece... I went out to a potluck and had long conversations with two people. The first was Matt, asking me for advice and guidance on creating a non-profit, basically me speaking my advice on how to design and implement a collaborative project (Matt's vision is a green belt of productive trees around every city). The second conversation was with someone I'd just met, a man named Cole. I asked what he studies... psychology... and I asked what he is most excited about... epigenetics!!! That IS exciting! So we had a conversation about that for a while, and about how amazing it is, and related things. Then a friend of his, Eliza, joined the conversation.

What am I studying? I began explaining without being sure what I would say. I am studying Integrative EcoSocial Design, and I get to make up what it means. With my hands, I indicated a sphere to my right to represent anti-racism and, more broadly, social healing. To my left, I created a space for knowledge flow in societies, across societies, and in individual lives.

She's studying children's literature, just started her Masters program. I thought, Hmmmm, how can I tie that to what we were talking about... hmmm. So I explained what I had written earlier, the hacker-learning-life piece. And my point of connection was the things I'd read about Josh Waitzkin and his ideas about the Art of Learning. So I explained most of my writing, then I asked Eliza and Cole if they'd see the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher, and they both paused for a few seconds in thought, and then Cole said YES, we were JUST talking about how he just won another Push Hands championship, and I just started a Push Hands class. And that was another moment of fantastic connection for me, and this time I noticed it more calmly, since I was already rather excited, and it just seemed right that everything would keep connecting to everything.

So, I said a few things about the Art of Learning, and connecting to Gaia U and such... And our conversation wandered around a bit...

And then I remembered that I wanted to connect epigenetics with the idea I'd read on Enoch Page's home page (http://people.umass.edu/hepage/), "Antiracist Spiritual Anthropology." So I asked, Have you heard of the professor at UMass named Enoch Page? Quiet seconds. And now Eliza burst with YES, Yes, oh, I took a class with him, and it was an amazing class. Eliza took Spiritual Anthropology with Enoch Page during her first year at UMass. What was it? What's Spiritual Anthropology? Well, we did many things, we wrote a letter to death, we watched a film about the World Bank, and so many other things, and he told us "You, you're connected to all this! You might not think so, you might not see it, but you're connected to all of it!" It was eye opening, and so much more, opening my view and... well... my spirit. It definitely had an impact on me, and I wonder what impact it had on the other students.

I told Eliza that I was now even more excited about Enoch Page. I pondered aloud if I might spend my capstone year hanging out with Enoch Page. I will see what I can arrange.

And now, just before I wrote this bit about my evening, I read the Introduction to Josh Waitzkin's book, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance (http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=526819&agid=2). And as I read it, I realized three things: 1) Josh wrote that he kept a journal of his chess learning and, later, of his tai chi learning, so he was using some action learning methods without knowing it, and was probably far more self-aware than most people his age. 2) With chess, Josh went through the stages that Ed Hallowell describes for promoting strengths -- he was intrigued by the game and sought connection with it (this step might have been a bit less present than the others), then he played and had fun, then he practiced a whole lot and thus gained mastery, and then he gained recognition by winning championships. When he gained the hollow fame from the movie, this was a different sort of recognition, and it led to his disconnection from chess, and the cycle of learning stopped. 3) The process of learning with passion and transferring knowledge from one field to another, and the experience of seemingly unrelated things teaching him... his description of that sounded like a description of my own day today. I have had days and moments and weeks like this before, when the connectedness of life flows up and imbues everything around me and within me, and I am stunned with awe... and I quietly float or burst into deep laughter and dancing, and life is amazing.

Ah, yes, Nicholas and I spoke of that in July. Nicholas was Sarah Marshall's boyfriend, and he stayed at 41 Carriage Lane with us for a few weeks. On his last day, he told me about the day that he came to a bottomless well of joy within himself, and I told him about my experience during the True Heart True Mind intensive. That feeling, the state of being I was in at the end of the last dyad on Sunday night when I felt fireworks blossoming all around me as they gave me warm hugs, that was a more intense expression of this feeling of all-connection.

In his introduction, Josh writes that: "I discovered some interesting foundations for my experience in ancient Indian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Greek texts -- Upanishadic essence, Taoist receptivity, Neo-Confucian principle, Buddhist nonduality, and the Platonic forms all seemed to be a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for." This is how I felt today while writing the hacker-learning-life-Gaia U piece... there was a common thread that wove together the thread of each idea I explored.

And now I come to another connection: self-awareness.

Josh developed self-awareness while learning chess.

