Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
We need to recognise the diversity of epistemologies and knowledge systems that have helped us in protecting the planet and ensuring our well-being. We need to unleash our diverse, interconnected intelligences to create another imagination, and through it another world, beyond the illusions and control of the 1%. Vandana Shiva, Oneness vs. the 1%
Nurturing Naivete
My Chinese Medicine teacher, a Daoist priest, has often insisted that one can’t heal from a disease with the same mindset, perspective, bias, programming, fill-in-the blank…that contracted the illness. Aging itself is a product of what he refers to as psychosclerosis, a hardening of the mind. And given that the mind is actually centered in the heart, in a healthy individual, this really means a hardening of the heart, as in and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened.
Jeffrey Yuen repeatedly encourages his students to be “naïve”, to cultivate a naïve attitude towards the human potential to heal from even the most serious of diseases. To be naïve in the face of statistics. To cultivate belief in the stories that often only end up in that “against all odds” section of Reader’s Digest that I used to read religiously as a kid.
At six, I learned that my culture perceived open-heartedness as gullibility, which was as close to stupid as you could be without actually being called stupid. And why is stupid so bad? Because it assumes a lack of knowledge. Which, in our society, connotes a lack of control, which implies vulnerability. And believe you me, empires aren’t built upon, or sustained, by vulnerability. To the contrary, behemoth, too big to fail organizations spend millions and millions of dollars on risk assessment. Yuck!
The more educated someone is, in a modern sense, the less naïve and open to possibilities they become. It’s a slippery slope of hoops, from learning to assimilate to the morals and expectations of one’s immediate family, which is necessary for survival, and not inherently limiting, to the ethics and expectations of whatever “education” one receives.
We live in a culture of expertism, where diploma certified knowledge is the gold standard. Most vocations, including psychotherapists and administrators of all kinds, are paid more for a PhD than an MS, or a BS. The argument goes that more experience equals more pay, because experience is directly equated with the acquisition of more and more knowledge. But what are the experts learning? What’s the implicit message? How much critical thinking is encouraged
Without a constant emphasis on critical thinking, we tend to go along with the programming that says that the more degrees one obtains, the smarter one is. Like simple math. And the delusion is that the more expert, and correct, and right, and invincible from harm this will make you. You accept that if a recognized expert doesn’t stand behind it, then it’s foolish. And when someone from the academy entertains the possibility of diagnosticaly unmeasurable phenomenon like morphic resonance, well, they get excommunicated.
One of my favorite Daoist teachings is to never assume one knows more than half of what there is to know about anything. I’m calling it the 49% rule. If you are the pre-eminent knower in your backyard of knowledge, because you’ve been told so with more money for whatever you pretend to control with your knowledge, can you maintain the naivete that you’re not even halfway, and never will be? Or have you already fallen into the fear-fueled hubris that the world is to be controlled at all costs, inside and out? Does the risk of admitting ignorance, the risk of assuming a child’s naivete when approaching a problem, sound scary?
The challenge is to go forward confidently with the heart-centered knowledge one has, and to easily question its truth in a given moment, at any moment. How ’bout the 49% guideline, because I have a neck jerk reaction to rules . Because self-measurements are, by definition, subjective.
Ted Kaptchuk is redefining our common understanding of placebos at Harvard Medical School. He’s shown in study after study, that even highly effective medicines for conditions such as migraines are barely more effective than a placebo if the subject thinks it’s a placebo. Because placebo is actually the inherent relationship and ritual in any form of medicine, and the belief one has in a particular medicine plays a defining role in its usefulness for a given individual. I just did it too, if you hadn’t noticed? I referenced Harvard Medical School because that’s as smart, and expert as you can get when it comes to “good” medicine, right?!
So, when it comes to solutions for our currently problems, I propose we look to those at the edges of our academic institutions, like the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard. And really, beyond our “highly educated” folks. Because, the more “educated” someone is, the more they tend to have hardened their hearts and minds into believing they know most of what there is to know about what they know. In fact, the more educated someone is, the more they’ve learned the implicit lesson in most higher education, which is to separate the heart from the mind. They have hardened their psyches away from the open hearted naivete that allows for insights.
Few know, and probably fewer have thought twice, about Rene Descartes’ admission that the notion of what became the Scientific Method actually came to him in a dream. In fact, he even referred to it as a divine visitation. Try proving that.
Marc Robertson Luchs, L.Ac.