Brodey’s richly illustrated and deeply poetic book from 1974. Defies any summary.

Series Preface

Man is an endangered species.

We think the separation of fact from value is the principal illusion responsible for the nearly terminal condition of species man on planet earth This series is an attempt to share the facts and values of intelligent people who know valuable things that might help us find, live, and experience in ways that are speciesenhancing. not species-destructive.

We think sharing information of this kind is as vital to humans as water is to fish.

We think we can depollute our information environment by introducing life-enhancing values into the changing currents of Wethink the series should serve as a critical information resource for people who are seriously trying to enhance the life of species man

We will publish hard science only when we think It will help us do that. We will publish opinion, analysis, exhortation, re-view, speculation, experiment. criticism, poetry and/or denunciations if we think it is of critical human benefit.

We are not naive. We don’t think publishing a few truths will set us free. We are not optimists.

We don’t think the chances for human survival are very good. We are not elitists. We don’t think that showers of wisdom from Olympus will illumine the simple man’s darkened awareness.

We believe that human consciousness both guides and responds to human interaction, and that most contemporary interaction proceeds from and perpetuates assumptions about human life that are no longer valid. We believe that these assumptions can be changed if/when we want to

Some of our fondest assumptions have already been unmasked by changes, unleashed by blind commitments to short run values. The most glaring example - we once believed technology made interaction “easier.” Now we know that when our technologies violate ecological laws, we murder each other.

Some new forms of interaction (and some old ones) are currently being touted as the way. We don’t think there is. or can be, any one way. How to sort out the promising ones from the blind alleys constitutes our principal aim.

We therefore deliberately adopt a post-disciplinary stance, believing that no one view, be it philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, political, clinical, what have you, has the answer.

We intend to be a sort of whole earth idea catalogue for people who think that thinking about the human predicament might help us to live as one self-aware species, deliberately guiding its own evolution for the first time.

As editors, we will select and publish things we value as a attempts to foster that kind of voluntary humanity.

Therefore, we invite anyone, whether clinical, social, behavioral scientist (or fan), student, Faculty (or interest person), young or old (or in the middle) to join us in the attempt to make a joyful human future not only possible but likely.

So – if you think “Science” is the way, we’re not for you, and you probably won’t like us. If you think radicals are mad (nee crazy, disturbed, insane, deviant, misguided etc.) we’re not for you, and you’ll probably loathe us. If you think the world will not be safe till sociologists are kings, we think you’re mad. Ditto for publications.

Every day, changes race into our world like mad flood waters, undermining all we hold sacred and sure.

Change is called for.

Yet, change is crisis.

What to do in such times. How to live. Feel. Know. Experience. That’s what this series is all about.—Victor Gioscia, Series Editor.

Introduction

She was a person I wanted to tell. I told her what I was thinking. She wrote it down. It was 1963. The text was substantially prepared.

In 1971 I showed Victor Gioscia the text. That’s how it came to be published.

Judy Johnson played with the print and spaced it out to her liking. She is a weaver.

Andrew Poynor and I went to Ireland to find out what would happen if we added pages of collage 1973 to text 1963. I was surprised.

In the time I spoke, the words became experience.

I wonder if this experience has rooted itself in others.

Let me know.—Warren

CHAPTER ONE: THE SPREAD OF RAPID GROWTH: OUR NEW EXPLOSION

Fast... Streak... Jet... rocket... man at the space control computer... faster... A small change at high and rapidly growing speed soon left behind... Irrelevant obsolete... Must learn quickly... body reaction time, each movement, sensation important, The twenty-fourth orbit - I am coming down... how fast is Earth going now?

Spaceships flowing from one planet to another, projected on beams of light and using light for fuel. Not long ago a madman’s dream.

A new simplicity is growing on the base of a new kind of world. Natural selection is no longer by chance. Man is being selected by his ability to discover. The days when learning was knowing what had been said before are gone. Each dawn opens a day that yesterday’s experience of learning how to discover helps to organize. We are like children.

We are discovering at the speed of children again!

Outer space and undersea explorations, atomic energy and awareness of other species all make conventions learned from parents irrelevant. Accelerating speed leaves parents’ conventions behind. Backward lines of contact with the past, home base on Earth is in a new context…. what we remember is changed. We are seeing so much... our language is changing…

Nearing Venus now... your time is going so slowly to us... it is easier to talk to other spaceships in our fleet...

Turn on the approximator again or we’ll lose touch altogether. I’d hate to be just a piece of static... sure, we are way out, and changing faster; you have the approximator on now? Good. Turn the knob to slow time.

As a boy, I learned to decode through different paces and rhythms; it was necessary and I enjoyed learning to make time and set corrections. My father was interested, and as we learned to approximate each other and made contact, I taught him the kind of discovery every child knows... the whole wide world of a child’s system reaches only to the end of the room. This makes adults even more huge. Growing older children rapidly grow bigger and the grown-ups relatively grow smaller. Giants get tamed, but as the adults grow smaller they are less able to be trained by their children.

EXERCISE: TURN TO THE EIGHT-YEARS-OLD CHANNEL

…Why are parents so bossy with toddler-sized children? They seem to stop listening — then, how can you teach them?

