Sharing the Personal Unity
with Students and Teachers
John L. Waters
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December 8, 2002
Revised December 9, 2002
Revised December 11, 2002
Copyright 2002 by John L. Waters.
All Rights Reserved
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Note: On December 10 Shannon Mondor of the HSU
Writing Center helped me edit this paper.
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The Internet is a very specialized medium that
combines telephony, graphic art, reading and writing,
and other specialties all the while immobilizing the
person and taking stimulations and pleasures away from
the arms, the shoulders, the chest, the belly, the
back, the legs, and the feet. The senses of smell and
hearing are often ignored in the height of visual and
intellectual stimulation that comes by seeing so many
pop-up ads, glittering, flickering, and otherwise
intensely animated little yellow smiley faces,
fluttering butterflies, running pooches, and little
ant-men with shovels hard at work at their "still
under construction" website projects. All this visual
stimulation can be seductive and destructive.
Books can be seductive and destructive, too, books
which preceded the Internet by five hundred years or
more, depending on whether you date from Gutenberg or
from Moses, or from some even earlier writer. By
vigorously simulating the eyes and associated
neocortical regions, but ignoring all the many other
parts of the body and brain, a book takes both reader
and writer away from the higher dimensional realm of
the dancer and the plowman in the world of movement in
space and time. You see, the print world is fixed on
a page. You sit still and keep your attention riveted
to the text. You look at the page and the letters
remain static even more so than the spinning and
twinkling stars above and the rolling stones that
gather no moss below. This intense fixation on static
forms takes the young child out of nature's dynamic
reality into a bookish or computerish isolation from
moving, living, breathing nature. For example, you
see the big letters of the Hollywood sign and you
ignore the natural hills all fragrant with blooming
sage and humming with life.
The ancestral human lived in whole body motion, in
tune with a continually changing natural world. Even
with speech and hearing, the words of one dramatic
aboriginal shaman or storyteller changed into the
words of another and stories were warped through time.
Later, though, when printed books came along, the old
stories became rigidly fixed by the art of print
itself. For example, even today the stories of Moses
remain preserved as sacred relics of a time that is as
long gone for humanity as the Cambrian era was for
Tyrannosaurus rex. But traditional human culture
preserves the writings of Moses as sacred, and our own
tradition-bound culture immobilizes young children and
teaches them to sit still in the chair and focus their
eyes and their minds on static printed matter. The
moving, living, breathing natural world is shut out of
the classroom. Nature's growth and change aren't on
the class agenda. Sitting still is the rule, with
little eyes not roving about freely. Little hands are
kept hidden or active with a pencil or a pen. It's
the way a child can excel, and get ahead, and grow up
to be highly respected. In the old days such a
narrowly focused child could grow up and become the
High Priest.
Even today, young children are still growing, and
every memory from early childhood is a record of
sudden personal growth. This growth was facilitated
by bodily movements as well as by bowel movements. In
fact, without body movement the body weakens and
without any bowel movements, a child will soon die.
And in learning, too, there is continual growth and
change, whereby most all of what a person produces is
error-laden just as a bowel movement is laden with
toxic wastes. So indeed, and this is important. The
growing person produces a lot of errors. This is how
learning occurs. So if I cull out all the errors in
this paper, that labor obscures the reality of what
learning is all about. The paper loses a part of its
importance and its meaning. Conventional discipline
has culled out a major part of the record.
A book is a product of growth in a writer, and so as
we follow the reasoning above, we expect the book of a
wise person to be laden with errors. We expect this
now because now we truly understand growth. But
here's a problem: Schools teach a little student to
make no mistake, and schools teach a student from
textbooks. A textbook has been reviewed by many
experts to eliminate all mistakes. So the nature of
growth and change is hidden from all the children. In
all innocence, they strive to make no error and they
cease to grow, like a sick child who never has a bowel
movement and soon dies. The anti-growth culture
trains all its children to become stunted in their
growth. The old texts and the old gods are revered,
but as works by inspired persons who never stopped
growing, indeed they are full of errors.
