Bloodletting Exercises

I tried to let all of my thoughts come out unimpeded. then i tried to organize them. then i had a friend give me feedback - comments by jake in italics -. this is what resulted.


I look around the streets in downtown Toronto and see blatant discrimination that most Canadians would rather not face because of their pride – Canada is a wealthy, secure, progressive nation – rated as one of the happiest in the world. Hatred and ignorance towards difference, however, is still quite visible here. Muslims, gays, lesbians, the homeless, and other reductions of people to labels become the target of hatred.

One might rightly say that at the gross, apparent level this country has undergone many profound changes that expanded our understanding, acceptance and encouragement of social diversity. To even publicly debate legal recognition of gay marriage, for example, is something many would never imagine happening 30 years ago. But to look only at broad changes in social attitudes and policies is to neglect the subtler realities. If you sit long enough on any street corner and start asking people about what gives them joy and what they fear, patterns start to emerge.

It is in our nature to seek belonging and acceptance. It is important to feel valued and unconditionally accepted for who we are in all our strengths and shortcomings. This seeking is an internal journey just as much as it is external. We are happy when we can unconditionally accept ourselves for who we are. In the process of defining ourselves in context of an external reality, we have come up with interesting ways of finding belonging and acceptance by representing identities with labels – words and symbols that serve to represent the thing or person being described. Each person is unique and to discriminate the differences between each of us, these labels enable us to make an assessment of who someone is. We cannot avoid doing this – we are taught to, it is embedded in our language and thus our thought patterns. It is also quite useful – the mind must categorize and reduce a complex world into statements, ideas, stories that can be acted upon.

Problems arise, however, when the words, the categories, and the stories replace the people. Our ever-changing reality becomes represented by a static snapshot taken from a particular angle, from a specific vantage point, at some point in time. We will never stop taking ‘pictures’ and placing them into categories, but when we substitute a photograph of something for the thing itself, we become close-minded because the world becomes defined by static, bordered images.

We are constrained in our own minds, by our own words, by illusions and myths.
Education, which this book is directed towards, should help us liberate ourselves from fear, enslavement, delusion and unconsciousness. It should enable us to become our own masters. It should not perpetuate fear, enslavement, delusion, and unconsciousness.

I use fear to represent feelings of anxiety, panic, worry, aversion and terror. I use enslavement to represent addiction, infatuation, vulnerability, craving and pathological dependency. I use delusion in reference to false belief and deception. I use unconscious in reference to that which is unmindful, oblivious, unconcerned and indifferent.

Introducing delusion leads us into that great philosophical minefield. What is false? What is true? You may breeze through it but your readers will explode.

As we go about trying to create ourselves, understand the workings of the world, and how to survive it all with some degree of happiness and ‘success’, we must overcome these four obstacles if we are to liberate ourselves. Liberation does not mean unfettered freedom nor the crushing of authority, but an existence from which peace, unconditional regard for self and other, and resiliency emerge. There will always be pain and pleasure in an existence borne of flesh, mind, and spirit, but raising our consciousness across these dimensions will make us strong, intelligent, and compassionate beings. Liberation is not quixotic, it is not an unrealistically optimistic ideal. The world is full of tales of people liberating themselves on a daily basis. I believe the process can spread like a wildfire, each person’s liberation inspiring the next. Liberation is what learning is all about.

So this is a mixture of Hindu/Buddhist philosophy and your own ideas. Fear = aversion, enslavement = craving, and you’ve broken ignorance down into delusion and unconsciousness. Liberation is arbitrarily defined as peace, unconditional regard (?) for self and others (do you mean “love”?), and “resiliency” (our old friend). Why these three? Why just these three things? On what authority are you defining liberation, and declaring it the goal of learning? What if I am turned off by this overtly eastern philosophical bent? Is there any purpose for me in reading this book? Is there room for me in your university?

We find out from a very young age that life is full of illusions, empty promises and paradoxes. Children and adults alike fall susceptible to the images of the good life promised by advertising and the consumption of trendy wares. We buy in only to discover sometime later that great stress is caused by all the time and effort needed to maintain and protect something that was supposed to make life better.

