As I get ready to go to India tomorrow, I find myself torn between excitement about the project I am working on, and sadness at not being able to meet as usual with the Saybrook community as it comes together in person. This will be the first RC I have missed in nine years. I will miss the revitalizing energy, the sense of commitment that is so strong at Saybrook, and the collegiality of the three hundred folks whose learning journeys I have participated in.

In the last few months, though happy to be enjoying a different pace, and time to renew my own intellectual energy, I have discovered a new syndrome. As with “phantom limb,” where symptoms persist even after amputation, being severed from a community one loves invokes the same kind of sensation. Even though I am no president I find myself worrying, fretting and anticipating the pains and triumphs of the people I have been so close to. Watching it all from the sidelines feel weird. In my minds eye I look around the dining room and as I recall the colorful mixture that says Saybrook my heart fills with appreciation for the riches that the Saybrook community represents.

These are challenging times, my friends. But my mentor Carl Rogers once said that everyone and every community has within them vast resources with which to meet and transcend even the darkest challenges. I believe that, and I have confidence that the Saybrook vision still has something transformative to give to the world. We are all in this together. Have a great RC.   more »

Transcript of a presentation made on the occasion of receiving the Donald N. Michael Award from Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco, November 9, 2002.
Word version included as attachment.   more »

Maureen O’Hara Ph.D,
Saybrook Graduate School
747 Front St. San Francisco, CA 94904

Presented at the General Assembly of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia, November 2005.
Session: From Certainty to Uncertainty: Thought, Theory and Action in a modern world. David Peat, Chair

mohara@saybrook.edu
website: maureen.ohara.net

Maybe the time has come in our civilization for a period of creative suspension. True creativity appears when we stay within the tension of a question or an issue and do not rush to assuage our insecurity with easy solutions. We are all essential parts of this modern world and must exercise our collective creativity to discover orders beyond, new forms of action and exercise our ability to hold a variety of viewpoints in creative tension and mutual respect. David Peat.

The sign of an educated man is one who can hold two contradictory ideas in mind at the same time and continue to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I believe we … need a revolution. We need a mindset change if we are to attain a just and sustainable future. And the revolution must be in our thinking. As Einstein has said, "We cannot solve the problems of today at the level of thinking at which they were first created." Another way of saying it is what one of my psychologist friends said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Jean-Lou Chameau, Dean of Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology has said, "We need to change the mindsets not just the problem sets” . Anthony D. Cortese
An educated person has the ability to appreciate, learn from, and embrace contradiction, even when we might prefer closure. Peter Salovey.


Introduction
We are living in a period when foundational givens of thought are on the move and when the cosmology that has framed experience in Western societies is unraveling. This is creating a shift in our understanding of reality so fundamental that it undermines many of the bedrock assumptions on which Western consciousness is based.

After an almost 500 year march from medievalism to modernism, during which time we in the West have addressed our desires for knowledge and eased our existential anxieties through a variously titrated mixture of metaphysics, superstition, natural science, alchemy, theory, and practical knowledge, the world is changing so fast around us that our minds cannot keep up.

It is hard to overemphasize the implications for knowledge in the conceptual revolution that is underway. In the sciences and technology, this shift from a world of Newtonian certainty and predictability to one of quantum uncertainty and chaotic unpredictability comes largely as the logical consequence of discoveries in theoretical physics at the opening of the 20th century and to the development of the mathematics of non-linear systems in 1950s. Taken together these intellectual developments represent a fundamental shift in our way of understanding the world, and as, Peat says, “puts an end to that Enlightenment dream of conquering the world through pure reason.”(Peat, 2005.p.5) It also reopens the possibility of dimensions of realities not apprehensible through rationality and objectivity.

There are many ways to think about this great unraveling, with significant implications for scientific research, ethics and philosophy of science, for instance. I would like to explore it as a psychological event—and discuss the simultaneous danger of mental distress and opportunity for consciousness breakthrough or growth. Further, I would like to propose some steps that those of us in the knowledge business—whether inside the academy or outside— might take to avoid possible cultural and psychological meltdown, and instead to enhance the likelihood that humanity will find ways to embrace the learning opportunity offered by its collective existential predicament and cultivate the necessary capacities of mind to live well in an unavoidably uncertain world.

The missing elephant
In the familiar Sufi tale of the blind people groping to try to understand what they have in hand, the point of the story is that the blind seekers can transcend their own partial knowledge and understand the totality of the elephant—the mysterious whole—only if they recognize the partiality of their view point, and can pool their various local knowledge of the parts towards an understanding of the whole. The story presupposes, however, that there is a position—that of the story teller—from where it is possible to know the whole. Furthermore it presupposes that there is already a whole to be known. For reasons much more situational than ontological, we now face a world where as Donald N. Michael once observed, the elephant is missing (Michael 1999). Or more accurately, there are an infinite number of elephants, chickens, spirits, rainbows, concepts, music--potential patterns to be recognized or produced, each an emergent phenomenon of particular participant-subject relationships. And furthermore, the cosmos may well be more vast than we can ever really know.

