A Reflection on Elements of Emergent Education
By Amy Edelstein
Is the Past Also the Present?
When I was in Australia recently, I became absorbed by the landscape. Away from phones and for the most part WiFi, I was conveniently removed from my customary habits and the draws for my attention. I was able to listen. Not listening to anything in particular or for anything in particular. Just listening. The longer I was there, the more I could sense, hear, feel, as if by listening carefully, I could absorb the landscape into me. The bird calls, their whips, whistles, caws, and bells. The brush of wings. The rustle of dry gum leaves and paperbark. The thump of wallabies and little joeys beside them. Oh, and the cicadas with their endless music. The butcherbirds and gerygones singing the melody and raga of the bush. They grounded the landscape, maintaining it. It wasn’t just sounds I was drawing into me; it was a merging with the lifeblood of the mountain, canyon, and dove white coast.
There were artifacts, some 14,000 years old, in the hills where I was. The presence of the footsteps of these ancestors hung in the air. As I listened, it was as if I could hear them, too. Their remains were part of the humus that softens sound in the wild, their presence still there, still coloring the landscape. My own steps and movements were now also part of the symphony, the echoes of generations past and future, sounding together, all at once. In the dreamtime of the aboriginal people, past, present, and future are all merged into one. In some of the more farout theoretical physics there is a theory of time collapsed into itself, or of time as a process that bends in a three-dimensional motion, more like a sphere or a torus, rather than a line, it moves in a single flow, pouring over and into itself. In some way, this type of seeing does still fit with our dominant paradigm, just interpreted a little differently. Everything is part of a continuum, a whole, a single that cannot be separated into discrete parts. The past sets certain actions in motion, which create certain possible outcomes and eliminates other possible outcomes. Our present reality is influenced and to some extent determined by those outcomes. And our actions similarly shape the future. The past is very much alive in our present, and the future is also directly shaped by every single action now. Is there a way of seeing that takes all this into account viscerally? Not through reasoning or deduction, but through apprehension, through an awakening that illuminates to us a profoundly different sense of time? One that is unitive and filled with the possible.
Realizing there are other valid paradigms and ways to see the world softens the edges of what we take to be possible. It allows for new ways of seeing to emerge. We start to see that our worldview is constructed, agreed upon by the dominant culture, and that it is not the only way of seeing. The way we customarily perceive time, history, causality, or consciousness may not be the deepest, most inclusive way, or the way that gives rise to the highest human potentials.
I am not a romanticist for past worldviews. We cannot go back to an age before technology or literacy. But other cultures were privy to understandings that we cannot discern now. We have indeed forgotten some knowledge. While we can open up to those worldviews, I am not sure that we will be able to authentically intuit that knowledge in its fullness anymore. Times, and our sense of consciousness, have changed too much. But we can become sensitive to alternative and intuitive knowings of life that are more subtle and have different dimensionality than the framework we currently operate in. Our current worldview so bluntly separates me from you, present from past, self from other, human from world. That’s the reality young people today are taught to experience. There are other credible ways to see the world.
In the period after World War I, Alfred North Whitehead moved from Britain to become dean of philosophy at Harvard, having never taught nor taken a philosophy class before then. It was at Harvard that he began to call a more inclusive and relational view “process” and proceeded to articulate a philosophical view of the world that became known as process philosophy. Rather than a series of discrete events, he saw everything as a flow, as experience. Gregory Bateson called this relatedness. Bateson would not see the five fingers on a hand; he would see how they related, the space between them. A worldview that does not harshly divide us in the way the Cartesian worldview does gives us access to very different sensitivities. Individually, when we feel a part of something, part of a whole, we experience safety, release, rest. We feel, intuitively, not so small or alienated as we so often see ourselves in our vast, fast-paced world. With an almost imperceptible shift, where nothing changes, we experience ourselves a non-separate from the newborn, healthy or struggling for her first breaths, or the early humans just learning to spark fire from twigs and tinder, or the technologist plotting trajectories on graphs to program a flight path to Mars.
“Individually, when we feel a part of something, part of a whole, we experience safety, release, rest. We feel, intuitively, not so small or alienated as we so often see ourselves in our vast, fast-paced world.”
A process-oriented view has many dimensions and capacities, many ways of looking in. It is different from our own in these ways: First we see that our own worldview is constructed, a set of beliefs that orders reality. Then we see that it is not the only way to see reality. All of a sudden, we find we have allowed ourselves to consider other paradigms and worldviews, to test the waters and let go of our moorings, becoming informed by other ways of perceiving the world around us. Once we consider alternative views, we open the door to creativity, expansion, solutions, and connections.