If I only had an approximator then... or an analogue computer that would render the size of a mouse or ant or a germ or an infant or toddler or adult all joined as size process and classified as such. Each change in size of anything alters rhythm and time. With each growth, you are turned into something different. The height and background and memory context of your viewpoint is different! Does an ant’s feeler take in the size of a tree? Does a child know the table tops? No. Lift him or let him climb up. Children know more about feet than faces. Adults think childhood is what they remember. The length of the past changes the present. Children and adults are not quite two species.

A kitten is not a lesser cat, nor is the adult a larger child, nor is the fawn a younger deer, yet between the pairs there is a similar relation. A puppy and a fawn and a kitten and a child suckling their respective breasts have a very similar problem. Search out similarities and differences in their process.

Do not dismiss a phenomenon with its name.

A child is a grown-up child for his age. At each nodal accelerating point of change, he quickens in his newness. This sequence of change does not exist in the context of the child’s own perceptive system. It is introduced by the observer. The child may only experience wonder.

Before our more rapid acceleration of information change — the new renaissance — the changing context of present did not change the past so completely. Past memories swim in the streaming of present.

Now we do accept that an unchanging past is an obsolescent concept useful only for systems at slowly increasing rates of change.

As we spin faster, parents can no longer relate to their children in terms of their own childhood. The jet experience of an old man is strictly obsolescent for teaching the light-transducing travel of the young. Older children now teach younger ones, bisecting an age gradient translating system.

The rapid change possible with the new speed of growth means valuing real contact with other systems. Now we are aware that one cannot make contact across huge chasms of basic structural difference without intermediate language. The Earthling on Mars at first tried to communicate with Earth language systems. Then he learned to observe any smallest juncture between Earth and Martian systems, and to use this to grow a broader bridgehead. As acceleration grew, the contact, child to adult, was reduced in spite of more continuous reporting to each other which began in the early 20th century. Inter-generational contact is now recognized as important to maintaining the regulated constancy of change in our coding systems (traditions).

There was once a little boy who cried sobbing tears with a curled-up body not being able to go with his father. He experienced so much, but only his curled lip and his crying knew, for him, about what he was feeling. This was his way of communicating, of sending a telegram, and it didn’t matter what was said to him back because by this time he was crying so hard that he couldn’t listen. And the father hugged him and left.

The little boy knew that there was nothing to be done but to play with his cars and watch with wonderment the small bee that stood by the crack in the wall, dead.

When his father came back he tried to tell about how the small bee was so sad that it cried till it died and didn’t move anymore.

But death was an idea that the child hadn’t been taught, so he simply took his father and said, “Look, Daddy, bee!” and all his thoughts about bees, all the detail observing for a whole afternoon, had no way of expressing itself across the word barrier anymore than a dog’s bark in the context of dogs meant simply: there is a stranger. The nuance could not be decoded until we learned to go beyond the ritual of words. Then the child could elaborate the detail of the bee. Once the father knew the problem he asked the child to draw what he had seen and to describe the drawing. The father was surprised but still could understand very little.

And later the child looked at the clouds and asked his father why they crossed the sky;

And when it rained, he asked why it rained;

And when he saw a house being built he asked why they were building it;

and a car accident wondered why itself.

And everything range happened that was full of the word “Why” and each question stood for all the kinds of questions the child was unable to talk about. But the father, instead of answering with a made-up answer as fictitious as a tale’s answer, returned the question to him,

“What do you think?”

The child answered,

“The cloud is laughing a race with another cloud, and the sky is wet and spilling over.”

The father did not know what to say, but he did know that talking about molecules was more impossible, the child’s own theories must be translated.

The child was involved with action theories that were near to his own experience, his experience - his eating, his breathing, his wonder set the one bridgehead then for information flow. His present rate of time is much faster. His discovering is freshened faster than father’s.

Each dawn makes history of the day gone by,

And each day gone by is seen in the light of the new dawn.

The communication problem for the man beyond the dawn is vital.

The astronaut outside earth’s atmosphere goes faster than light. Watching his Earth video viewer he he beholds an experience which he once had, and aware that he cannot return to the past he assigns to this his-seeking capsule the values and structures of the present day movement of his Venus seeking capsule. Techniques of encoding and decoding between different systems have been enriched by the time knowledge he reports.

Accepting a child’s exploding information is our new resource. Each new experience builds two more.

There is the sand... there is the truck... there is the hand on the shovel... and more on the other side... go back and get more... the castle is heightened... his time span is short.

A child’s time process is as difficult for his mother to language as the spaceship designer’s capacity to think in light years. A child’s experience, once acknowledged, is a source of learning how to discover.

Each movement poses a new chain of choices.

Knowing what happens in context to oneself, and in context with another, and in the context of the many systems one can use to describe the same event, begins to simplify as translation back and forth are not taken as if the words were the event… the child is not limited in the relations he does not see by words. The child in the sand building castles did not speak words.

We can talk to children in their language and they will teach us to go beyond our limits as we learn to give them the information their curiosities need!

An exchange in terms of the child of dump truck, like child of the bee is far from repetetive. It just seems that way when we cannot translate. We are searching to go beyond the sandbox and the wet word castle unmatched to the time of the sun’s drying of the sand.

