Just Blocked: Allowing the Fractal
God as a Fractal
Mind the Gap
Field Study
Fractal Flow Learning
Life Path Curriculum
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Fractal-Flow Learning (Based on the book Flow)
Whenever the goal is to improve the quality of life, Fractal-Flow theory can point the way.
It can inspire the creation of experimental and innovative school curricula, it can be used to generate ideas and practices in clinical psychotherapy, the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents, the organization of activities in old people's homes, the design of museum exhibits, and occupational therapy with the handicapped.
The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order, rather than chaos, in consciousness.
This happens when the psychic energy--or attention--is invested in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. The pursuit of a goal brings order in awareness because a person must concentrate attention on the task at hand and momentarily forget everything else.
Striving to learn in the face of new challenges are what people find to be some of the most enjoyable times of their lives. A person who has achieved control over psychic energy and has invested it in consciously chosen learning goals cannot help but grow into a more complex being. By stretching thinking skills, by reaching toward higher learning challenges, a person becomes an increasingly extraordinary individual.
Fractal-Flow: Learning Experiences that Follow a Meaningful Pattern
One of the keys of Fractal-Flow in teaching is to connect learning experiences into a meaningful pattern.
We often feel helpless in learning how to face the chaos that interferes with understanding life and reaching knowledge fulfillment. The kind of knowledge--or wisdom--one needs for truly deep learning is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula. It cannot be memorized and then routinely applied. Transformative learning and gaining new insights about how to live, like mature political judgment or a refined aesthetic sense, must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual.
Control of Consciousness, Emotions, and Fractal-Flow Learning
While true knowledge and learning has a cognitive component, it is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as cognitive effort, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do something; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practicing what they know in theory. This is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.
No one branch of science deals with learning Fractal-Flow and control of consciousness directly; there is no single accepted description of how it works. Many disciplines touch on it and thus provide various accounts. Neuroscience, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology are some of the most direct relevant fields to choose from. However, trying to summarize their findings would result in an account similar to the descriptions the blind men gave of the elephant: each is different, and each unrelated to the others. No doubt we shall continue to learn important things about consciousness from these disciplines.
The mark of a person who is in control of consciousness and is therefore open to optimal learning is the ability to focus attention at will, to be oblivious to distractions, to concentrate for as long as it takes to achieve a educational goal, and not longer. The person who can do this, in addition to learning rapidly, usually enjoys the normal course of everyday life.
Following a Fractal-Flow Learning experience, the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before. It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow. Complexity is the result of two broad psychological processes: differentiation and integration. Differentiation implies a movement toward uniqueness, toward separating oneself from others. Integration refers to its opposite: a union with other people, with ideas and entities beyond the self. A complex self is one that succeeds in combining these opposite tendencies.
Complexity is often thought to have a negative meaning, synonymous with difficulty and confusion. That may be true, but only if we equate it with differentiation alone. Complexity also involves a second dimension--integration of autonomous parts. A complex engine, for instance, not only has many separate components, each performing a different function, but also demonstrates a high sensitivity because each of the components is in touch with all the others. Without integration, a differentiated system would be a confusing mess.
The self that is only differentiated (but not integrated) may attain great individual accomplishments, but risks being mired in self-centeredness. By the same token, a person whose self is based exclusively on integration will be connected and secure, but lack autonomous individuality. Only when a person invests equal amounts of energy in these two processes and avoids selfishness and conformity is the person likely to reflect complexity and to reach optimal learning.
In the learning activities people are engaging in, enjoyment comes at a very specific point: whenever the opportunities for action or learning perceived by the individual are equal to his or her capabilities. Playing tennis, for instance, is not enjoyable if the two opponents are mismatched. The less skilled player will feel anxious, and the better player will feel bored. The same is true of every other activity: a piece of music that is too simple relative to one's listening skills will be boring, while music that is too complex will be frustrating.
Fractal-Flow learning and enjoyment appear at the boundary between boredom and anxiety, when the challenges are just balanced with the person's capacity to act!
The Fractal-Flow experience, like everything else, is not "good" in an absolute sense. It is good only in that it has potential to make life more rich, intense, and meaningful. It is good because it increases the strength and complexity of the self, allows for the possibility of optimal learning.
Fractal-Flow and religion have been intimately connected from earliest times. Many of the optimal experiences of (wo)mankind have taken place in the context of religious rituals. Drama, music, and dance had their origins in what we now would call "religious" settings; this is, activities aimed at connecting people with supernatural powers and entities. This connection is not surprising, because what we call religion is actually the oldest and most ambitious attempts to create order in consciousness.
One could claim that a society (or a school) is –better” than another if a greater number of its people (or students) have access to experiences that are in line with their life goals.
Ordered Paths of Fractal-Flow Learning
Transformative learning in part comes from playing with ideas that can be extremely exhilarating. Not only philosophy but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by the enjoyment one obtains from creating a new way to describe reality. The tools that make the flow of thought possible are common property, and consist of the knowledge recorded in books available in schools and libraries. A person who becomes familiar with the conventions of poetry, or the rules of calculus, can subsequently grow independent of external stimulation. She can generate ordered trains of thought regardless of what is happening in external reality. When a person has learned a symbolic system well enough to use it, she has established a portable, self-contained world within the mind.
Fractal-Flow as Life-Long Learning
Many people give up on learning after they leave school because thirteen or twenty years of extrinsically motivated education is still a source of unpleasant memories. Their attention has been manipulated long enough from the outside by textbooks and teachers, and they have counted graduation as the first day of freedom.
