Your change unfortunately has to start with the adult and everyone is thinking the change has to start in children. That, if we just have a different way of engineering children, you know a new curriculum in school and this, that and the other and change will take place. Some of this is partly true. For instance if you really did start and educate children in school about the developmental system, about what is even happening within themselves, what’s going on in their own brain system, what’s going on in the growth process, the high selectivity of the brain and how all that works, just that, the idea of intelligences as fields which are there available, and so on and how we access them.

Well I think first of all that would require an enormous kind of moral effort on the part of the parent to, what was this mindful alertness that Krishnamurti talked about, that the Zen people talk about, George Jaydar talks about it all the time, simply monitoring ones reactions to make sure that we’re not falling back into old patterns. This takes a lot of effort. One of the things I have found that parent’s do is they will automatically respond to their children as their parents responded to them. They can’t help it. This is a pattern ingrained very early. And one of the biggest ways in which this occurs is a parent prescribing the child’s behavior without ever knowing it and the child then perforce fulfilling that prophecy. They act out the prescription. Parents and their question, they way they present things to children continually. I’ve heard a parent say, oh, you don’t feel well this morning do you? What’s the matter dear? Or about food, try this, you might not like it, and so on.  Now here are the prescriptions of behavior and ambiguity that’s continually presented the child through prescriptions of behavior. And all this would have to be suspended. One would have to check all that because it’s through that that we impose the same limitations that we had imposed on us and we do it automatically. So it’s a very difficult thing. It’s like Plato’s statement: “Give me a different set of mothers and we’d have a different world,” which is not to castigate women at all, it’s just simply saying the mother is such a powerful, incredible presence and force on the emerging mind, brain. She is the environmental stimulus and inevitably it’s going to replicate itself. And so to break out of a cultural fixation is very difficult.

M:        I think that that’s our challenge though.

J:          it’s a tremendous challenge.

M:        I would like to focus the rest of whatever we’re talking about with this notion in mind, that the model imperative which we haven’t talked about yet, but I think our real task is not to bring about a new generation of children. Our real task is to transform the model.

J:          Your change unfortunately has to start with the adult and everyone is thinking the change has to start in children. That if we just have a different way of engineering children, you know a new curriculum in school and this, that and the other, that will take place. Well now some of that is partly true. F or instance if you really did start and educate children in school about the developmental system, about what is even happening within themselves, what’s going on in their own brain system, what’s going on in the growth process, the high selectivity of the brain and how all that works, just that, the idea of intelligences as fields which are there available, and so on and how we access them.  Because there would be a lot more attention to the human being as a human being rather than attention to preparations for the gross national product or anything like that. Then that couples with real concentration on being a parent, to change a parent’s whole pattern of response to a child. That’s what you would have to do to break cultural deadlocks or gridlocks such as we face right now. And when none of our old techniques are working and we can’t break out of them and that is not moral failure. It’s no one’s fault. These ingrained, imprinted processes control us.

M:        How would we do it Joe?

J:          There’s where information does help.  I think that face that the triangular structure of the brain and the behavioral patterns locked into the more primary brains, should be calling primitives since they’re so magnificently sophisticated but the two we share with all other species, on some level, that those structures once activated operate autonomously and literally furnish us the only world we know.  Even in examination of some of the striking differences between realities experienced by different cultural patterns of child rearing, as in the Australian Aborigine or the Coo-hari-coom, literally is one of the few most extraordinary, almost paranormal societies on Earth, not from the standpoint they have any models for us but the fact that the model factor works the way it does. If we could open up some things like that and begin to realize that these two primary systems once formed are literally immutable. All we can ever do is transcend them. Now there we get into where I think some of our religious attempts have failed. The Eastern denigration of the body, the degrading, the denial of the body and trying to get rid of it and the denial of in effect these early imprints which we have to have to have a universe at all and so. On the one hand, and all the various problems we have, on these fixed kind of immutable patterns, if we just understood their operations you see and could admit to ourselves that the majority of things that happen within us are not within our control.  And then we can look at the ways in which we can begin to monitor these earlier systems with our higher intellectual brain system.