Watch a child’s eyes dart about. Can you visualize what he is seeing? The answer is “No!” And “No!” remains until one begins to gain some knowledge of the child’s own system.

We are afraid if we take away conceptual hangers... our skin will fall off. Whether the old clothes are kept on is irrelevant. What is needed for the new education is respect for living flesh.

CHAPTER TWO: WE DESTROY OUR CAPACITY TO CONTROL GROWTH WHEN IN ORDER TO NAME THINGS WE SEPARATE THEM FROM THE TIME IN WHICH THEY EXIST

They told me when I was little that it was good to crawl, but that walking was better for going far. Crawling is necessary for going under beds. “Best” depends on where one wants to go — far, or under beds.

And so it is with our language. It is useful for exchanging those experiences unsharable in a shrug, or a sniff, or in a crawl under the bed-with-me-gesture.

“Don’t look at me that way!” The glance-language is not scientific.

“Stand up!”

“Speak!”

Prove you are growing up. Watch him, the scientist, with rigor, walk straight up standing! At least he can walk like the old order! He can establish truth: it is better than crawling.

Upright!

Distinguish our kind of posture. No forearms. Hands up. Chant together. ’WE NEVER WERE ANIMALS!’”

You can do more, hands free. You can spend more time at it! But go farther? Not under beds. I have tried to walk under beds. Crawling is better — necessary. Rediscover it!

A poet’s description can be as rich as a child’s immediate fresh impact. Think of a child’s or a foreigner’s naive, ungrammatic accuracy. He is crawling through our language with precision unknown to those who are used to its implicit errors.

The language of the new realm uncovers aspects of living that everyone experiences as obvious — to be spoken by a nod.

The nod-language takes too much away from our awareness. Yes, there are living aspects of everyday situations not encompassed by our walking-language. Growth, for example, has no words.

The informal language — a glance full of knowing — must be put into writing.

Our present written language can not encompass the information exchanged in a handshake or a glance.

How do you measure the flow of a kiss?

Bench marks won’t do!

Even in the movies a kiss is nothing but an eye-cheating flicker of stills.

Is there no language of movement?

Of course there is! The artists know it. It is written in their poetry (in whatever form that may take).

Everyone can crawl but who has the courage. There is no need to learn how!

It is this kind of change that’s taking place.

Can poetry be fed into computers? Yes! But crudely.

Count the tension in a bending bough. That poem joins cycles found in living nature.

Last night there was sleet. The bamboo sprig bowed, and I, hoping to save it from breaking, shook off heavy ice. It snapped as I shook it. The sound of the snap marked an end-state—a sudden shift: from standing, bowed, heavy with ice, to a broken bamboo sprig. The stem beyond the break marked a new cycle. The sound—“crack”—marks a nodal point. Only precise control of gradual change from system to system is adequately described: it broke.

The haiku poet gives fourteen nodal points to work from before translation. The literal translation of it is:

“old pond,

frog jump in

water-sound.”

This is the height of information-packaging.

The blind children with whom I work teach me that the critical-point concept is important. To name the nodal points between cycles of their experience requires a different Haiku. We take so much for granted. It’s natural! Being perpetually different, they do not naturally accept our conventions.

“When shall I teach the child

to answer ’Yes’ to ’Is it

raining?’”

“They smell the wetness in the classroom. Is it raining then,

or when fog-drizzle runs down the windows?”

“Ask them.”

“Is it raining?” the teacher asks.

“No,” little John replies.

Now they are going through the door — the open door into the rain. John’s blind threshold to outside is sniffing sudden fresh damp air. He breathes in and smells more rain..he hears louder canopy rain.

“Is it raining now?” John wants a ruling.

“Should I say it is raining yet?”

“Of course it is raining,” the teacher responds.

“No! — not in my face,” says the child, distressed, revealing his own convention.

“I am not wet; it is not raining here.”

The child walks beyond the entrance canopy. It is face-raining now. He smiles.

This child is unskilled at recognizing the sighted conventions usual to the naming process. “It is raining” means to him not seeing rain or hearing it but feeling-in-the-face! We understand that this is not a foolish child who does not know when it is raining; he has simply chosen his own critical point.

Smell rain; hear rain, rain increasing from humidity to wetness, precipitation to heavy rain. Rain under canopy to rain on umbrella, on clothes, on skin, wet skin, wind sink, rainy, wind, shrill, skin, rain, blown, wet, drip, slow, cold, rain– all this we describe form nodal or critical.

Do we have formal language to name walking-into-rain in terms of the continuity? Yes! Who will see the haiku poem is very explicit. What more is needed?

I am trying to catch a crawling —

an idea that is not yet worded.

Is your mind making a moving picture out of flashing stills? Your perception of the coming storm is more than intuition.

Must the twinge in auntie’s toe be our only ordinary record of the shift in rate of change in barometric pressure? Barometers do not record the wearer’s human language. But if the weather changes faster than usual—don’t go near the boss! Strong emotions grow with rapid change in rate of change of weather. We do not teach our children what is most useful to them or their form of our species. This important information is left to that informal reservoir of knowledge—intuition. That reservoir needs to discharge old contents; there is a new intuition on the way.