History shows how delusion is a common pattern to humanity’s misery. Discovery of the New World and the European colonization that took place in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries was, for the European missionaries, about ‘sharing the real truth’ with the natives. Salvation would come through faith in Christ and better technology. Many natives changed their ways of life for the promise of something better. The paradox to it all, the ‘real truth’, the reality, and the consequences of the European arrival for most, if not all, natives has been centuries of discrimination and marginalization. Freeing ourselves from suffering and finding happiness in life is not possible when others are excluded or oppressed in the process.

I stated a few paragraphs ago that education should help us liberate ourselves from fear, enslavement, delusion, and states of unconsciousness. It should enable self-mastery. I think everyone would agree with such a simple statement, but for the most part these words are merely a vague intellectualization, an abstraction. Because these are only words, you can read this or some other much better written work concerning the human experience and be completely unchanged by it. The temporary neural activity that comes about from reading this work will quickly pass away as soon as you put down the page. The words are still abstractions.

The dominance of abstraction in what counts as legitimate learning, I believe, is where our current educational practices miss their aims.

We cannot fully address fear, enslavement, delusion and unconsciousness in education when we reduce learning to an intellectual exercise and only talk about the world through abstracted concepts. Most often, we actually perpetuate these four obstacles in education because we fail as a society to recognize and validate accomplishments that do not fall under narrow rubrics of intellectual achievement. Consciousness is not limited to the intellect or cognition, essentially synonymous terms that considers the mind and it’s relationship to objects in an external environment. We are able to experience reality along sensory (subconscious), mental (self-conscious), and spiritual (supraconscious) levels of consciousness. Through these levels we must consider the many independent lines along which personal development can take place - sexuality, gender, cognition, morals, emotion, faith, kinesthetics, logic, and creativity to highlight a few . These lines of personal development cannot be contracted off by to various societal institutions without somehow bringing the others along for a ride. Most of the learning we expect students to do in schools does not happen in a cognitive vacuum and without careful attention given to the complexity of personal development, we miss out on understanding the overall development of students. This overall development is what should matter most in education.

You’re redefining the terms subconscious and supraconscious and equating “mental” with “self-consciousness.” I think this needs a lot more elaboration. Subconscious carries a load of Freudian/Jungian baggage, and supraconscious is associated with the Jungian concept of collective unconscious.
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Students go to university with many different motivations and aspirations. Some are really excited to leave home – freedom at last. Some are also scared for the same reasons. Perusing the course calendar, I can remember from my undergraduate days being overwhelmed by the diversity of courses one can take - everything from the role of music in film to cultural perspectives on death and dying to health psychology. One is no longer constrained by a government curriculum and the possibilities are almost endless. Some students are hoping to get through their undergrad as fast as possible and get started on the real education they’re after – medical school, law school, etc. Some dream of changing the world and end up doing so for better or worse. Others don’t have much of a reason to be there – they couldn’t envision any other existence than that of studentship, parents forced them to go, or they were just following their friends. Isn’t school just a really good excuse to avoid getting a boring job and continue being a youth?

That first week, frosh week, is an amazing time to see how all of this begins to manifest itself; the keeners first to the bookstore, the binge-drinking, sexual tensions mounting in the residences, the onset of loneliness. Frosh week ends and classes begin. Students are thrown head first into the steep depths of lecture halls and expected to adapt. Some are wise or lucky to get academic counseling or find a group of friends to learn how to manage the change and have a positive first year experience.

For those unlucky souls who are unable to establish a strong peer group or find support from a teacher or counselor, the experience can be cold, lonely, and depressing. Students are expected to learn a vast volume of knowledge (learning is now measured in cm3), usually across a full-course load in three, one-hour time slots for twelve weeks. Mid-term exams and papers creep up quickly, catching off-guard those still high off of frosh week. From mid-term to final exams, there is about a six-week stretch characterized by panic, procrastination, and prayer.