During the True Heart True Mind intensive, Paul Weiss spoke of the importance of self-awareness and consciousness for the creation of a world of reciprocity (and as he gave that talk I felt the unity of all things burst through me and fill everything), and I connected it to the self-awareness that Brittney asked of the white people during the ARC training in January.

During my recent output advising with Jennifer, she has walked me through a design process to create a self-management system that cultivates my self-awareness (especially the periodic reviews).

On Wednesday night I wrote a list of things I have learned that help with the process of working to undo racism, and I included this point: "Find ways to be more self-aware and self-reflective. The aim here is to be able to recognize the thoughts I have that come from a racist society. Only by being aware of myself can I begin to heal myself."

And on Thursday, after a conversation with Brittni about her course with Enoch Page, I looked at his home page, where he writes that: "[...] his upcoming work extends the combination of these concerns into the most recent development of what he calls 'Antiracist Spiritual Anthropology.' He coins this term and would like it to be known as a form of anthropological research, scholarly discipline and pedagogical practice dedicated to fostering social change through an understanding and pursuit of what may best be understood, for lack of a better term, as 'higher consciousness.'"

And tonight Eliza told me that Enoch Page's approach to Spiritual Anthropology is to say something to the effect of, Look, you must be more aware of yourself and everything in the world, you must cultivate your consciousness because you are connected to everything, everything is connected to everything.

And I asked Eliza if perhaps this Antiracist Spiritual Anthropology is a way of bringing love (as I call it) into the effort to heal racism, and in my case speaking about love and spirit so that white people don't get bogged down with shame and guilt, but rather recognize the love of life in every being, including themselves, and work from there to heal ourselves and the world from racism.

Okay, now I need to go ask Enoch Page... no, I need to do my Year In Review output, and then I need to create a project proposal or a "legitimate question" (as SDaS would call it) with which to approach my capstone year and Enoch Page.

How amazing. How awesome.

I am reminded of what I wrote years ago on my facebook profile:

I do my best to live in the present. I am searching, looking, listening, on a journey to understand the neighboring strands of the universal spider web. Where you are depends on how you got there.

That last sentence can be read as a statement about self-awareness.

Ah, another connection... I probably wrote that bit on my facebook profile around the same time that I wrote the following, in spring 2006:

"Tal vez sería que el universo es una telaraña; una telaraña que abarca el tiempo y el espacio, cuyas hilos y hebras son compuestos del significado y la influencia."

I think that's a good summation of all of this, and I suspect that relates to what Josh calls "a bizarre cross-cultural trace of what I was searching for."

Oh, another connection: Theory U. I'm watching a video of Otto Scharmer explaining Theory U right now, and it's definitely akin to Hallowell's five steps, and to Waitzkin's Art of Learning, and more tangentially to Paul Weiss and True Heart True Mind.

So I want to get the Theory U book. And I want to get it before I go to Tennessee, so that I can create my capstone year from my passions. Theory U, Art of Learning.

Scharmer keeps saying "connecting to a deeper source of knowing," which sounds like the threads of the universal spider web and the "cross-cultural trace." He's also talking about opening the source.

Ah, and a connection for Cole: Heylighen and the Global Brain.

Another test of the GEL blog RSS feeds...

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:20:10 GMT

by Patrick Gibbs.

I published my last post to "Anyone in the world" (which really means "Anyone with uncensored internet access"), and it showed up in the RSS feed for All Blogs and in the RSS feed for my blog. This latter appearance (in the feed for just my blog) is a pleasant surprise. Further exploration reveals that there are not RSS feeds for tags.

I'll publish this post as "Anyone on this site" and if it doesn't show up in my RSS feed then I'll switch it to "Anyone with uncensored internet access."

UPDATE: This post didn't show up in my RSS feed when it was published to "Anyone on this site," so I've now switched it to "Anyone with uncensored internet access."

~ Patrick

RSS Feeds for GEL blogs

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:11:39 GMT

by Patrick Gibbs.

One surprise with the update to Moodle 1.9.2+ is the appearance of the RSS feed icon on blog pages in GEL. I've tinkered a bit so far, and it seems that

1) there is only one RSS feed, and
2) it has all GEL blog posts published to "Anyone in the world," and
3) it has only those posts published to "Anyone in the world."

That's my deduction at this point, and this post is part of the test. Will this post show up in the feed? We'll see...

~ Patrick

neohumanism

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:45:35 GMT

by Karmendra Rossy.

neohumanism