The barometer dial predicts the weather; it does not specify the time factors of its change. A revolving drum barometer does write the pressure flow of one day. Imagine an instrument that would accurately tell how fast the change was taking place. The shifts in rate of growing change give the information that is closest to experience. Humans are attuned to detect change in a live and growing process. It is change we best detect but it is the still dead states we name. What if we named the kinds of change and held implicit what is usually considered stopped?

Formal language crudely brings in time. It abstracts the juice and leaves the symbolic end-states to signify the process. Stormy, cloudy, fair, beginning, middle, end; good and evil; drawn and quartered between four mules; bathed and perfumed—all these are conceived of as settled. The movement between the endpoints described is implicit, to be dubbed in without words.

It is the continuity of the wave between critical points that our usual language is least able to encompass.

We evade the lack of words defining movement by waving our hands when we are talking to each other. Such informal and often unintentional language is used for the measurement of living process.

Where is the precise language for describing movement: the rhythm of Jim and Jack fighting, or two countries whirling as in a dance?

Is predicting what will happen at the end enough?

Not now!

We must learn to control a process as it happens.

Perhaps this is most notably problematic to grown-ups who wish to teach their children.

This is a house;

This is a church;

A house is a kind of church;

A church is a kind of house.

Son, this is called an egg;

this is a chicken.

But what of words for describing the chicken to egg moving relationship?

It seems so difficult to say to a child that the chicken grows from an egg, and the egg from a chicken. Can you put these statements into a circle that moves accurately through time? What happens in the barnyard is simple enough, but our language does not encourage specificity when it approaches time as it exists.

The chicken-egg paradox focuses a fundamental weakness of our present language system.

This weakness is costly.

Does war grow from economic conditions, or do economic conditions grow from war? Is the day of declaration a beginning, or is defeat an end? Just think of the last war to end all wars.

Our present language makes barnyard sense seem complicated. The living story of the children of the egg phases of a single species’ flow-through-time should not be complex. We need new, fundamental structure, new simplicity to teach our children.

How does an international negotiator write of this paradox solving skill to another generation? Is this intuition to be lost?

We need a science that writes down and studies what is now intuitive data.

But some teach that learning cannot be scientific unless most of it can be held still — Dead!

Recite: Our ancestors were the goodies;

The Indians were scalpers!

Be goodies, children,

It’s all so simple.

Who teaches the problem of what is relevant? It is not included in the T.V. simplicity.

Recite: Good versus evil!

Kill the bad guys.

Atomic bang.

Cowboys and Indians are historical because anyone can understand them — and which cereal is best. Relativity is too difficult to understand. Begin with simple things! Name end-states as beginnings. The old rules of simplicity are used for propaganda.

“This is an egg, this is a chicken.” Simple only because it is these end states we have chosen, by convention, by definition, to use for basic naming.

“This is an apple, children. Crayon it red.”

A timeless apple is no apple. Be accurate — throw the core in the trash. Is this semantics? Advertisers don’t think so. “You buy an apple dyed redder so it will be like ‘a picture of itself’.” The apple picture changes slowly from generation to generation; it never rots; it is a timeless symbol.

A is for apple.

J is for simple Justice.

Why begin by teaching a simplicity that does not exist? Justice as a living process is taught by example, but where is the language to describe its growth? Each explicit language leaves a different area to be covered implicitly by intuition.

Had we chosen to name growth process as our explicit unit, then we’d have new problems.

New books have begun to show the new progressions. Spot-stills illustrating stopped morals are no longer popular in our present day books. Already the retrospective race to the stillness of a snap photo-finish. ... the word “End”...his final reward... the end of the end ... seems grotesquely unnatural.

But can we catch up to our atomic progress with knowledge of our ways? The behavioral sciences are guarded by ancient beliefs hidden as conventions. What is considered natural is not easily unlearned!

A mushroom cloud implies new nature. The old Hiroshima recontexted is something new.

Now one bomb can prove that end states do exist... for us as did the Garden of Eden and other inventions necessary to the beginning-end phasing out of our present language system. But you won’t be here to experience having ended; for you there will be no proof. The idea of relevance is changing. The value of nonsense is changing in terms of its relevance.

Is it possible to change man’s language?

The coin of the new renaissance is not to remove the coin of the old. It is not to replace—it is to enhance. Building a language descriptive of relational process does not remove the uselessness of end-point description, but fills in the space-time continuity denied by the gap between a static beginning and an end. Growth does not stop or finish; it may accelerate more quickly or less.

The new concept introduced by the atomic bomb—controlled explosion—can become a new common sense. It is the basic simplicity of the new realm.

My dog lies beside me. He is asleep. His sleepiness awaits my stirring. He stirs as I pause to look at his stirring—I am tuned to listen to stirring. The house quiets as the children, suddenly hearing no sound of my pen, leave presents at my study door and go away again to live the next room into a children’s place. They disappear beyond my sight but not beyond my hearing, my pen, or my breathing. I feel them in my air as if their presence were my soul. I am writing to them. A distant quiet announces absence, but pen motions are not their motions, and I grow sad, for this writing soaks in the intimacy of their sweet buttings-ins. How lovely to be annoyed by interruptions so sweetly conceived as the intimacy no coldness can remove! How far we are from war! I must teach my children about change in the hope they can control this accelerating process, what we old ones call explosion.