Students begin questioning why they are struggling to get by. Some ask themselves why they are even in university, and as the next year reveals, these questions lead to decisions to drop out. For those of us who made it through this and decided to stick around, we are quick to romanticize those early days of higher education. It’s a right of passage that weeds out those who aren’t up for the rigors of academia.

I find it interesting, however, that the overwhelming majority of undergraduates and graduates I have spoken to over the past years speak so cynically and coldly about their university experience. Yes, they are making or have made their way through, but it is so clear how ripped off they feel. Not in a financial sense (although this is an important consideration), but in terms of how their dreams and expectations of what university could be were so totally squashed. With so much investment and an expectation of getting a degree, students submit themselves. They coldly adapt, pushing ‘personal issues’ aside. Dealing with them detracts from the learning. The intellect is all that counts.

The primary function of most universities is to develop the intellect. By intellect I mean everything associated with the capacity of the mind – cognition, logic, analysis, communication, synthesis, following instructions, problem solving, posing questions, reading critically, learning the ‘language’ of a discipline, consideration of ethical implications, etc. I am not writing to argue that this is detrimental. On the contrary, I am able to articulate my ideas as an outcome of my university training. I am writing, however, to show how disabling and dehumanizing this becomes when it becomes the only path along which one can learn and succeed in higher education.

I do not throw disabling and dehumanizing around as provocative power verbs. They only begin to describe what is actually experienced by most undergraduate students. Let this not be interpreted as an attack on faculty members, for students and teachers are both the victims and perpetrators. Faculty members have been disabled and dehumanized by their own university experiences . Like frogs, everyone willingly sits in a heating pot of water until it boils them to death. Were we to be thrown in a pot with the water already boiling, we would surely jump out.

The disabling and dehumanization that I refer to is so subtle as to never really ever be noticed by both teacher and student. It manifests through speaking on the surface about what is purported to be happening; taking risks, being creative and innovative, engaging with cutting-edge research, being a critical thinker, challenging the status quo, finding one’s voice, creating knowledge, and learning how to learn. The disjuncture and the subtler reality, however, is that these same activities are implicitly discouraged. Even before the learning begins, there is an agenda set by someone in authority who has a vested in interest in what concepts are important, the sequence and context in which those concepts will be learned, and how they are to be expressed. Penalties are exacted for deviating from the norm and those that deviate are labeled inadequate and subsequently punished. Teachers typically tend to disregard grades as being important to learning, but to students they symbolize much of the ranking, discrimination and valuation they see going on everywhere else in society.

I find that this comes off sounding kind of paranoid and conspiratorial. I think a lot of profs would object to this. Who is this “person in authority” and what is their “agenda”? To me this sounds too much like a superficial and fashionable way of criticizing power structures. I think it needs a lot more evidence, analysis and sophistication if it is going to fly.

Slowly over time, we develop the intellectual capacity to understand how we are oppressed or being oppressed, as we might learn in a sociology class, but what purpose is served if we fail to learn how we might actually do something about it? If we confine learning about oppression to the intellect, will we ever know what it feels like to be a victim or a perpetrator? When learning is reduced to an intellectual exercise that is only given value in the context of a course syllabus, we are blind to how these abstractions and concepts are playing out in the classrooms, coffee shops, street corners and homes we live in.

Our inability to see past social constructed notions of reality, which we see in myths, stereotypes and unchecked discrimination is influenced by the primacy given to the intellect. Mental constructs can be built and deconstructed without ever causing one to change their actions. Knowledge does not always lead to action. We must often experience and act before we can build knowledge. In reducing learning to intellectual exercises, the interaction between teacher and student becomes disconnected from the reality they are both situated in.

When you’re writing about the academy and you start throwing in terminology like “social construction of reality”, “myths” and “deconstruction” you’re plugging in to an academic discourse – are you equipped for this, or might it be useful to use plainer language?