Lost at sea
No matter the issue—global warming, terrorism, famine, avian flu, the nature of love, the location of a housing development, the existence of being after death or care of aged, once you begin to include into your thinking all the information that could potentially illuminate your subject, you find you must look at technology, science, sociology, folk lore, religion, psychology, anthropology, media, personalities, politics, big picture, up close, history, current events, future predictions and so on out into an ever expanding universe of relevance. Before you know it, you are awash in a sea of information where the more you learn the less you understand. And despite the availability of sophisticated data- mining techniques and ever more intelligent search engines, the sheer volume of information—good, bad and ugly—coming at us from everywhere, at accelerating speed, in different languages, epistemologies, assumptive frames --sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary—means that even if we had the most super-duper pattern-recognizing-mega-computers and data-mining techniques with which to process it, we could no longer hope to separate signal from noise to make the kind of sense we used to refer to as truth.

We experience information overload, yet at the same time there is a widening realization of how much we don’t know. We need information to understand our information, we don’t agree on priorities, discipline, epistemology, metaphysics, metaphors, values. Is global warming a technical problem, moral problem, or a social psychological problem—or no problem at all—and who decides? How much of the context do we include—too much and the signal disappears, too little and we can’t join up the dots—in either case, we miss 9/11, and so on. Just a few years ago, the favorite metaphor for life in the age of hyper-rapid information flow was “white water rafting.” Increasingly it is “lost at sea.”

Uncertainty as the new existential given
Such a world is a fundamentally uncertain world. Gone for ever is the security that for every question there is a single simple answer—even one, as Mencken quipped, that is wrong. Our relentless search for new answers is itself a source of new ignorance, undermining old certainties at the same time as it creates new ones, only to have them disintegrate in turn in the face of new knowledge. Our irrepressible curiosity has brought us finally to a place where we can no longer hope to comprehend our world as a whole and to where we no longer have a basis to trust what we once trusted. Should we trust science for instance? Our doctor? Priest? Tarot reader? Fox News? Al Jazeera? Dreams? Intuition? Logic? Wikipedia? Me? And if so, why?

Powerful times.
Cultural psychologist Richard Shweder has observed that stable communities derive their stability in part from a shared “cosmology” , (or “grand narrative”) which coherently and convincingly explains to their inhabitants why things are the way they are (Shweder and Bourne 1982). This cosmology includes the interpenetrated and culturally embedded stories, symbols, language, metaphors, beliefs, epistemologies, morality, view of reality, cognitive and emotional routines that make any particular culture. It defines what is sane and what is crazy, what is mature, smart, foolish, good, evil, beautiful, worth striving for, worth living for, worth dying for, is the right way to think, perceive, feel and act. It is the role of the socializing institutions—schools, families, churches, governments, media—to inculcate these ideas and values into the population. When the cultural consensus breaks down, societies and the individuals in them come unglued.

A shift in cosmology on a scale implied by the end of the Enlightenment dream, taken together with an awareness brought to us by ever present global media, that our cosmology is actually just one of any number of reasonable stories to live by, is highly destabilizing. In the emerging global context , where previously trusted authorities and sources of knowledge, must compete in the information marketplace with literally countless others, we are left with radical uncertainty not only as a theoretical reality, or as a technological limitation, but as an existential reality. For a great many of us, this presents us with a serious psychological challenge. As any psychotherapist can attest, an existential challenge can be both threat and opportunity; a source of anxiety and defeat or a spur to transformational learning.

Capacity gap.
Peat (2005) argues that the fundamental complexity and uncertainty of our times requires us to understand that, “we are all essential parts of this modern world and must exercise our collective creativity to discover orders beyond, new forms of action and exercise our ability to hold a variety of viewpoints in creative tension and mutual respect.” If he is right, and I think he is, we must ask if we are psychologically prepared for such a task and if we are not, what can and must we do to become so.

As a clinical psychologist and educator, my look at the evidence suggests that while some small percentage of us may have achieved the level of psychological development implied in Peat’s statement—which is actually pretty sophisticated—most of us have not and by a long way. We are mostly over our heads, where many of the challenges we face every day require levels of consciousness, habits of mind, and ways of being that are beyond the level of psychological development at which most people are operating. (Kegan 1994).

And I think the evidence suggests that a great many of us are not all coping well with being out of our depth. It is generally accepted in world health circles, for instance, that we are experiencing a global mental health pandemic. The World Health Organisation reports of 2001 and 2002 reveal mounting evidence of the global burden of psychological distress and violence. WHO suggests that by 2020, depression will be second only to heart disease as a source of illness in the world (2001; Organization 2001; 2002) . This shows up in individuals in symptoms of anxiety and depression, self-destructive and violent behavior and it shows up in communities as marginalization, alienation, hopelessness and extremism. Though much of this is due to such factors as war, poverty and other problems, even in advanced and economically privileged societies, mental illness is on the rise. At the level of nations the unraveling shows up as failing states, civil war and repressive regimes (Hannah, 2005).