Beyond my study door the two-year-old scribbles as he imitates his concept of me. I long for language to make simpler poetry to communicate to all the unschooled children important affairs uneasily stored and shared within us—but tauntingly hidden. You who are listening to this rhythm may know my beat is gone or sadness. With each naming of a boundary, I lost the moving friend who had stopped still to be present — as a cipher.

I was a school child lined and counted, numbered among lines of branded children, boundaried, graphed and I.Q. charted.

Here! Here! Here! We answered the roll though the teacher could see us. Or could she?

Is there in your mind a growing picture of my wish to tell the children what we have each experienced but have no language for the naming? My anguish need not be obscured as if each man’s private thoughts were his alone. It is an anguish shared—the word has become flat.

And the small child returns to my door.

“Why can’t I come in?”

“I’m writing.”

“Here’s a school book to write in.”

He shoves it under the door to give it to me. Oh, how much I love to teach them, but so much is too basic to be able to say because I don’t know how! I write about the language of process, hoping to help in its progression as it continues to be growing. And I will leave my writing now to share my children’s laughing and playing — and we will teach each other worldlessly.

Real experience must be assisted.

CHAPTER THREE: TEACHING CHILDREN TO MAKE TIME A DENOMINATION

This morning, before the bathtub where today’s chores began, I asked my two-year-old-blond-thatched-and-very intelligent-boy—No, he asked me first as he pointed to his stomach –

“Is that your tummy?”

“Yes,” I replied, and pointed out his.

As I did I noted it heave with breathings, I drew in a big glob of air and said,

“What do you call that?”

He looked at me blankly.

“Breathing,” I replied.

Then, as he played I wondered, why do we teach our children parts of the body as if they were objects? Why teach arm, finger, leg, long before we teach breathing, standing, running, jumping, talking, fighting? Why are namings of objects given precedence over namings of actions? Is this the child’s demand? Who has defined the fundamental precepts of the child’s questions? Is his “What is that” or “Why” set by our convention?

Do children really mean “How does it rain?” instead of “Why?” We teach them the language of “how” when they are older. It is our teaching that constructs the form of their earliest questions. They have no alternative to “why?” If they use the word differently, how will we know they have changed? They can change the words faster than we expect them to change.

The way a question is structured determines its answers.

If we do not allow children to redesign the way questions can be asked, they can’t ask us about change. If we don’t respect their reality, we can’t respect their new formed questions. We will correct them to the old form. If the meanings of our original questions is set by our natural convention how is he to teach us what is natural to his experience?

How much of our formal training of children is a rationalization of our grammar? “Who-done-what-to-which,”-- this is still the essence of our sentence structure, of our grammar. This is the way we divide our world. The question “how” is becoming more popular. “How” implies process going on over time. This is considered more complex than the answers to the question “Why?” which requires simply an ultimate cause. This old conventional simplicity, the final simple cause is becoming irrelevant.

I can only shift little by little from convention as I slowly cross the circle. You cannot communicate language until you translate it so that it can be understood in the old framework, but if it can be understood as a part of the old framework, it is not fundamentally new.

The learning explosion proceeds as transition unclear as to its beginning and end — if you know what I mean! Children can be trained to the new language in such a way that they receive the knowledge stored in the old system, while restoring it in their own way.

Nouns and adjectives, the thing words, have been placed first in the common learning process, and being placed first act as organizers for verbs and adverbs.

What is taught first sets a structure within which the next piece of learning is organized.

Let us first teach the child with the Video Tape Recorder (V.T.R.). Picture books do not come first because picture books are limited to showing timeless pictures.

New classroom procedure: Turn on the individual television books which allow the teacher to present “See Sally Run” on the V.T.R.

Teacher: “Listen to running making sounds of Sally, children. . . hear breathing harder as she runs faster. . . those movements we call Sally, hear the sounds of Spot ’huh, huh’. . . that is called panting . . . Spot is running faster towards Sally. . . listen to his padding rhythm change as he runs faster. . . the sidewalk bumps against his feet and that’s the sound called ’padding’. . .

They are rapidly slowing while Sally’s arms are stretching out. Children, have you felt the air from a wagging tail? “That’s the dog’s way of speaking.”

EXERCISE: IMAGINE FOR YOURSELF THE POSSIBILITIES AS YET UNCOVERED FOR CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION AND A TAPE RECORDER.

VTR is used now to help student teachers evaluate their capacity to follow the program. Using new media to show a teacher how to teach the old style better is putting a stuffed horse on a horseless carriage so as to not frighten those less resisting to change, then removing the engine, and selling the vehicle as – advanced. By using our modern tools artfully in teaching we allow children to accept their potentials; they will teachu us new techniques of using this equipment.

“Running is performed by children.” is the caption under the moving picture sequence of children running. Now running by grown-ups. Now running is faster…faster…faster. The teacher bangs the dish in time with the rhythmic running feet (on the TV screen) faster…faster…faster…

“Children, what do you call that?”

“Acceleration, teacher?” says Johnny.

“Is it accelerating fast or slowly?” teacher asks the class.

