Clearly, as Peter Vaill (1996, p. 43) admits, “learning as a way of being is a very capacious idea.” This enterprise is not for the faint of heart. And it requires a sustained appreciation for learning in all of its many forms. We are invited to view the world and our state of being from quite a range of perspectives—and even perspectives that seem contradictory. Dr. Freud did a good job of varying the perspectives and modes of learning he introduces to Daniel. He took his client on a trip down a turbulent world of multiple ideas, diverse sources of information, and a cluster of sometimes contradictory intentions. It is while traveling through this white-water environment that Daniel potentially gains a clear, insightful sense of his own being. As Peter Vaill suggests, this might be the most important learning outcomes that we can achieve.
Joy’s Sea: Following up on the profound perspective regarding learning offered by Peter Vaill, I wish to introduce an extraordinary spiritual leader, Brugh Joy, who has conducted many workshops on consciousness and transcendence and written about his own spiritual journey. Joy can speak to the ingredients of an Appreciative Triangle and to Vaill’s journey through a white-water environment.
Brugh Joy (Joy, 1979, p. 7) promotes the expansion of (and intense appreciation for) the reality that we can choose to create and embrace outside us and inside us:
“Transformation enlarges the context of reality. The awareness is lifted up into states of consciousness where the multidimensional nature of existence is perceived, not just conceived; where it is experienced, not just imagined; where each dogma and each absolute truth is seen as but a single facet of a superconscious whole called Beingness. In the totality of Beingness there is no absolute anything—no rights or wrongs, no higher or lower aspects—only the infinite interaction of forces, subtle and gross, that have meaning only in relationship to one another. Absolutes are concoctions of our rational minds. Reality must never be confused with concoctions. The Transformational Process, the release from fixed beliefs, allows the fragmented awareness to meld into universality.”
We find the essence of transcendent leveraging in this breathtaking challenge to our usual way of seeing and being in reality. The other leveraging challenges in our life, range from the role played by memories (residing in our hippocampus) to the role played by emotions (residing in our amygdala). It is worth noting that these two neural structures reside alongside one another in our limbic system. These limbic structures merge into Brugh Joy’s transformation process. Perhaps, as Joy suggests, it is a matter of abandoning our “grown-up” sense of reality—what Thomas Kuhn (2012) labeled, “normal science”–and returning to a fresh, pre-socialized sense of wonderment about reality (Kuhn’s preparadigmatic state). Joy (Joy, 1979, p. 20) proclaims:
“. . . as we begin to use the beginner’s mind to see things the way they are rather than the way we have been conditioned to see them, we can also begin to understand . . . fundamentally, our all-too-human habit of taking our belief systems as real. . . . [W]e can also learn to see the magnificence of our creative potential in the rich variations of themes called life, religion, government and so on.”
