On Transformation

“If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, then you are still bobbing in the sea of delusion”

-Lin-Chi

Over the course of the last week or so, I’ve been popping quotes that touch on the esoteric. I like this quote because it reminds me that, while there are so many challenging ideas orbiting our consciousness, the greatest realizations typically emerge from the day to day minutia of life.

My book, “Falling but Fulfilled” is very much a spiritual child of Lin-Chi’s perspective shared in today’s quote.

While on the surface, the book is shaped around one person’s take on a brilliant learning theory presented by Howard Gardner (Multiple Intelligences Theory), it shares with the reader, on a more fundamental level, the experience of growing up and how the random moments of our lives teach us wisdom. As I wrote the book, I challenged my mind to turn inwardly and look fearlessly at the occasions which bubbled to the surface as I meditated on Gardner’s learning theory.

I hope to see the book shift attention back to our quietest, meekest, and most disenfranchised stakeholders:

Students

Education too often gets caught up with politics, labor relations, and various ideologies. All of these address the various aesthetic frames of reference, but not the real issue: the development of conscious cognition, also known as metacognition. Metacognition is the ability for us to think about the way we are thinking.

And metacognition doesn’t just happen. There is a process, perhaps an individualized one peculiar to each of us, which I believe sets the stage for foundational transformation. In his discussion of his Transformative Learning Theory, Jack Mezirow talks about this process as the need for critical self analysis.

The challenge to making effective self analysis is the creeping in of bias. Lin-Chi touches on this in the quote by using the word “delusion”. After all, we tend to pay attention to those things which most powerfully catch our attention…and the “sacred” sure trumps the “ordinary”!

I took this to heart as I wrote the book. Instead of discussing the real whiz-bang stories of surfing 10ft Banzai Pipeline or cliff diving in Laguna Beach, I worked at giving the simple memories a voice. It is my hope that the gentle memories conjure up your own memories of your learning. It is in the gentle voice of the book that I advance my strategy: giving a voice to the learner. After all, we are all learners, if we consciously participate in life. If I can inspire readers to take a moment to scan across the history of their lives, then this gentle book has succeeded.

Borrowing the structure and poetry from Lin-Chi, I propose an alternate version of the quote for Saturday morning, 12/11/2010:

If you love the ordinary because it gives glimpses of the sacred, then you are bathing in the sweet glow of enlightenment.

I wish you all a happy weekend! I will take tomorrow off and celebrate my father’s and mother’s birthday. By Monday morning, I’m sure to be back on track. In the meantime, check out my publisher’s website at: www.savantbooksandpublications  

Mahalo nui loa