“Compared to what, teacher?” Sally answers.

The running of two children flashes on to the screen, for Sally is giving the usual answer for her age.

“Is the running accelerating fast or slower?”

“One running is accelerating the child faster or slower than the other which do you wish to use as the point of reference, teacher?” says Henry.

“Henry, you are right. The situation is seen differently by the faster accelerating child, by the other child and the cameras eye observing, both.”

“What happens if I tell you, children, if the faster acceleration does not become impeded by negative feedback? Mary, you answer that.”

Mary smiles knowingly at the teacher’s abstraction.

“The system always changes,” she says. “The running will be altered. A limit will be reached. Too much tiring will slow running, and the runner will feel her side hurting. Her breathing is self-limiting too.”

This is simple to these children. They may not be so familiar with some of the divisions into objects, causes or subjects -- the nodal points that we know best. Just as the math is familiar and complex to a child’s parents, so the old mathematics is complex to a child of the new systems. To a child of the movement classroom above, the exact division between a hand and an arm as things might leave the child perplexed, or make him laugh.

The new system of simplicity has been introduced early and not unlearning.

“Now Lynn, where are you eating?” (everyone knows about eating, it’s such a common experience), “What do you call the entrance to the food processing?”

“What do you mean Miss Frog, by entrance?”

“Oh Lynn, you should know that. Remember we talked of how the slow movement, such as when mother calls you home when you are playing, can suddenly get faster... accelerate... move faster... mother says ice cream... speed builds up…“Call it ’startling’, the shift into a new rhythm. Entrance into the special location defined by the change. We talked of ’start’ and ’stop’ as words for sudden alteration of the rate of acceleration, when the person had become used to the previous rate of change so that it no longer sent messages.

I know ’start’, ’stop’, and ’used to’ are difficult.”

“Lynn, your chest is being heaved by breathing. Do you think of that if I don’t point it out?”

No.

“You are used to it. Well, what if you stopped breathing…”

“You know I can’t stop breathing. I’d be meat. That would change the system teacher, how could I start if I stopped?”

“Lynn, you are avoiding the question. Exactness must be statistical (An aphorism of the age). You know that it is true that stop and start are arbitrary names but unimportant since they represent points of statistical alteration in rate, or direction of flow, or the change process systems. Alive to them has to do with oxygenation. You can stop breathing in the pressure breathers those machines that rest the chest muscles. We tried so we would understand the effect of being without the breath clock.

Oh, you’re talking of changing the rhythm of the breath clock cycle.

Lynn, why don’t we just start there about where digestion process begins, and I know it began at the sight of food, but mouth is where the rhythmic field of changes in taste includes changes in the food. There it begins to be broken down—chewed up—to be ready to be cycled through digestion. And Lynn, how do you know that digestion proceeds actively involves changing the food?

I know that—I can taste the taste change and feel it swallowing, Lynn replies.

...This is the primitive account of verbs coming first, it is awkward, but the idea is there and will develop. Newness is at first awkward, it is not natural or automatic. Real newness is at first absurd. Teaching writing before teaching letters and reading, once absurd is now well accepted. My children come home from kindergarten carrying long sentences they have copied but cannot read.

From the beginning we teach children to break living process into choppy pieces. This is our way of denominating. These pieces we call objects. They are considered simple-complete. We rarely regard as simple the words we do have in English for directly naming process itself.

CHAPTER FOUR: DENOMINATING RHYTHM SO WE CAN TEACH TIMING TO OUR CHILDREN

Saying what is wrong is not enough.

Knowing what to do is not doing it.

We widen the gap if we do not unlearn “naturals” no longer relevant to experience.

Onward!

Timing can no longer be denied.

Bravo! If only bluster could make us aware of what we cannot realize to exist until it exists for us. After breaking through what we must unlearn, it is so simple.

EXERCISE: TIME ALL THE SENSATIONS YOU EXPERIENCE AT THIS MOMENT! CATCH YOUR RHYTHMS, TIME WHERE YOU ARE AND WHAT IS HAPPENING. DON’T JUST TIME IT WITH A CLOCK – TIME IT WITH THE CRITICAL RHYTHMS YOU EXPERIENCE. TIME YOURSELF IN PASSION’S RHYTHM FOR CONTRAST. WATCH, I HAVE DISPLAYED ON THE SCREEN BEFORE YOU AND THROUGH YOUR HEADSETS, THE SOUNDS OF YOUR BREATHING, YOUR HEART, THE GRADIENTS OF YOUR BLOOD... D…D PRESSURE CHANGES. LISTEN AND SEE THE BODY SENSATIONS YOU ARE SO USED TO NO LONGER APPRECIATE THEIR INFORMATION, EXCEPT AS BASE SCANNING PATTERNS. LOCATE A PATTERN. CHOOSE ANY SIMPLICITY TO STAND AS THE BASE. CHOOSE FOR EXAMPLE THE RHYTHM OF YOUR BREATHING TO TIME THE WORLD OF YOUR PERCEPTIONS. YOU HAVE PATTERNS. WHEN YOUR BREATHING IS EXCITED TIME DURATION CHANGES. A CLASSROOM’S BREATHING CHANGES AS IT’S LEARNING IS EXCITING. TIME FLIES. A TIME PATTERN IS NECESSARY FOR COMMUNICATION. FIND SOME PARTICULAR TIME ON WHICH YOU WOULD CHOOSE TO BUILD THE LANGUAGE YOU WILL TEACH YOUR CHILDREN. THIS EVENING? NO! THE NEXT TIME THEY ARE OPEN. TO CHILDREN, STELLAR CLOCK TIME DOES NOT COME FIRST, UNLESS THEY HAVE BEEN PROGRAMMED THAT WAY. BECOME AWARE WHEN YOU ARE CLOCKING THEM OUT OF THEIR NATURAL RHYTHM.

