7 Common
ground: - the ineffable, the
sacred, the mystical and the aesthetical
My
own joy in teaching, my experience of the ineffable and the sacred in the
teaching process came when three sources came together.
The first was my education as a teacher at Bulmershe College, at the
University of Reading, and it was a wonderful experience, from beginning to end
– not many people say that these days.
Within the course as a whole, the most important for me was the course as
a student of English. Within
that was what great critics such as T S Eliot, and the Cambridge don, F R Leavis
called The Great Tradition of English Literature, and the process of practical
criticism. Perhaps here is
the place to mention one of the great statements about Holistic Education
namely Charles Dickens novel Hard Times.
Leavis was the person responsible for bringing this work back from
obscurity. Now Oxford
University Press announce it as possibly Dickens greatest novel.
Why do I claim that it is a great statement about Holistic Education?
The first few chapters present a contrast between the excesses of
fragmentation, in the form of utilitarianism, and the wonder, magic and
ineffability of the circus, its very ring a symbol of the infinite, the
unknowable and ineffable.
You
can get a sense of the fragmentation side of things from the following;
'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and
girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and
root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle
on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring
up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'
"Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind,
squarely pointing with his square forefinger…….
Give me your definition of a horse."
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
"Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Gradgrind for
the general behoof of all the little pitchers. "Girl number twenty
possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some
boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours."
"Bitzer," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Your definition of a horse."
"Quadruped. Gramin ivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four
eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries,
sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by
marks in the mouth." Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
"Now, girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, "You
know what a horse is."
Under
such teaching neither girl number 20 nor the poor pitchers of today will know
the reality of a horse or the reality, or value, of anything.
The
second great river to come to my particular confluence was the writings of the
Baha’i Faith, the major source of my spiritual, caring, understanding. The third was Matthew Lipman’s PFC, Philosophy for Children
programme. These three are my
main, but by no means my only, sources for caring, creativity and criticality,
for Truth Beauty and Goodness, and for Wilber’s three ways of knowing,
the ‘I’, subjective, artistic way of knowing, the ‘WE’
interpersonal, moral way of knowing and the ‘IT’ objective, public,
philosophic and scientific, way of knowing.
When
we bring these three together we have a magical process.
To switch metaphors, in multi-level dialogue with a class you never know
when the pin-ball will roll toward the creativity, the caring or the critical,
that is tremendously exciting to be involved in.
Which way the process of discovery goes doesn’t matter providing there
is balance over time, and balance between the teachers aims and the flow of
pupil interest.
Aesthetic experience and the ineffable and mystical
There
is time for only a very brief justification for the claim that the ineffable,
the sacred, the mystical and the aesthetical spring from common ground.
When
we undergo an experience which we could describe as ineffable, sacred, mystical
or aesthetical, such experience is characterised by a loss of the ego state,
and its strong sense of a separate self.
This is the moment when the poem catches us, when we ‘melt’ into a
sublime landscape, when we are taken up in adoration in great music.
That is to say some flow takes place between the ‘object’ with which
we identify, and ourselves, and then for a time we are no more.
We are not ourselves in such experience, because we have become one with the
‘other’ – and then we return, subsequently, to ourselves, to our ego
state. And when we return later,
perhaps seconds, perhaps months or even years, we start to process that
experience and make use of it. For a grand example of the ineffable look at
Robert Hamilton’s wonderful account, in his book EarthDream, of
such an experience that for him is lasting up to a life-time.
But
as I have been arguing there are micro forms of such peak experience in the flow
of the teaching process, day-to-day - there are opportunities to open the door
to the ineffable. After such
experience, great or minor, we are not the same.
We are either transformed or have the potential to transform.
Of
course these visits to, or from, the ineffable and sacred are part of the
duality, perhaps the ultimate duality, of existence in this earthly life.
In general terms the whole in which we lose ourselves, and the
particulars that we pay attention to, are two sides of a dynamic that is
interdependent as we can see in this wonderful quotation from Ken Wilber;
“To understand
the whole it is necessary to understand the parts.
To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole.
Such is the circle of understanding.
The
Eye of Spirit; an integral vsiion for a world gone slightly mad by Ken Wilber (1997) pub. Shambhala p.1.
Processing
the experience I suggest is a matter of having the human spirit energized, and
the three means for receiving that energy and expressing it are - to care, to
create or to exercise criticality.
Central
to my argument has been that such experience is part of being fully
human. We, as educators, must
not allow it to be forced into an alien realm, to be placed into the category of
bizarre anomaly – like the dodo I once saw in a museum case; dead, stuffed, a
pathetic reminded me of one kind of
insufficiency. In my best
years of teaching, teaching 12 to 13 year olds, and with groups of adults, such
ineffability was there – in moments and minutes, but also in relationships,
and always within the rough and tumble and sheer speed of things that is school
life - but it was there. These
moments or minutes are not ‘teaching moments’ but are moments of heightened
experience from which, and around which, great teaching can take place.
This is transcendent teaching, and to do transcendent teaching we need
the confluence of the three ‘rivers’ of spirit to engender the caring, the
creative and the critical.
These
three sources, in confluence, correspond to the intrapersonal in the human
spirit. They also, as I have said,
correspond intrapersonally to Ken Wilber’s ‘I’, ‘WE’ and ‘IT’
model, and externally to the ancient Greek cardinal virtues of Truth, Beauty and
Goodness
Part
of our responsibility as holistic education teachers is to maximise the
possibilities for children to experience the ineffable, to experience the
aesthetic, the mystical AND to provide various means for the children to process
that experience. Chief amongst
those means practically are as we have seen; reflection & dialogue,
expression particularly artistic expression, and thirdly the means to care,
through direct service or through vicarious imaginative means such as
literature.