The Nuffield Trust : UK review of policy futures for health examined the deterioration in “the social context for healthy living”, pointing out how stretched people feel when there is “no time for life, no partner for life, no job for life.” (1999) In the U.S. the 9/11 Commission Report, sees people turning to fundamentalism as a source of stability in a world in which many have lost their bearings (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Against the United States, 2004). The report notes Osama Bin Ladin’s appeal to “people disoriented by cyclonic change as they confront modernity and globalisation”. Palestinian psychiatrist and human rights activist Eyad Sarraj, describes the evolution of what he calls “a paranoid culture” in the Middle East, where older cultural coherence was destroyed by colonial actions in the region and nothing coherent replaces it (Interview with Tikkun Magazine, February, 2005). In its Readiness for the Future Index of 2001 the World Economic Forum states that “social harmony” in a nation is necessary for sustainable competitiveness, but notes that this is deteriorating in many countries (World Economic Forum, 2001).

Perhaps, we should not be surprised about how unprepared we are for the new context of complexity and uncertainty in which we find ourselves. After all, in the West, socializing institutions, especially our educational institutions are still mostly designed with the Enlightenment dream in mind. For all the usual reasons—entrenched interests, bureaucratic inertia, established hierarchies, revered tradition, ideology, and so on, the educational establishment has been highly resistant to fundamental change in its basic commitment to the Western scientific canon and over the last decades science and engineering rule the roost. This is especially true of the universities and colleges that are often “prisoners of their own legacies…trapped in long-established procedures and norms” and where legitimate concerns for quality and accountability approached through the frames of the Enlightenment dream, has lead to an exaggerated focus on metrics, the unintended consequences of which is to freeze innovation and to overload teachers. ((Kelley 2005) p. 212.

Increasingly, higher education as a socializing institution is seen to be failing its students and the societies that support them. Smith (Smith 2004) has suggested that in large measure this is because the curriculum increasingly misses concerns of a generation already living in a post-Enlightenment world, that our schools are organized for failure and that our “industrial model” does not work for the 21st century. In the US, less than 50% of young people actually enter college and only 50% of those leave with a completed degree. The figures for blacks and Latinos are even more distressing. Even those who do graduate do not develop the needed competencies for success in today’s work force or for life. In particular, according to employers, they lack the higher order mental capacities such as critical thinking, imagination, analysis of ideas, creativity, expressive skills, and social skills that are now required for success in the most jobs. This misalignment between the curriculum within the academy and the world outside it, will become all the more salient in the not so distant future in which China and India—exposed to European thought relatively recently, and after millennia of seeing the world through radically different frames—become the dominant economies. Inadequate capacity to deal with the inevitable uncertainties of life in a world where Eastern modes of thought have equal standing along side Western, for instance, will leave the West vulnerable, yet in the West, we continue to construct educational programs as if no other forms of thought even exist, let alone have epistemic legitimacy. If a student brings up questions from outside the Western canon such as questions about talking to ancestral spirits or other non-material beings, for instance, they are still likely to be ridiculed. Singapore, in contrast, has already realized that to be successful in the emerging future, a new commitment to mental formation of its young is required where a far more expanded conception of consciousness guides learning programs. In 1997, the Prime Minister launched the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation initiative where emphasis is placed on the ability to function in ambiguous situations, problem –solving skills, creativity, flexibility, new literacies, and self-motivation (1997, Ministry of Education, Singapore) (retrieved at http://www.moe.gov.sg/corporate/mission_statement.htm) .

From these and many similar indicators, it seems obvious that we have come to a place in our development where the inherited ways of thinking and knowing are inadequate to the task at hand.

New minds for new times
In a recent presentation, Walter Anderson, quoted Stewart Brand, who suggested that since we now possess the power to destroy worlds or to transform them, “We are Gods, and we might as well get used to it.” (Anderson 2005) If this is true—and I assume he means by this that we now have the kind of responsibility for the future of the planet that was once thought to belong to beings of a higher order-- then it seems to me urgent that we consider what kind of education this unprecedented level of responsibility requires.

Questions arise. What would ensure that enough of us across the various world cultures develop the capacity to hold not just two opposing ideas at the same but many; and to resist the desire for easy certainty and premature closure? What kind of socializing experiences can we invent so we learn to see the world through new eyes and to take in its complexity without becoming overwhelmed by it? What will help us stay “within the tension of a question or an issue” and live in the messiness for longer than is comfortable in order that creative new forms can emerge? What do we need to learn to live in peace and with respect for those we have been taught to see as the “other”. In a rapidly moving technology landscape what do we need to teach so that we develop “just in time” technical and content experts who are willing to let go of obsolete information and to continuously learn? What kinds of experiences would help people steward our natural resources, protect the ecosystem that we are part of while at the same time we feed the next few billions of additional people? Can we reclaim lost capacities such as “dream time”, communication with animals, and connect to the spirits of a place?

