c h a l q u i s t . c o m
Catching the World by the Tale
Networking Nodes
Weaving a Web of Learning....
....into the nature of nature, mind, heart, and place:
From the Desktop
Writing pointers, course handouts, psych, eco, myth glossaries just a click away...
read more
Staying Informed
Stop by this Public Page at Facebook. Also, click the icon below to email a request for our quarterly newsletter about our Deep Ed work.
What is Deep Education?
Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself.
-- John Dewey
What if, as depth psychologically-minded cultural workers, we labored against falsely separating the processes of individuation from those of liberation?
--Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman
Somewhere down a long road of inner work, meditation, education, and psychotherapy training, I lost faith that individual practices would be enough to provide a better, cleaner world to live in. If they could, they surely would have by now, and every place where seers danced, chanted, and purified themselves would have become a paradise. Instead, the blue-green globe deteriorates into toxic grays and desert browns.
Although I kept the practices, I found myself increasingly drawn toward educating people inspired to be cultural mentors. We have, of course, many kinds of personal therapy, but as yet, no consistent cultural therapeutics working toward reconciliation of conscious self, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, nature, place, and planet.
My business and ruling passion, then, is education for coming home to self, to others, to the living, sentient Earth.
“Deep Education” as I conceive it and attempt to practice it encourages the evolution of our relationship with our animated and increasingly reactive planet from that of alienated spectators, consumers, and exploiters to that of loving, responsible conversationalists in the human-nonhuman dialogue. Deep educators are world therapists and cultural mentors who work toward just communities that can adaptively reimagine and reinvent themselves through collaborations in which every citizen can be truly free to participate.
"Deep” also means encouraging the learner to probe through appearances, surfaces, and customary explanations--the “natural attitude” noted by phenomenology--to explore the motifs, images, collective fantasies, and other structural forces moving in the personal and cultural unconscious. These forces shape institutions, works of culture, and technologies alike and constitute the true foundations of our time.
The Deep Educators who tend these depths seem uninterested in going mainstream, and for good reason. Social movements containing evolutionary potential remain powerful to the degree they attract the entire society in their direction. The Women's Movement and the Civil Rights Movement unleashed deep change by sticking to their goals and visions, NOT by trying to appeal to the mainstream (which at that time felt just fine about excluding blacks and women from politics and the workplace). Real culture mentors do not succumb to the heroic temptation to change a culture; instead, they work on their own kind of culture and invite the interested to participate.
To continue supporting their efforts, I have formed a diverse Bay Area team to assemble a compendium of freely available cultural transformation practices that create containers, wisdom groups, and safe spaces for brewing new ideas about how to manage environmental fear and displacement, how to encourage generative leadership, how to stay intelligently networked with each other, and how to imagine the kinds of community we most desire: the multi-platform and, one day, worldwide Encyclopedia Sophia Project.
Truly transformative education cannot be segregated into separate disciplines, bloated by abstract theory, dissolved in spiritual bypass, or reduced to numbers and measurements, although it includes the latest scientific findings as well as lore from ancient wisdom traditions. A Deep Education might offer content or training, but always in service to evolving deeper, higher, and more flexible modes of consciousness-in-community. To do this it must shatter and mine old worldviews, melting down their accomplishments into educational containers for the surfacing "new paradigm" emphasis on ecology, interdependency, networking, information, and participation as basic modes of apprehension. Following the lead of Joseph Campbell, I refer to this world paradigm, or eradigm, as Earthrise, the mythic image for our time.
Earthrise education--education for a living, networked planet--cannot remain in the classroom, although aspects of it do start there. It must draw on sources all over our planet to fashion new ideas, visions, and experiments centering on how to fashion just, sustaining, Earth-friendly communities in which world citizens feel truly at home. The global civilization capable of supporting such communities will have to be organized around new stories that frame human experience more interactively than models caught in fantasies of separateness, detachment, domination, or control.
When I think about the just, peaceful, and Earth-conscious civilization we must evolve in order to survive and flourish, the word “Terrania” floats through my mind as the code word and aspirational axis around which all my labors and projects turn, driving me onward to continue my own evolution as a deep educator and perpetual beginner.
See also "Heartsteading: Forming and Strengthening Circles of Community"
Click the contact link below to email a request for our deep education newsletter.