“Why I always sat her on the potty just after her five o’clock supper till she was trained.”

That’s the way they used to do it. Now the pot is put on a comfortable place so the bowels message can be heared by the child, then, she walks to Mom’s preferred location. The management of internal sensations can be learned best when there is a language which does not disdain as subjective the rhythms of our children’s felt experience.

EXERCISE: CAN YOU DENOMINATE LABELS THAT WILL HELP YOU TEACH WHAT YOU WISH TO TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THEIR NODAL POINTS? THEIR LEARNING WILL ACCELERATE AS YOU LEARN FROM THEM HOW TO APPROXIMATE YOUR TEACHING TO THEIR WAY OF LEARNING. CAN YOU NAME THE RHYTHMS WHICH SEEM TO TIME THE OPENING AND CLOSING OF YOUR CHILD’S WISH TO LEARN FROM YOU? DO YOU KNOW YOUR CHILD’S WAY OF TRANSITION ‘INTO’ AND ‘OUT OF’ YOUR INNER TERRITORY?

The pace of a thinking child is more than how far he has come. His Thinking can go the same distance with quick short steps or long strides. He can pass the same point at the same time from countless zigzag directions. It is strides we are studying, pacing, rhythms, accelerating rhythms which leap across to new creation. A teacher does well to catch the class stride, joining their rhythm and building its measure with a joining exactment. Watch on the video while I blur the detail, see the rhythm of the teacher joining the rhythm of the students to the rhythm of the experience being studied. The build escalates into a driving force.

EXERCISE: CAN YOU FOLLOW THIS PROCESS IN A CLASSROOM EN RAPPORT WITH ITS TEACHER, THEN IN A CLASSROOM ORGANIZED BY ITS OWN TIMING WHERE THERE IS NO GROUP OR LEADER? WATCH AND FEEL IN THE NEXT GROUP SITUATION YOU ARE IN. HOW DOES ITS PACING GROW?

EXERCISE: IS THE KINDERGARTEN DANCING PATTERNED OUT OF LITTLE LEGS? OR ARE PUPPETS BEING MADE FOR A PARENT RECITAL? SO THEY WILL LOOK LIKE ADULTS? A CHILD’S LEARNING MUST MOVE FROM HIS OWN BODY’S PATTERN. THE JOINING OF THEIR WORDS AND THEIR IDEAS AND THEIR PHYSICAL STRUCTURE IS FAMILIAR TO CHILDREN. IT SETS A LEARNING STYLE THAT GROWS WITH LESS RESENTMENT. TRAIN CHILDREN TO THE LOGIC OF STILLNESS AND YOU TEACH THEM TO FEAR THE RAPID CHANGE OF LIVELY GROWTH.

Think in rhythms rather than beginning and end or distance traveled let’s imagine that the finishing line is a great big monster who will eat you up…you cannot experience finishing.

You are gone.

There is no way to start over.

No baby ever could crawl back down the phylum. Since you do not experience beginning -- having already begun in order to experience, you might as well enjoy wondering about the kinds of pace and the variations in pace and rhythm and bars of our living adventure. It will be fun to teach the children as we listen to their rhythm in concert with our own.

We humans are not solitary runners.

We run in a space filled with air and ground and creatures.

The resonance of life itself fills our song with greater meaning.

Each moment’s phrasing gives context to others.

How does one weigh the songs of living creatures against SO WHAT Anschluss! We just ran through another country -- a diplomatic victory. Mushroom clouds may pop the old debris. Stop, so we can start anew. How shall we code meaning so we can weigh each other’s so what? What is relevant? It’s not chess we’re playing. The rules are moving. Only change is inevitable, that means relative stillness sometimes. Is there to be confusion? Or can we readjust convention to our expanding explosion. A child’s experience explodes as he moves towards his birth.

Can we find a way of dancing which grows within the spirit of our times?

Can we dance as kindergarten children freshened with bud bursting moments?

Can we find patterns?

We need denominations.

We are communal creatures.

We need words to share our rhythms.

We wish to build our thinking from our rhythms, fitting to the rhythms of our times.

There are rhythms of rhythms.

Each human’s arm and her back and his leg and its way of fitting to another’s and the sound of rain constrains.

The bamboo snaps.

There is a feedback rhythm in our language, in our values, in our religions, in the excellent way of throwing a garbage can up on the truck so that just the right amount of garbage falls back so you know most of it got there. While springing through time if you send a message and nothing comes back how do you know you were there? Or where you are? There is a basis for self reference rhythm which is important to human operation. The duration of the return is the moment called ’now’. They blocked the sound of his footfalls with an electronic device. They delayed the sound of his voice in his ears. He was confused. He would not speak or move. “He was afraid he was not there. Even a slight change in the sent rhythms return blocks orientation.