Education for uncertain times.
The mental capacities aimed at in the Western canon reflect those which generations of academicians believe are necessary for success in the industrialized world--objectivity, reason and rationality, linear logic, critical thinking, radical skepticism, secularism, a focus and clarity, either/or dichotomies, sensitivity to difference, preference for fixed categories and sharp boundaries, empiricism, analysis, quantification, self-mastery, enough certainty for confident agency. Obviously, these capacities remain highly relevant in the emerging new world, and need to remain a focus of socialization attention—in schools and outside. In the new world of uncertainty the Enlightenment culture does not evaporate, but rather becomes subsumed within the new world view. The modern, science dominated world will be with us for the foreseeable future, and we can safely assume that as the developing nations enter the industrialized world they will ensure that some part of the acculturation will involve learning to think in these ways. (Schofer and Meyer 2005).

But the new context of complexity and uncertainty calls for the cultivation of levels of consciousness and habits mind that go far beyond this and success will require new modes of consciousness. Let me briefly, and with some trepidation describe what some of these dimensions of consciousness beyond the modern might be.

We must learn, or rather relearn, to view ourselves subjects in a world of other subjects. Though as part of the methodology of science and technology subject-object thought has been immensely productive, it has arguably also brought us to the edge of destruction. With its arms-length relationship to the world, it has severed the deep empathic links our ancestors had with the earth, and with their kin and with other beings. We must reconnect. We need to cultivate intuition and appreciation of the non-rational; not as substitutes for reason and skepticism, but as a complement to them. We need to cultivate both/and thinking, enhance our capacity for holistic perception, gestalt awareness, network logic and pattern recognition. Along with a capacity to focus, we need to be at home with fuzziness and a wide-angle view. We will need to balance a fear that we have not enough information with the problems of having too much. People will need to become comfortable in a world of fluid boundaries, understanding the world as a continuous web of relationally connected integrities. We will need to be able to work at the places where knowledge domains and interests overlap and interact. To make all this work, and to actually be at home in the creative tensions posed by a world in transformation, we will need to make explicit the importance of psychological self-care, emotional maturity and the nourishment of the soul. This means we must recognize and honor the important place in most people’s lives of what is called religion or spirituality.

If these are the ends to which we strive, what might be some of the approaches to learning and knowing that could provide the means?

There are four holistically interrelated dimensions which educational institutions must rethink—a new mission, new curriculum content, new pedagogy, new modes of inquiry,

I New mission
Firstly, education at all levels needs to rethink its mission in light of the emerging connected world. This mission must go beyond simply providing workers for the global economy. We also need to make it a high priority to cultivate the kinds of people—individuals and collectives—with the necessary scope of awareness and level of mental development to create sustainable systems in which human beings thrive and can co-exist on a fragile planet. We must aim at an expansion of or evolution of the modal consciousness of our species. Anything less, is whistling past the cemetery.
Unless we evolve our ways of thinking to embrace a wider sense of responsibility not only for self, or tribe, but for entire planetary system including its people and other creatures, nature may well decide that its experiment with homo sapiens sapiens should be abandoned.

II New content
ß It is obvious that science and emerging technologies will remain crucial. Even in the unlikely event people say no to such galloping technological innovation—which I doubt—we will still need the knowledge to maintain our tools and toys and sustain and improve our quality of life and our environment. But given the rapidity with which old knowledge becomes obsolete and new discoveries are made, curriculum must be more process focused and content needs to be “open source” updated constantly in response to feedback from a changing world.
ß New literacies must be added to the existing canon--eco-literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, cultural literacy, spiritual literacy, epistemological fluency are all core capacities in the new context.
ß Curriculum must be globalized. This means more than simply learning about other societies. As long as people beyond ones own national boarders are considered “other”, vital perspectives on human possibilities will be hidden from view. Global citizens must enlarge who they think of as “we”. This will mean learning to put local knowledge into larger perspectives, and bringing a global and multi-perspectival approach to local knowledge.
ß Given the inevitability of the “law of unintended consequences”, consideration of possible futures must become part of everyday thinking not just of futurists but of everyone who must make decisions—in other words most of us. Futures studies must become a core element of all education and must include awareness of, and responsibility for the short term, medium term and long term future.

III New pedagogies
Not only what we learn but how we learn will need to adapt to the new agendas.
ß A shift from a content focus to process focus. From a focus on knowledge as a noun to a focus on learning as a verb. Expertise will still be needed, but the ephemeral nature of information, and the speed with which we must act, means that learning how to harvest information from multiple sources as needed will become more important that accumulating a body of knowledge. Discernment, critical and appreciative appraisal of knowledge all become essential skills.
ß Whole person pedagogies will have to be developed that involve experiential activities where theory can emerge from practice.
ß If we are to keep our heads in the dizzying world of contradiction and complexity, “inner work” that leads to psychological maturity needs to be part of all learning environments. Such mind development approaches as yoga, psychotherapy, the arts, creativity, meditation, contemplation, self-reflection, will be all be important elements in learning.
ß Curriculum most make room for love, emotions, creativity, spirituality and aesthetics, because these all influence how sense is made, how priorities are set and how the world is interpreted. The Singaporean education ministry recently mandated 30% reduction is “required curriculum” to permit learners and teachers time to think and to process their experience. They believe that if they are to remain innovative, this will require openness to unpredictable, uncontrolled, and emergent experiences.
ß More attention must be given to learning about human relationships, group dynamics, and unconscious dimensions of behavior. Since most projects will require collaboration with others who are different, high levels of social competence become essential
ß Education must be problem-embracing and case-based, and knowledge and learning derived from attempts to solve real problems.
ß We need to provide “cognitive apprenticeships” where learners can be socialized into the tacit dimensions of emerging fields by those who are already in them.

