You’d better be running…

I am browsing though the pages of my workbook from Master I “The Awareness Proces” training…I would like to share my favourite quote from the course:

Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning in Africa, a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It does not matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle….
…when the sun comes up, you’d better be running!
(c) unknown

“I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats” (c) E. Tolle

Through opening up to the simple wisdom of nature each of us can learn to experience the present moment in its full beauty. Allowing oneself to exist not just through doing, but also through being can be breathtaking.
This is what I learned from “Guardians of Being” – an inspirational book that mixes the wisdom of a famous spirituality teacher Eckhart Tolle with funny drawings of Patrick McDonnell. This book was kindly recommended to me by an amazing coach Savannah Steinberg this weekend at Master IV “The Success Process” training by Creative Consciousness International. I have immediately ordered this book and other works of Tolle.

(c) Patrick McDonnell

These quotes from the book inspire me:

“Most of us live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image making – a world of thought. We are immersed in a continuous stream of mental noise. It seems that we can’t stop thinking”

“It’s so wonderful to watch an animal, because an animal has no opinion about itself. it is”.

“I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats”
(c) Tolle

Resume: a must have for all friends of animals and seekers of simple truth.

Open education: can we crowdsource the Ivy League?

It sounds so tempting: creating your own schedule, learning what you are passionate about, combining courses and subjects in any way you want, being free from university bureaucracy as well as from high tuition fees. Open source courseware and open education captivate the minds of digital natives and challenge education policy experts since MIT has launched its open courseware project and some creative others have followed suit. Despite the numerous benefits, open courseware and education 2.0 have their dark sides: with the traditional education still in power and degrees from famous universities still opening many doors, open education ideas have much room left for improvement.

The issues of open courseware and Do It Yourself education were discussed yesterday at re:publica in Berlin in a workshop held by a Palomar5 participant Basti Hirsch and a pioneer of DIY master studies Pippa Buchanan. As I was listening to them talk, I could not stop thinking about the vast body of human knowledge that is out there, waiting to be discovered, reflected upon, transmitted, used, changed, improved… Nowadays technology has made all this knowledge more accessible than ever before. Open courseware delivers high quality learning materials, online platforms like School of Everything connect people willing to learn with people able to teach, social media and networking tools allow us to get in touch with likeminded individuals. Sharing knowledge and seeking for creative education becomes natural for the generation of digital natives, for whom online lifestyles, coworking spaces and opensource software are the norms of life. Sharing is one the fundamental principles of their philosophy. So is the idea of mashup and remix (see Lawrence Lessig for deeper insights).

Open education and DIY degrees give space for individual self-expression and perfectly match Zeitgeist of network society: do not take anything for granted, deconstruct, remix, mashup, connect, collaborate…Its spirit of openness and “no control” gives digital natives the hope that in the world of Web 2.0, their lives can go the way they want even when it comes to the fields that are normally strictly regulated.

However, open education is missing something.

First and foremost, the process of DIY education lacks legitimate feedback and control. A student whose education draws upon downloadable courses from MIT database does not get assessed, supervised or guided by any reputable mentor or any other person who has been professionally trained as a teacher. Peer revision hardly solves the problem since making progress in learning requires feedback from someone, whose worldview, knowledge and experience are different from yours and who has the competences to deliver this feedback in a comprehensive and effective way. This is often not the case when feedback is given by someone of your age. For a level up we all still need support from those who are visibly smarter than us.

Second, DIY education and its freedom will never substitute the atmosphere of learning at a university. Studying at home while wearing your pajamas and eating muffins may sound fun, but it can get troublesome as soon as you start missing books, resources and access to conferences or student life. However vivid your online life is, the real student life still takes place on campus.

Third, the contemporary society and business world appear to be rather conservative when it comes to educational standards. Although some companies do not care about your degree, the majority still do, so getting a proper job without a proper proof of academic performance can be a problem. Moreover, DIY education hardly allows for academic research and cannot offer a scientific career: for that an established academic institution is needed.

Fourth, in the long run open education can undermine the economy of educational system. If professors and mentors are no longer needed, what is going to happen to their jobs? Who is going to pay people with academic degrees who have invested time and effort into their profession if they can be substituted by DIY curricula, peer revision and collaborative courseware? This dilemma is closely connected to the discussions of amateur culture and its pitfalls (for critiques, see Andrew Keen, Jaron Lanier). In my vew, both the critics and the enthusiasts are making some valid points. It would be narrow-minded to disregard the creativity of human communities, though it would be idealistic to trust the mob too much, especially when education is at stake.

