🌀 Education as Medicine, Polarization, Contemplation & the Meta-Crisis
The Waldorf approach to education, child development, the negative impacts of social media, navigating politics & artificial intelligence, and the role of contemplative practice in wisdom cultivation
One of my favorite aspects of being involved with the liminal web is meeting fascinating people who are doing vitally important work while engaging in transformative processes.
It’s a space where deep exploration and meaningful connections naturally unfold.
A few months back, fellow liminal explorer Joe Lightfoot hosted a community experiment called "The Garden."
Through this experience, I had the pleasure of connecting with several people, including Brad Kershner – an educator, independent scholar, and Head of the Kimberton Waldorf School.
As we got to know each other, I learned that Brad had studied in the same spiritual lineage as me, was good friends with my meditation teacher, and has been collaborating with several of my previous podcast guests.
It was also cool to hear that we both grew up listening to hip-hop.
In the weeks that followed, as the election results were revealed, I was struck by Brad’s wise and nuanced sensemaking amidst the sea of reactive and divisive perspectives.
I also watched several of his lectures, where he explored topics like polarization, mental health in a digital society, the tension between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence, and the differences between left and right-brain thinking.
Our initial conversation left a strong impression on me, and I felt that more people could benefit from hearing Brad’s perspective.
Click the video below to tune into my podcast with Brad, where we dive into a wide range of topics, including the Waldorf approach to education, the critical stages of child development, the negative impacts of social media, navigating political polarization, the challenges posed by artificial intelligence, the limits of rational optimism & the TESECREAL worldview, and the role of contemplation in wisdom cultivation.
Insightful Quotes 🗣️
The Waldorf Approach to Education:
“The impulse is to be gentle, to be playful, to be artistic, to be musical, to be magical... to slowly build the conceptual and rational on top of a strong, healthy, loving, securely attached foundation."
“There’s a healing quality to what we’re doing when we engage in a multigenerational endeavor to educate each other... rooted in the land, in ritual, in ceremony, in spirituality, in a deep understanding of what it means to be a human being.”
Child Development & Parenting:
“Two deep fundamental principles... having a sense of developmental unfolding and timing. So not rushing things and understanding both in terms of sequence and in terms of timing. Pulling on grass doesn’t make it grow faster... You have to actually let things unfold in time.”
“If you're thrown into an industrialized, mechanized, digitized world that is hyper-abstract, hyper-rational, you lose something, and it’s hard to integrate it later.”
"Your job as a parent isn’t to get them to talk about their emotions. Your job as a parent is to model a human being who has a healthy relationship with their own emotions."
The Negative Impacts of Social Media:
“Spending a lot of time in the digital environment of social media is dysregulating. It lowers and decreases attention span."
“The intention behind these digital architectures is to capture and manipulate your attention. It's anti-educational in that sense.”
Arifical Intelligence and The Limits of Rational Optimism:
"Artificial intelligence without the balance of natural intelligence can exacerbate societal dysfunction."
"The rational optimism that sees AI as purely beneficial often overlooks the deeper crises it may provoke within human development and societal structures."
“If you move through metacrisis sensemaking, the kind of hope and faith you can have on the other side is much deeper and realer – maybe more religious than a naive rational optimism.”
Navigating Politics & Polarization:
“If you think that choosing the right side in a two-party system is the answer, you do not have a deep understanding of political dysfunction."
“The solutions are not going to come from mainstream political culture or political structures. It’s through decentralized work and people finding each other organically.”
“Understanding right relationship to politics involves understanding the meta-crisis – the world that we're living in, the sum total of the problems we're facing, combined with our collective inability to solve them.”
Meditation & Contemplation:
“I think it’s pretty ideal to really focus intensely on meditation and awakening early, as early as possible and first... If one's able to achieve a certain foundation of presence and awareness, then they can spend the rest of their lives learning as much as possible and developing their cognition in order to be of service to the world."
“Meditation is very underrated and underappreciated. Even with the positive press that it gets, I don't sense that culture at large, and even metamodern integral cultures, are really appreciating how important and central a contemplative and meditative life is to all of these questions."
“People exposed to developmental and evolutionary maps often think that by understanding the map, they understand the territory. But the territory is explored best through contemplative and meditative modalities.”
Dive Deeper 🤿
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