In a college course on "the personal unity" we have to
make clear that the whole person has arms, legs,
belly, chest, and other parts that need to move in
nature to feel unified with the head and the eyes that
tend to get so immobilized in front of a book, a
television, or a computer monitor. Moreover whole
persons need to do a lot more than close eye work to
feel whole and attuned to reality. Culture, though,
has kept many little boys and girls isolated from
nature and taught them from static, changeless texts,
especially on the so-called "holy" days. The need to
grow makes these things clear and opens humanity to
the next stage of human awareness.
There is in fact an art of grace which shows a record
of the movement in supple hands before they start to
write. This art, however, can't be recorded in a
small digital file. A person's handwriting itself
contains this grace, but again, cursing writing can't
be recorded in a small digital file. For small files,
only a fragment of the hand's communication can be
saved. So which part of "the personal unity" shall we
cut out? The art which shows a record of the movement
in supple hands gets cut out. You see how modern
"efficiency" removes an important supple and fluid
part of humanity. And this removal was increased a
great deal when words became set in stone or in print,
and more so when certain texts became
sacred...unchallengeable and unchangeable. Indeed,
the very art of inspiration got removed. Perhaps
inspiration is rare today because culture trains
children to avoid using the art of inspiration and be
"efficient." Virtually all school books are printed.
So, too, are the sacred books.
Slipping in a lot of waste, and offending certain
persons who don't yet understand what this is really
about, a whole person showing the personal unity is a
growing, changing student whose writings are tainted
with vinegar as spice as is sour wine. Today many
teachers and older students might recommend following
the less blithering and confusing alternative which is
to just study the writings of some person whom many
believe to have been a transmitter of the "Divine
Truth" which never changes, a pipeline as it were, or
a channel connected to the mythological "Divine
Source." But nothing in nature is actually changeless
or free of waste, except for the laws of the universe
which science has gleaned over the ages and rendered
into the form of one or more mathematical equations.
And each of these formulas, too, is subject to
revision if evidence shows it to be incomplete or in
error. Very little in us is totally pristine and
pure.
Youth is restless and still feeling the impulse to
grow and break out of the hard rigidity of school and
the super-efficiency computer mindset. Vitality makes
a child less able to sit all day and gaze at a book or
into a fluorescent tunnel which, with the Internet
still growing, seems to have no end. But the end of
natural and vigorous humanity living at the full
potential came with the cementing of language into
stone figures or incisions in stone, and later into
ink blots and even still later into digitally coded
assemblages of light points. In our own age, for
years and years young bodies and minds are kept
immobilized by traditional education. To succeed the
modern child has to submit to this torture.
The moulting of birds, the skin-shedding of snakes,
grasshoppers, caterpillars and other animals was
forgotten as the most worshiped writers, Moses and
others, lost the ability to grow and shed belief after
belief the way a tree sheds limb after limb to be
burned by primitive humans in their camp-fires.
Somehow, the written word became rigid, set, and
certain verbally communicated beliefs became holy. In
so doing all the children who were trained to become
priests lost the personal unity and presided over
multitudes of people who still moved more or less
freely and couldn't read or write. No one knew what
really was happening to youthful human brains. Today
great wars are still being waged because of the
inflexibility of adult human minds!
The art of ages past, the art of preverbal persons is
still being inscribed on rocks and in the sand. Waves
and storms soon wash all this art away. Only in a few
places is the rock art of aborigines preserved. Young
children make similar art on impulse and in grace
until they are taught to just copy art from a master,
a figure, or a book. In this way the letters and the
numerals themselves are learned. Disciplined out of
his or her original and natural grace, the naive
student is striving now to copy from a master and be
judged error-free. When an undisciplined child makes
stray marks and deviates from the set pattern, some
peer or the teacher expresses displeasure and the
graceful child is made to feel ashamed or hurt. Never
is this preverbal art encouraged in the older child.
So even more the brain of the sophisticated child
prodigy who never makes a mistake is like the body of
a child who never has a bowel movement. Such a brain
simply doesn't grow and develop to demonstrate the
full human potential. Indeed, the esteemed student
grows up following some sacred text or tradition. The
precursory art, the living art of grace, lifelong
learning and rejuvenating personal growth has never
been well understood and well cultured. In fact this
impulsive art has been considered evil art, witches
art, voodoo art, or even psychotic art, the art of
satan the devil. People are still afraid of it and
hide it because they don't understand it. People
throw their doodles and scribbles away, refusing to
take them seriously and study them as the precursors
to and stimulators of modern verbal and rational
ideation...the calculus of inspiration as it were.