Universities are unique from other institutions in society in terms of the specific functions they perform. The people that attend university, however, are part of many institutions simultaneously (families, churches, workplaces, community groups, governance etc.). Every facet of our experience in all of these institutions also simultaneously involves the body, the intellect, our emotions, and spirituality. ‘Learning’, a concept which carries no value judgment to its quality, occurs along all of these dimensions even when not explicitly designed by the institution. Some are more valued than others. For example, at a gross, superficial level religious institutions tend to focus on spirituality, schools on the intellect, and sports teams on the body. But each cannot ignore the complexity of human beings. The strength of a religious community is affected by the physical health of it’s members, requires the sharing of food, and how well the ill are looked after. Sermons, discourses and texts engage the mind and allow for communication between members. Feelings of joy, fear, happiness, and destitution can be seen on the faces of any member of a community.

This is the discrimination that causes so many of our problems. Within every institution and everything a human does in this world we are dealing with the physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. Development along these dimensions cannot be contracted off to various institutions without somehow bringing the others along.

I’m not convinced by this argument. Sure, wherever you go, there you are, in your entirety. Every part of you is operating simultaneously, no matter what the context. But why should every context seek to develop every aspect of the individual? The whole is composed of specialized parts. When you do things well, you do them one at a time and with concentration. When you meditate, you don’t brush your teeth. You don’t expect your doctor to give you a haircut and a shoeshine along with your physical.

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I am here to write about how the university can become a wholly integrative institution. Integrative in the sense that the given the mandate to develop of the intellect explicitly legitimizes and values development in context of other human dimensions.

I want to write about how it can be a refuge from the doubt, fear, cynicsm and ignorance that underlie the suffering of ourselves and the planet. Strong communities of individuals can envision and realize dreams that any one individual on their own could never accomplish.

We need to spend time learning how to talk to each other, how to listen well. We don’t reflect very well below the gross level, on the subtler realities. We’re good at talking about the value of scholarship, research, and evidence but we need to include our own practice as educators into the mix. We need to find ways of understanding learning as a transformation of ourselves along multiple levels (body within the mind within the spirit) why this hierarchy? and multiple lines of development (affective, creative, cognitive, moral, etc.). I think we’re afraid of what it might mean to think about learning beyond the intellectual level because it would mean engaging with those parts of ourselves that are uplifting and inspiring but somehow feel ‘unprofessional’ to bring into the classroom. The same with understanding our fears and our suffering; the dark side must be avoided. When we can learn how to do this as educators, when we practice examining ourselves, we take a different view of students. They are exactly the same as us, but with less experience. With a holistic understanding of ourselves, we can now understanding the learning being done by students must consider the multiple dimensions.

There should be space throughout the curriculum, an academic requirement, to deal with some of the learning typically neglected in academic studies. There needs to be a valued, ‘legitimized’ (ie. worth a credit) opportunity for students to understand themselves broadly as learners. This opportunity cannot be a one-off experience, but carry through their entire undergraduate tenure. Developing one’s self along multiple dimensions takes time and practice. Gaining a holistic sense of one’s self cannot be completed in first year and be expected to carry through, it cannot be done in workshops, it cannot be relied upon to happen on it’s own. It is a lifelong activity. ‘Success’ comes about through repeated practice, not through a few short intense spurts.

I am not writing to offer a solution, but a philosophy that experience matters the most in understanding the power, potential and dangers in education. A philosophy that empowering students to become their own masters is education’s highest priority. To develop a philosophy that is wholly our own, each of us must examine ourselves and the places we live, teach, and learn and take stock of what makes this job worthwhile, taking everything into account from the joys to the struggles that help us grow.

I have a few things that will help me describe why I believe this.

I have my own experience, which I will share here. There is also the experience of others I have learned and worked with. Beyond this I can also point to scholars, writers, researchers, philosophers, and poets who have influenced me. They too speak to the need for change, for embracing our own humanness.

My goal is to capture some of the key issues on what’s involved in making higher education a context for learning of the entire being. I need to talk about content and process, evaluation, learning objectives, curriculum, bureaucracy, administration, politics, the layout of desks and chairs, feedback, teacher development, ethical boundaries, and research.