IV New modes of inquiry
ß The context of complexity means that we must wean ourselves from our overdependence on positivist science as the only acceptable form of knowledge, and reclaim qualitative, more holistic and even contemplative modes of inquiry.
ß We need to emphasize systems inquiry not so that we can control systems, because most of them are too complex to be controlled, but, as Donella Meadows puts it, to “dance with them”.(Meadows 2005)
ß We need a new emphasis on pattern recognition, learning how to distinguish “signal from noise” and how to navigate the exploding world of “open source” information—Wikipedia, blogs etc.
ß We need to go beyond quantification with expanded emphasis on the human sciences such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, appreciative inquiry, action learning, contemplation, scenaric inquiry, ethnography, reflective practice, journalism, symbology, critical inquiry, discernment, meditation.
ß We need to further develop approaches to what Nicolescu has called transdisciplinary knowledge production (Nicolescu 2002; Nowotny 2003) in recognition of the fact that in complex problems research is increasingly conducted in its application and its application frequently involves teams from many disciplines, as well as practitioners and lay people. The kind of open process learning referred to as “Atelier learning” (Brown 2005) retrieved at http://ctl.sdsu.edu/pict/JSB_digital_learning.doc) can provide a safe space where errors are embraced and where practical applicability trumps theory.

Age of Innovation
My colleague Eamonn Kelly has said that the world may be entering a “Cambrian explosion” of innovation and experimentation in education and learning (Kelley 2005). We are gaining knowledge of the brain and cognitive and emotional functions at an astonishing rate and this knowledge is already being used in instructional design to enhance learning and performance. We will see “transhuman” mind enhancement through drugs and various implanted technological mental add-ons very soon (Hughes 2005).

Announcements about innovations in educational delivery models arrive every day. Reports on new ventures--distance learning bringing classes to remote Indian villages by satellite, new business-academy partnerships, Barefoot academies, service learning that takes the academy into the world, apprenticeships and corporate training that tack back and forth between academy and workplace. The boundaries between the research universities and commerce have all but disappeared, prestige institutions band together to create joint programs to satisfy the massive appetite for learning in societies like China and sub-Saharan Africa.

At lower grade levels, educational innovation abounds. Even though hobbled by gargantuan bureaucracies and political wrangling , innovative teachers are gradually introducing systems thinking, group techniques such as “sharing circles” and creativity labs, classes in eco-literacy, digital media production, contemplation (though you cannot call it meditation!) and are increasingly employing the latest research from cognitive science in their instructional design. Adventurous youngsters too, are also part of the innovation--they are blogging, creating their own multimedia of high quality, doing simulations, participating in online role playing games with thousands of players worldwide. Many of these games expand the imagination, requiring intense participation, long attention spans, and the development of sophisticated mental strategies.

Humanity—or at least large parts of it—has faced such inflection points before, where new forms of consciousness have been called for—the shift from the medieval to the modern world for instance, and then later as a result of the industrial revolution. Some societies have thrived, and others have disappeared. The response to the present conceptual crisis must be to embrace the adventure and harness the potential for transformative learning that is implicit in such uncertain times. The stakes are high: If we fail to learn fast enough the world could, as it was in the 13th century, be cast into a Mad Max world of violence, craziness and despair. But on the other hand, and it is here that we must aim our efforts, the potential exists that we might use the challenge of these times to learn our way into the future.

If we can provide the supporting structures in education and other socializing institutions to permit us to live in the creative tension of unanswered questions and emergent possibilities, and if new or reclaimed capacities become integrated into our existing forms of knowledge, we may as Peat suggests, “ discover orders beyond.” This could conceivably result in a new stage of human evolution. It seems to me that this should be the goal of education for the global 21st century.


References

(2001). World Health Report 2001: Mental health: New understanding, new hope.

(2002). World Health Organization Report 2002.

Anderson, W. T. (2005). Fragmegration, mystery and unity: Some thoughts on the global brain. .

Brown, J. S. (2005). "Learning in the Digital Age (21st Century):
Catalyzing Creativity by Artful Making &
by Honoring the Vernacular of Today’s Students retrieved at http://ctl.sdsu.edu/pict/JSB_digital_learning.doc."

Hughes, J. (2005). Changing Our Minds: Electronic and Chemical Modification of Cognition and Emotion. General Assembly of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia. 14th -17th November.

Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

Kelley, E. (2005). Powerful times: Rising to the challenge of our uncertain world. Upper SAddle River, N.J., Wharton School Publishing.

Meadows, D. (2005). Dancing with systems. . Ecological literacy: Educating our children for a sustainable world. M. K. S. a. Z. Barlow. San Francisco, Sieraa Books.

Michael, D. N. (1999). "Some observations regarding a missing elephant." Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

Nicolescu, B. (2002). Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. Albany, State UNiversity of New York Press.

Nowotny, H. (2003) The potential of transdisciplinarity. Interdisciplines (retreived from: http://www.interdisciplines.org/interdisciplinarity/papers/5/printable/discussions)

Schofer, E. and J. W. Meyer (2005). "The world wide expansion of higher education." Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. 32.

Shweder, R. A. and E. Bourne (1982). Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally? Cultural concepts of mental health and therapy. A. J. Marsela and G. White. Boston, Reidel: 97-137.

Smith, P. (2004). The quiet crisis: How higher education is failing America. Bolton. MA., Anker Publising Co.

I want to open by acknowledging with sadness, the passing of Robert Shapiro, husband of Board member Alison Bonds Shapiro and great friend to Saybrook and the entire human potential movement. Bob passed away on October 4th. I dedicate my words to him.

I also ask us to hold in our hearts and minds the people of Pakistan and the Kashmir region. The devastating earthquake has killed and injured hundreds of thousands and we must stand in solidarity with them.

Thank you all for being here. I particularly want to thank Terry Hopper and Ann Luckiesh, and to acknowledge their unstinting efforts to make this gathering happen. I have felt your love for me and your care for Saybrook in all you have done to create a space for our celebration this evening that is both festive and I hope in some ways sacred.

I also thank Saybrook’s new president Art Bohart . Art has taken the helm under particularly difficult circumstances. He is also an introvert, so I am pretty sure a party for a former president was not high up on his to do list! Thank you, Art.

But I have much more than a party to feel gratitude to Saybrook about.

When Margaret Mead reminded us never to underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world, she might have been speaking of the Saybrook team of faculty, staff and board that for over thirty years has nurtured this small institution and helped bring it this far. I think of three times acting president Rudy Melone, who in 1996, with Faculty members Tom Greening, Dennis Jaffe and Amedeo Giorgi, put on a full court press to persuade Bob and me to leave our sybaritic life on the beach in Southern California, to sign on with Saybrook. I also wish to acknowledge Gerry Bush—that big bear of an Irishman, who hired me exactly nine years ago this week. He called and asked me three times—because the first two times I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the Blue Angels overhead —to become the Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs. I will always be grateful to Gerry for taking a chance on me only a few months after I arrived green from the provinces, with a promotion to Executive Vice President and entrusting me with an institution-wide organizational transformation. The whole school scenario and planning process resulted in renewal of our commitment to our humanistic heritage and values, our transformational agenda, a new long range vision, and a decision and plan to restructure and rebuild so as to develop the operational capacities to take the school on the next stage of its journey. It was one of those times of rapid institutional learning, it was hard work, and it was also a lot of fun. I thank Michael Doyle, who as Chairman of the Saybrook board, on the tragic and untimely death of Gerry Bush less than two years into our transformational process, trusted me to continue the job we had started, only then as Saybrook’s president. In the time since, Saybrook grew from 280 to a high of 520 students. Our annual budget grew from 2.9 million dollar budget to over 8 million, we now have over 600 alumni doing first rate transformational work in the world, we have state-of-the-art business systems, information services, interactive website, and a new blend of our traditional one-to-one mentorship model and online cohort learning. We have a new facility, a highly professional staff, a global reputation for excellence and academic creativity, faculty with international standing, and we have money in the bank. Amedeo, Tom, Dennis, Michael (and Rudy and Gerry, where ever you are), I hope you feel that I warranted your faith.

But obviously a President does not build a school. It takes a team—and then some—and I have been blessed with terrific colleagues. There are many more people than is possible to mention by name today --staff, faculty, board, supporters, consultants and friends--, who have been crucial in our collective journey, but as I look around here, I see many of you here in the room. It fills my heart to at last be able to thank you in person for your efforts, collegiality and solidarity, to acknowledge your enormous contributions to this institution. I also want to express my gratitude for the overwhelming support that Bob and I have received these past months. Saybrook is very fortunate that you are a continuing part of it, and I am blessed to call you colleagues and friends.

Thinking about what I wanted to say today involved some rather deep reflection on my nine years at Saybrook. You all know me as a person who values candor, and transparency. My entire professional life has been focused on the question of how we build organizations, communities and ultimately a shared human future, in which all human beings can participate as whole persons, with the freedom to know and interpret the world on their own terms--as subjects--to be the authors of their own lives, and to speak their own truth freely and without censure or reprisal. This is the humanistic vision at the heart of any democratic society, and is key to reconnecting to the unknowable whole.