Finally, the idea of open education is simply too new and too controversial to be taken seriously by governments and many traditional universities. Clearly, it should not be taken down only due to its pitfalls. On the contrary, it should be further developed and discussed by governments, universities, students and the general public. Much remains to be done before we can crowdsource the Ivy League. Through trying out new things, opening up to citizen creativity and taking the best from collaborative potential of the modern Web, our society can make its education free.

Meditation: getting started

In my international circle of friends there are many people who want to start meditating, but there are unfortunately only few who actually try to get started. I think here hides the main obstacle to enjoyable meditation: it is very difficult to believe that you can do it if  you never tried it before. But if you do not give it a try, you will never know that you are able to be good at it…

People tend to perceive meditation as a sort of complicated, mystical activity, which can be performed only by specially trained individuals. Meditation is, indeed, special in many ways. But meditation is not a pleasure reserved for the lucky few. I encourage everyone to accept the fact that meditation could be as natural as breathing and sleeping. Meditation is a state of mind – like, for example, relaxation, happiness, enthusiasm.Meditation brings you back to your inner self. It helps you to re-connect with the Universe that gives you life. And what could be possibly more natural than being in touch with yourself and the world around you?

So how to get started with meditation? There is only one advice that works: “just do it”.

- ask someone who already has some experience in meditation to give you tips or even to conduct a guided meditation session with you

- read some simple meditation guide (avoid complex books for the beginning, keep it simple, do not overload yourself with information) – I find the one drafted by Peace Revolution very easy to understand and follow – you can view it here

- be persistent in your efforts. Firstly, do not give up if you fail at the initial stages. Secondly, do not be to demanding and thank yourself for every achievement. Thirdly, start with short sessions. Finally, do not hesitate to ask questions and discuss your experience.

And once again: meditation is not a priviledge, it is a necessity, a natural condition and a gift that everyone in this world has access to. It is here for us to take – we just need to make some effort and reach for it.

How did I start meditating?

As with many things that are meaningful to me, I do not remember the exact details of my first meditation exercises. Now it seems so natural and so indespensable for my daily routine that I can hardly imagine the time when I did not know meditation existed. However, I remember reading a book about yoga. I found it in my home library, it belonged to my father. I guess I was around 15 at that time. I started trying out some techniques from the book, and it worked. I did not practice every day. There were periods in my life when I did not do any meditation or yoga or other spiritual exercises for weeks…but somehow life always brought me back to them. Now I am practicing almost every day. Be that a 40 minutes long session or just a moment of silence, I believe that meditation has become a refreshment for my soul and a haven for my concerns. I avoid making a big deal out of it, I do not aspire to force everyone whom I know to meditate. I am also far from being a specialist and I know I have to go a long way before I will be a really good teacher. Nevertheless, I have made the first step – I accepted meditation. I allowed myself to feel it as a natural way to perceive myself, and I am satisfied with the outcomes I get.

So please thank yourself for your interest in meditation and celebrate your own personal moment of silence and peace. Silence is inspiring. Freedom is close. Peace is inside you.

About this blog

We live in the world characterized by significant social and cultural complexity. Brought closer by the Internet and modern communication media, challenged by the immense variety of global problems, confronted with the choice of political, economical, social and cultural paradigms, we – the humanity – form the world around us through our actions and decisions. While social and cultural complexity are recognized by the academic community as well as by the general public as the issue that deserves research and consideration, the complexity of our spiritual reality has hardly been tackled in a profound and systemic way.

Despite the shortage of research and exploration, we have to acknowledge that complexity penetrates not only our daily social reality – it is embedded in ourselves as living beings. There is hardly anything more complex and beautiful as the soul and spirit of a human being.

This website is a blog and also a research project, which aims to contribute to the existing understanding of complexity through tackling it from the standpoint of spirituality. My goal is to fill in the gaps of our knowledge and to expand our perception of spirituality and complexity through reflection and exploration.

In this blog I intend to:

- share my knowledge and experience in the fields of meditation, relaxation, and self-development

- write about my research on complexity and spirituality

- and, hopefully, co-create together with my readers, achieving new levels of understanding and fostering knowledge-sharing through meaningful discussion

I welcome you in my blog and invite you to take the road of spiritual discovery.

Love and best regards,

Violetta

creator and author of Spiritual Complexity