c h a l q u i s t . c o m

 

 

 

 

Catching the World by the Tale

Networking Nodes

Transformative Education for Deep Homecoming

This site, which displays professional articles, interests, and resources compiled by Craig Chalquist, PhD, also represents a call for the type of educational work that transforms how we relate to ourselves, each other, and the living planet below and all around us.

 

Education in this holistic sense cannot be segregated into separate disciplines, bloated by abstract theory, or reduced to numbers and measurements, although it includes the latest scientific findings as well as lore from ancient wisdom traditions. Deep education might offer content or training, but always in service to evolving deeper, higher, and wider modes of consciousness and community. To do this it must shatter and mine old worldviews, melting down their accomplishments into educational containers for the surfacing "Deep Web" paradigm that emphasizes ecology, interdependency, networking, information, and participation as basic modes of apprehension.

 

Education for this new paradigm cannot remain in the classroom, although aspects of it do start there. Deep Web learning draws 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 be organized around new stories--new "myths" in the sense of collective dreamings from deep within the psyche--that frame human experience more interactively than models caught in fantasies of separateness, detachment, domination, or control.

 

Education for a new civilization has already begun to coalesce around the following core realizations:

 

The human mind cannot be understood apart from its social and ecological context.

Ravaging landscapes and cultures signals an alienated and ecocidal relation to self, land, and place.

Greed, monopolization, and armed aggression represent dangerous cultural immaturities that must be outgrown.

 

A soulless "education" promoting alienation and objectification feeds an empire mentality in a late stage of decay.

Data and evidence mean little without a coherent framework of embodied meaning to house them.

The multiple ecological crises we face demand deep transformations of consciousness beyond fixes or tinkerings.

Long-standing crises resist "inner" or "outer" solutions because they present us with rites of passage to negotiate.

The possibility of creating healthy, just societies depends on educating responsible, psychologically mature adults.

True democracy, liberty, and species survival now depend on aligning human with planetary needs.

These alignments require evolutionary economies, careers, media, technology, wellness, nutrition, and spirituality.

Sustainable forms of community cannot be imposed from above or outside: they must rise from citizen dreamers.

At bottom, we need new methods or solutions less than a new story that fosters a sense of belonging to the world.

My hope is that my site will be one node in a vast, networked dreaming forward of new stories of deep homecoming for our time, with dreamers daring on the way to imagine new and more satisfying relationships between self, others, and Earth.

 

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Copyright © 2010 by Craig Chalquist.