No matter how different our starting points may be, I believe if our diverse perspectives can be shared openly and fully, in a mutually respectful dialogue, we have the chance—though not the guarantee—that our inquiry might help us reach some measure of common ground. I think you also know me well enough, that as a humanist, feminist, and civil rights activist, I am acutely attuned to and have always resisted the ways in which dissenting or unpopular voices are silenced, through, power, intimidation, shame, legal maneuvering, cooptation and apathy. I hope for a better world, and I see my work is to help bring it into being.

I say this as a preface because I want you to understand why I am choosing to focus tonight not only on the local story of Saybrook itself, but on the deeper and more important cultural story of which we are part . On what it was nine years ago that I found compelling enough in the Saybrook vision to disrupt my husband and my lives for it, why I am still committed to this mission, and on what those of us with a personal stake in this movement might yet accomplish together.

My friends, we are living in tumultuous and uncertain times in our nation and in the world. Even before 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq, there was already a rising awareness that despite immense advances in technology, connectivity, longevity, standard of living, the social consensus—the grand narratives or world views upon which the last 500 years of Western cultural development has been based, are unraveling and coming apart, and have been for some time. As established consensus breaks down all over the world, a new global consciousness is emerging for which we are unprepared. We live in a period of cultural upheaval on a scale that the world has never before seen. There is much to be viewed as positive happening, and on some other day we can explore the opportunities of life in changing times. But there is also much danger and much for us to do.

The surface signs of a world turned upside down are everywhere – rising levels of level of rage, alienation, polarization, environmental degradation, the general lack of civility, apathy and violence, provide a steady drum roll announcing a world pushed beyond its limits. Our context of boundless complexity, unpredictable change, messiness and paradox, confounds even the smartest of us,—we are drowning in data, information, contradictions and it sickens us. Our species’ awesome intellect has created a world it can no longer understand. As the pace speeds up we fall further and further behind in our attempts to make sense of things—to find meaning. We are out of our depth and we become increasingly bewildered and anxious.

So like our Dark Age ancestors, we grasp at anything that offers us ways to simplify or organize things, to reduce the complexity and uncertainties to something easier to cope with. In the face of the unraveling we invent brave attempts to exert ever more rational control over our circumstances through bureaucracies-- with their chains of command, rules of order, management by objectives, measurable outcomes, as if that will make our uncertain world more manageable, less scary and more predictable. And if bureaucracy does not do it for us—and it rarely does for long—we can turn to fundamentalisms of various kinds— for alternative sources of certainty and freedom from ambiguity. Other options for coping include denial, cynicism, delusional thinking, projection, and distraction, and it that doesn’t work—we can always lash out and find a scapegoat. And if this means we must ignore or betray our souls, our anxieties, our emotions or our relationships, “so be it”—say the pragmatists—“it is necessary—it is reality”

It is not hard to find examples of such attempts to reduce the complexity of life in these times. When the President asks us to accept his nomination for Supreme Court Justice by reassuring us that he knows her and does “not expect her to change over the next decades” he speaks to his own and the people’s needs for simplicity, order and predictability.

In unraveling times—whatever local or global—promises to make things simple, run on time, get things done are appealing; silencing dissent, forsaking dialog for manipulation, information control, misinformation and spin become acceptable because they are expedient; taking decisive action—even if unwise, inept, or unjust—is preferable to living in the messiness of thoughtful and inclusive deliberation; and though it may chill to the bone those of us in the change business, for millions including many of those who govern us, the appeal of a strong father—whether on earth on in heaven—who provides reassurance, a simple story and consistency in the face of uncertainty, is extremely comforting. Times of unraveling are fraught with psychic danger and the risk of regression to less mature ways of being, and for losing faith in ourselves and each other, is high.

But I do not raise these issues tonight to bum you out or wind you up. This is a celebration. I raise them with you tonight, as I move into my new role as President Emerita, because I believe today, as I believed nine years ago—perhaps even more intensely even than then, that Saybrook’s core mission must be to provide an alternative and transformative response to the psychological and spiritual challenges of our times. We owe it to our founders, to our history and we owe to our future to step out into that learning space where crisis become opportunity.

Saybrook was born at another time of great upheaval—where to those with the sensitivity to hear it, the song of new a new kind of consciousness seemed to be emerging. It was a time of cultural turmoil, vibrancy, protest and hope—generating new and heretical ideas about ourselves and about the kind of world we wanted to live in. Saybrook’s founders (two whom --Arthur Warmoth and Eleanor Chriswell--are in this room tonight) created a place where brave new ideas that challenged previous certainties could find sustenance, and within that crucible of intellectual activity and collegiality we call transformational education be developed and refined. They imagined an intellectually rigorous community where established and cherished assumptions-about human potential, about gender, race, consciousness, politics, and reality itself could be opened up for re-examination. In its choice of cutting edge content, Saybrook encouraged people to cross established disciplinary boundaries, bringing together diverse ideas and practices, and to become alchemists of new ways of thinking and of being.

