‘We have to completely redefine our brain structure.’ Learning clearly does accumulate form the concrete to the abstract, but there are leaps of insight where perceptions arise that don’t come from the bottom up, rather they are translated from fields of meaning independent from the brain. There is also a structural coupling of reality ‘out there’ and the reality in our inner world. Here Joe suggests that this is a wo way street, not simply one way, outer to inner, as we believe.

We have to completely redefine a brain structure. You can locate it in a spatial–temporal realm but its function, its actual mode of being is not available to any time space material kind of thing. So it’s both in and not in. As a result, within any brain structures are the totality of all universes we could ever know. This was something I had learned and experienced in a very dramatic way in my little Eastern foray over a period of twelve years. It’s a frustrating kind of a thing to try to get it. I admired David Bohm’s way of approaching this very much. Any of these metaphors will do. You can it’s enfolded within the structure of the brain. You can say the brain is enfolded within the fields which it’s then giving rise to. 

We think of the biologist speaking of the potentials of mind giving, and the potentials of an environment, in structural coupling, by that he means they interact and structure each other. The mind gives structure to the environment or a reality system or a world, whereas the potentials of the world are giving structural shape to the mind which perceives it. So there’s no possible way you could distinguish between the two. All these are complimentary dynamics between the mind and the brain.  There’s this complimentary dynamic and nobody’s going to separate them.

And we find that down the line. Now, this in itself is a radical departure from the old Cartesian notion that here is the world out there that impressed itself on our brain system and our brain then made kind of a knee jerk reaction to it, trying to learn what was being signaled from out there in order to survive it and so forth. Now we still basing our education essentially on that and its result three percent retention of that kind of information is about the best we’re getting. 

The workshop approach for instance, as in Grace Pilon's Workshop Way where there’s no rigid handing out of any kind of information. Everything is essentially discovery from kindergarten on up and discovering groups of children who are self-corrective. They’re all involved in this and there’s no teacher there correcting anything. They’re opening up to process right from the beginning rather than learning products of information that they can mark with a graph pencil on a machine gradable test. It’s a constant process of discovery. This is certainly a magnificent step in the right direction. 

And there was a large television documentary the other night on CNN I believe it was, Peter Jennings, on these new developments in education. Here was this noisy classroom with all this milling around and tremendous learning was taking place and this is great threat to the old-line teacher who wants everybody in straight rows and the teacher up in front has the authority in handing out the dictates of the system. The change is already in the mill. Howard Gardner’s Zero Schools, I think they’re called. There are a number of great experiments like this going on.

We have left out here, again the dynamic that there are no one way streets except in some unfortunate thing like a Savant where you really had the brain dynamics there but not the overall dynamic of entry into the field. Or the dynamic between our reception, our conception, perception and all that which enters into the field and we feed back into the field. Actually every action we have along the line of say mathematics feeds back into the field. I think of Sternberg’s ten year research at Bell Lab on this that long after the mathematician thinks he’s completed the job the mathematical fields in his brain continued working perhaps for hours and on into the night simply because the networking involved in any discipline like that changes all of the relationships in these fields and neural field must reflect this. That is it must bring the house back to order.

The other thing is that anything that we do on our physical level then is reflected I the causal level or what David Bohm would call the implicate order wherein all these relationships are held in their balance so that what we’re doing is affecting the very fields on which the brain will then draw. I’m saying that mathematics is obviously a radically different field effect now than it was in Pathagruss’ time. It’s bound to be. So as we draw on a field we are then interacting with the field and changing the shape and nature of the fields structure itself.

Then we get into the different levels of the brain structure which are to me so obviously, so evident, and I can’t see why this connection isn’t made on a broad academic level as well, the fact that we do know all the precise ways in which these three different levels of the brain handle different levels of information and have a different way of processing that information if you want to call it information.

Now this is critically important to discover what are the possibilities of interacting, changing the nature of what the brain is translating into our reality and as a result changing our reality itself. And the possibilities of the highest neocortical structures of the brain to change the relational field s out of which our physical brain is presenting us with the world to use our Karl Pribram’s sense. And this really is critically important because if this is true, it shows how we come into dominion over the world, or should through maturation, come into dominion over the world at which point all of the primitive, very primitive fears, anxieties, hostiles and rages of a lower system that feels imprisoned by its world would simply disappear from our society. They could not exist because we would discover the fact that since the brain is a self-organizing structure, with in effect the whole universal field enfolded within it as it is enfolded within the field. We can come into dominion over it without our scientific technologically to dominate it and destroy it in effect in order to try and free ourselves from it.  So recognizing the brain’s true nature as it is already evident in research is to recognize our own true nature and our own place in the scheme of things. Once recognizing that the change in the social structure will be awesome.