I want to point to experiences that capture how some of these issues are dealt with in the realization of the university experience as an integration of learning along multiple dimensions. I want to share the insights that have lead to why we believe this. I want to offer some generalizable lessons that will help others. Our practice, our craft, our relationships are continuously evolving.

I really appreciate what you’re doing here and I’m excited by it, especially because the idea of making university education more holistic is something I’ve pondered and discussed a lot in the past.

I feel like the broader and more profound this work becomes, the more vigorous I need to become in my critique. Please don’t take any of it personally.

The critic in me is screaming new-agey bullshit. Here we all are, growing, evolving, cuddling with each other. “Embracing our own humanness” “empowering students to become their own masters” … To me these sound trite and clichéd, empty. What do they actually mean in practice? I think things need to get way more specific, and fast.

“Engaging with fear and suffering” – It sounds like you’re proposing that therapy be integrated into the university curriculum. What if I simply don’t want to engage with my fear and suffering at school? What if I don’t trust the people, the environment, the structure? What if I was sexually abused by my parents as a child and my suffering is too deep for the resources of the university to adequately support me? If I refuse to participate in therapy do I flunk out? Can the individual be compelled to grow in this way?

I also think you’re stretching the word “learning” past the breaking point. When you expand a term to encompass everything it ceases to have any meaning. It seems like “learning” has become a proxy for “all human activity”. While it sounds clever and philosophical to say that all human activity is learning, it isn’t. Take reaction, for an example we know well. Much of human activity is reactive, and there is no learning in it.

I also feel like a lot of educators are going to argue that you’re setting up a straw-man attack against the university. There are a lot of university programs that require people to investigate and engage with aspects of themselves other than the cognitive-intellectual. Your program at Mac, for example (and ironically enough). If you take university training to become one of many different kinds of therapists, you must undergo therapy yourself and explore the inner recesses of your being. At Trent, my dad once accepted a painting as a master’s thesis. If you take a decent literature-studies program, and take it seriously, then you will certainly learn to embrace your humanity. And on and on. There is growth and transformation in the university that at least needs to be acknowledged.

There are also specialized universities throughout the western world that cater to those who want to develop holistically. The US is full of Christian universities that integrate spirit into the curriculum. If you want to do Hindu mantra meditation and get an MBA you can go to Maharishi University of Management. Naropa for Buddhists. Many universities have divinity schools. And so on.

This brings us to another problem with this approach: the things you are proposing to integrate into the curriculum to make it more holistic are sites of considerable controversy in society. There is no consensus on morality, for example, and the very discussion of it inspires violent conflict. Sure, your program aims to make people engage in a personal exploration of morality and define it for themselves (experientially even). But show me how to structure even the context of this inquiry in such a way that everyone will feel that they can participate. Unless the assignment is simply to sit in an empty room and quietly contemplate morality, which I for one would support.

How will people of faith view a university that declares its explicit purpose to be the liberation of the individual? This is the exclusive jurisdiction of religion. Suddenly the university is competing with religious institutions, and is thus in conflict with them.

The goal you are proposing for the university is liberation of the individual, but there is no consensus around what this means or how to achieve it. The attributes of liberation and the values you have defined here, while they may seem commonsensical to you based on your recent experiences, are far from universal.

One might argue that the modern public university has removed the experiential and holistic investigation of liberation (AKA religion) in order to protect the essential and unique function that it alone performs for society, namely to preserve, impart and develop “objective” knowledge, that is to say observable, empirical facts? And while people might dispute the facts themselves, there is at least broad consensus around methodology and epistemology.

On a personal note: Is it possible that you feel that our society has neglected some aspect of your development (i.e. your liberation) and that you are looking around for some institution to blame and reform? Forget the Christian church, it’s beyond salvation. The next most logical candidate is the university. You’ve recently experienced a practice which offers a path to liberation. Why try to reform this gigantic behemoth of the university to serve a purpose for which it and its present membership are arguably ill-suited, when there already exists an institution designed exclusively for this purpose?