But a person who foregoes the use of symbolic skills is never really free. His thinking will be directed by the opinions of his neighbors, by the editorials in the papers, and by the appeals of television. He will be at the mercy of "experts." Ideally, the end of extrinsically applied education should be the start of an education that is motivated intrinsically. At that point the goal of studying is no longer to make the grade, earn a diploma, and find a good job. Rather, it is to understand what is happening around one, to develop a personally meaningful sense of what one's experience is all about.
From that will come the profound joy of the thinker, like that experienced by the disciples of Socrates that Plato describes in Philebus: "That young man who has drunk for the first time from that spring is as happy as if he had found a treasure of wisdom; he is positively enraptured. He will pick up any discourse, draw all its ideas together to make them into one, then take them apart and pull them to pieces. He will puzzle first himself, then also others, badger whoever comes near him, young and old, sparing not even his parents, nor anyone who is willing to listen..."
This quotation is about twenty-four centuries old, but a contemporary obsever could not describe more vividly what happens when a person first discovers the flow of the mind.
The Typical Teen is not in Fractal-Flow
A typical scenario familiar to many parents involves a teenager who comes back from school, drops the books in his bedroom, and after
taking a snack from the refrigerator immediately heads for the phone to get in touch with his friends. If there is nothing going on
there, he will turn on the stereo or the TV. If by any chance he is tempted to open a book, the resolve is unlikely to last long.
To study means to concentrate on difficult patterns of information, and sooner or later even the most disciplined mind drifts away
from the relentless on the page to pursue more pleasant thoughts. But it is difficult to summon up pleasant thoughts at will. Instead,
one's mind typically is besieged by the usual visitors: the shadowy phantoms that intrude on the unstructured mind. The teenager begins to worry about his looks, his popularity, or his chances in life. To repel these intrusions he must find something else to occupy his consciousness. Studying won't do, because it is too difficult. The adolescent is ready to do almost anything to take his mind off the situation-provided it does not take too much psychic energy. The usual solution is to turn back to the familiar routine of music, TV, or a friend with whom to wile the time away.
Fractal-Flow and Learning from Everyday Moments
Being in control of the mind means that literally anything that happens can be a source of joy. Feeling a breeze on a hot day, seeing a cloud reflected on the glass facade of a high-rise, working on a business deal, watching a child play with a puppy, drinking a glass of water can be all be felt as deeply satisfying experiences that enrich one's inner life.
To achieve this control, however, is not the result of a hedonistic, lotus-eating approach to life. A relaxed, laissez-faire attitude is not a sufficient defense against chaos. To be able to transform random events into Fractal-Flow, one must develop skills that stretch capacities, that make one become more than what one is. Fractal-Flow drives individuals to creativity and outstanding achievement. The necessity to develop increasingly refined skills to sustain enjoyment is what lies behind the evolution of culture. It motivates both individuals and cultures to change into more complex entities.
Extracting from Past Order Those Learning Patterns that Help Us
If there is a strategy shared by people who (lead remarkable lives), it is one so simple and obvious that it is almost embarrassing to mention. Yet because it is so often overlooked, especially nowadays, it will be valuable to review it. The strategy consists in extracting from the order achieved by past generations patterns that will to expand and enlighten one's mind.
There is much knowledge--or well-ordered information--accumulated in culture, ready for this use. Great music, architecture, art, poetry, drama, dance, philosophy, and religion are there for anyone to see as examples of how Fractal-Flow and harmony can be imposed on chaos. Yet so many people ignore them, expecting to create meaning in their lives by their own devices.
To do so is like trying to build up material culture from scratch in each generation. No one in his right mind would want to start reinventing the wheel, fire, electricity, and the million objects and processes that we now take for granted as part of the human environment. Instead we learn how to make these things by receiving ordered information from teachers, from books, from models, so as to benefit from the knowledge of the past and eventually surpass it. To discard the hard-won information on how to live accumulated by our ancestors, or to expect to discover a viable set of goals all by oneself, is misguided. The chances of success are about as good as in trying to build an electron microscope without the tools and knowledge of physics.
At its best, literature contains ordered information about behavior, models of purpose, and examples of lives successfully patterned around meaningful goals. Many people confronted with randomness of existence have drawn hope from the knowledge that others before them had faced similar problems, and had been able to prevail. And this is just literature; what about music, art, philosophy, history and religion?
In the past few thousand years- a mere split second in evolutionary time-humanity has achieved incredible advances in the differentiation of consciousness. We have developed a realization that mankind is separate from other forms of life. We have invented abstractions and analysis-the ability to separate dimensions of objects and processes from each other (disciplines?), such as the velocity of a falling object from its weight and itęs mass. It is this differentiation that has produced science, technology, and the unprecedented power of mankind to build up and to destroy its environment.
But complexity consists of integration as well as differentiation. The task of the next decades and centuries is to realize this underdeveloped component of the mind. Just as we have learned to separate ourselves from each other and from the environment, we now need to learn how to reunite ourselves with other entities around us without losing our hard-won individuality.
Faith for the Future: Universal Fractal-Flow
The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account. Recognizing the limitations of human will, accepting a cooperative rather than a ruling role in the universe, we should feel the relief of the exile who is finally returning home. The problem of meaning and learning will then be resolved as the individual's purpose merges with the universal Fractal-Flow.
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