The curriculum then, and the curriculum today, was conscientiously heretical, challenging the cannons of conventional academia— consciousness studies, organizational and systems design, transformational psychology, integral health, peace studies, studies on gender, race and class, eastern psychology, engaged spirituality, epistemology, social criticism—all asking through multiple lenses, the core existential questions of the modern condition. “Who are we?” “How should we live?” “What does it mean to be a fully human being?” “What can we do to sustain human aspiration and advance human potential?” “How do we address evil, ease suffering and reduce pain?” “What must be our relationship to each other, to our environment, to the cosmos—to the future?” A look through the Saybrook catalogue is an inspiration—a call to action.

But Saybrook was always about than more than the content of its curriculum. Saybrook is about expanding consciousness.

In my experience, the scholars and students who come to Saybrook, unlike those I meet at other institutions, have already awakened to the fact that a great sea change is underway that cannot be managed with the same kinds of minds and systems that created it. They understand that they are active participants in the evolution consciousness. People come here already with a song of the future in their hearts, seeking a place where their experience, accumulated wisdom, and their desire to transform themselves and their worlds, will be met by mentors, colleagues, playmates, healers, lovers and friends, who will take their vision seriously. They come here as warriors and lovers—warriors against the forces of conformity and accommodation, lovers of the great mystery we call life, and lovers of the immense possibility we call humanity. They are willing to enter the darkness, to go to places where their certainties are challenged, and when their old meanings can no longer sustain, they are willing to let them go and search for new sources. They are people who have the courage to walk into the fire, to risk their easy answers and to entertain new heresies. At Saybrook you will hear story after story of people who come here full of conviction, with the book they want to write already mapped out, only to discover in their dialogues with faculty and colleagues, that they are made of larger stuff, and that they have bigger work to do. Saybrook is not like most other professional schools, providing training and legitimization to those who seek to fit into a world that is already dying. This is worthy work, but in my view, not the highest use of this unique institution. Saybrook has always been a place for heretics and visionaries and for those who already hear the early phrases of a newly emerging world song.

So, as I reflect on this moment in my own life and move on to the next stage of my own journey, I realize that I came here for the same reason as everyone else. I came to challenge the certainties of my secure world and to step into a world where I had to learn my way. There were many surprises and many dark nights of the soul. I realize now that like generations of Saybrookians, I came here to be transformed. I came because Rudy, Gerry, Tom, Dennis, Amedeo and the wider humanistic community of which we are all part, heard the heretical song in my heart and offered me a place where I could turn aspiration into action.

And so the wheel takes another turn. I move out into uncertainty once more, into my life-long learning journey, but this time with my Saybrook experience to enlarge my capacity to see in the dark, to not lose faith and to learn my way along.

In an strange way, I see an interesting parallel between where I am as a person and where Saybrook is as an institution. After journeying together for nine years, we both face an existential challenge—an inflection point. What next? We each have choices to make, yet the light is dim, the water murky, and the stakes are nothing less than our souls.

Perhaps because of disappointment or fear, either of us might be tempted to opt for a more conventional path, where there is more light, better maps,—usually referred to as “reality” and to step back from our place out on our learning the edge.

For the world’s sake, and for our souls’ sakes, I hope we don’t take this road. I am convinced this is not the moment to retreat, and surrender to fear. With every cell in my body—including my brain cells--I urge us—myself and Saybrook to resist this temptation. As the sages tell us, at those moments when we lose our way, the best place to look is not out into the world of false light, but rather to go inwards and remember who we are. Not in the superficial forms that turn up in tag lines and branding slogans—but in the spiritual sense. What is the song in our hearts—and who really is the singer?

For thirty years, in various situations, with different constellations of colleagues, often on a shoestring, and with great love, we in this room have kept faith with a higher vision of human possibility. To help us we have done our own psychological work in therapy, in spiritual practice, creative expression, and acts of service. As educators we have developed and refined the art of creating sites for transformational learning, we have developed curriculum relevant to serious adults that puts daring ideas together in creative ways, we have developed unique person-centered pedagogies that honor the wisdom our students bring with them and then helps them grow to new levels and to make a difference. The Saybrook education does not simply add to what people know, but changes the frames within which they know it, and it enlarges what their knowledge may mean for the global commons. We have been a home for heretical adults who seek to explore new territory and to bring light into the world, and they are willing to be transformed themselves in order to do so.

Saybrook is not just a graduate school—at its best it is a site of personal and social transformation. We have a destiny and we have a calling. A friend of mine once told me that at the place “where the heart’s deepest passion meets the world’s greatest need, is where true vocation begins.” I believe we—Saybrook and I ---and many of us in this room tonight are at such a place. We live in a world undergoing one of the most radical transformations in its history. It is in desperate need for those with the courage and experience to live through the murkiness, to keep their hearts open and to keep the faith in human possibilities. Saybrook is an academic community that knows this territory as well as any. We have much to give. What an opportunity! What a blessing!

Thank you for welcoming me back in my new capacity and for giving me the time and space to follow my heart’s song.