In our new study of the personal unity, we go back and
devote a number of hours each day to moving in nature
and feeling unconstrained. We learn to draw and paint
freely without being constrained by conventional ideas
about art. We create a "free" space and commit errors
without being made to feel "illegal" or "evil" or
"stupid." We create our own safe "padded cell." We
may do this on a deserted beach or out in the
wilderness. At first we may be destructive. We may
smash stones or build sand castles and blow them up
with cherry bombs. Or we may take pistols out and
shoot up beer cans. Many youths act out in this way
but they don't understand where this urge comes from
and the paradise to which it can lead. At first the
youth are breaking up the boxes and letting some fresh
air come into the solid containers of their lives.
But present culture doesn't understand this behavior
and many young people go on to become more and more
destructive.
In our present culture of organization and maximum
"efficiency," young children get severely confined,
and often by the age of five the sense of freedom and
personal unity is lost. Even in elementary school, no
one wants to make a mistake and appear to be retarded
or stupid. No good child dares be different.
Imitation of the leader or master is required. One
child may be the leader everyone in the peer group
wants to imitate. Young brains become constipated.
Hearts and minds become hardened. Growth slows down
as maturing children give up free rock art and use
only imitative art. Only a few precognitives keep
their youthful sense of freedom and produce prophetic
works. Often the eccentric loner is attacked by the
accepted masters or authorities. Culture block
continues. The personal unity remains shrouded in
mystery. Human brain growth remains blocked. Yes,
even in the creative arts, by the creative artists
themselves.
This free art is easy to illustrate, but not in a
small computer file. A relatively small computer file
can contain a very few samples of art and the rest is
print in some standard font such as Times New Roman
for easy reading. In a finished presentation you
expect to see no error and you expect every article to
be well-crafted. Thus, to compose a finished book,
the writer has to break the rule of personal unity and
freedom in a free space and thereby suffer the
discomforts of a soft child seated in a hard chair
with body bent over a hard desk and a man in solitary
confinement. As graduate students many academics do
spend years in their small rooms like monks in a
monastery. This is the tradition in our culture, and
it keeps on blocking the understanding and realization
of the full human potential.
Humans learn by making mistakes, and the most
knowledgeable person has made many mistakes.
Continuing to grow and learn, this adventuresome
person keeps on making mistake after mistake!
Consequently a nation doesn't elect him to be
Commander-In-Chief! The Commander-In-Chief isn't
expected to make a mistake. The electorate wants the
Commander-In-Chief to be almost as intelligent as God
or the mythical Messiah who is supposed to be as
all-knowing as God. As the myth goes, this ability to
always be right enables the Messiah's nation to be
victorious and defeat all the other cultures. But you
see, in every culture, not just in the Jewish culture,
the initial sociocultural anti-growth and anti-life
premise is wrong. All cultures have made the same
basic pedagogical error.
In correcting this error, and eliminating sin,
humanity will grow a lot more, and become more
intelligent, more healthy, and more attuned to nature
and to reality. This free art of the personal unity
shows you how. Just find yourself a free space and
let your whole body move freely. If your family and
your school has taught you to think and be
responsible, the personal unity in you will keep you
safe and sane. In due time, the rational intellect,
the intuition, and all the other senses and
intelligences in you will be integrated.
And now, since you understand the integration and the
harmony that is possible in yourself and in others,
you will study war no more. In addition to your
applying this method of harmonization, you will stand
against the present abuse of children by authoritarian
adults who know not what they do. Not everything you
do or say will be error-free, of course, because you
are youthful, growing, and changing, and you are
inspired. Humility sometimes interpreted as arrogance
is therefore a part of the personal unity. Indeed,
the concept of personal unity has been difficult for
cultured humans to arrive at.
12:50PM Sunday, December 8, 2002
Revised 1:30PM Monday, December 9, 2002
Revised 6:45PM Monday, December 9, 2002
Revised 10:45PM Wednesday, December 11, 2002
John L. Waters
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