There is a spiral here!

If you need to hear back what you said in order to know that you said it -- how can you speak in a language that isn’t yet familiar to your ears. It will sound at least a little like nonsense. What if the return from your probing is altered by a new process. Has the telephone ear-phone-ear-circuit changed our diction. Has reading changed our way of vision? What is the nature of these spirals?

The rhythm of a classroom can be changed so it does match the teacher, children, and machines to each other or so that it does not. The newness of a technology of learning is strange to those who are so used to oldways that they are just ’simple’, ’natural’ if irrelevant. Out of control unlearning builds anxiety that slows the process of integrated learning. We do need new language with which to adaptively control educational changing.

What seems absurd is the beginning of change, but the return message must fit to some degree with what you can take in and rhythm with your own learning process or it is noise. Any new system must have information tuned to your tuning, or you cannot speak or hear it. The teacher or machine that learns the children’s timing can build their learning rate by knowing the way the child will decode the message sent. A child on the accelerating upswing of learning decodes differently. Information must be encoded so that it can give the maximum intended specificity when it is decoded.

Each enhancement of this process facilitates more enhancement. Communication grows — this growth builds. Increasing acceleration as there is approximation of the learning-teaching process to the critical nodal points within the total system. This is so broad a statement as to be close to gibberish but we continue (remember we must push this unstructured edge to find new language).

In order to dance in the concert of our times we must somehow broaden the base upon which being a “natural” human being is conceived. Our new technology can magnify our errors, the rapid rate of change magnifies this magnification—a small shift in a quickly moving process can explode. We must become expert at plotting out the “civilized” way we have grown without nipping in the bud what have been to us irrelevant paths…

The child has a new destination.

Rhythm changes... Take a breath.

Can you remember the feeling of wanting to tell before you had words? A butterfly lit on a petal softly—it feels good and comforting and night to smell the warmth of blankets which cuddled us once.

How real I was before the days of being a turnpike man with safety belt.

The grumbling of each modern man’s wordless soul commands these changing times. Art is broken open, and the jet of science has left its sound behind. We are breaking through again and again. We must hasten our human development to catch what our minds have defined.

The coin that evolves us rests within our breast pockets, near our hearts, and in our pants pockets.

With fanfare, someone must introduce your long-saved coinage and give it rightful value. Such is the purpose of this book. At least to induce you to formally introduce it your children.

Trumpets! Pfft! Hurumph!

Sshh, smile, twinkle, air, ah! fresh air! irreverant jog, dancing should not be educated out of soring. Growth happens. There is a language of growth.

The metal of this growth coinage is your experience of growing. This is a coinage of intimacy, of detection of movement, shift, space, timing, signals, intention, non-intention, feedback, breakfast, bacon—relative to genes, and Einstein. Remember your voice speaking to a little boy from huge head tilting down? Can you see your father’s lips moving? Still picture memories can remind us of symbols—crosses and clowns, but not of the restless sound of steaming horses. Petals folding as the sun darkens—is the process world. Blossoms on a black bough living during night, unlabelled but alive.

The new coin is as old as eating before eyes and teeth and tongue were separate words. Cooking began before cookbooks. Imagine a new cookbook that explains explicitly the oven heat, the baking, the mixing, and the eating combinations, but leaves ingredients to intuition. Be honest, it is the skill in timing and controlled mixing that separates the tasty wife from the meal maker.

Imagine classifying ten minute recipes on one page and twenty on the next. A working wife’s cookbook would upset her grandmother.

Language, classification, code, or coinage is a convention. Stamp the metal with an eagle, code it by convention and it becomes a medium of exchanging human work, sweat, summer evenings. Coin materializes the prevalent conventions.

An eagle in flight is the heraldic device of the new coin. Our metal is alive—a bird’s fast pulse will hot alight on the stillness of the timeless metal.

Yes! The American eagle is pregnant!

A bud moves its windy flower held within till time and warmth instruct:

Flare now!

Petals, open!

Hup two three!

Evening coolness wraps them closed.

The new language holds growth time within its rhythm.

Stillness now becomes an abstraction referring to less jogged stirring... a time of unperceived movement.

Do you believe what you are used to has ceased to exist? Can you specify the cyclic flow of common things and experiences you are used to in and out of your awareness? Is your foot there?

Tell me of your foot’s sensation now!

Is the ground pressing up?

Name the feeling... how do our moon astronauts name new foot movements in new gravity space?

I have no words to describe the pencil’s movement in my hand.

Try. Can you feel my pencil move your fingers even as I write? I want to share with you the sensation of the rhythms within me as I am writing you. But remember, I am limited by the conventions of what is by old conventions being influential. Once the new coin is established writing will be easier. The richness of a hand moving through time needs new language for its flow.

An epidemic of moving awareness is arising in every corner. It is flowing through us. And we cannot stem the tide.

I have walked along the evening street and heard your son’s voice calling from many windows in many countries that he won’t go to bed. Answering voices rhythm the language of their epoch. Human experience and thoughts are not unique.

A two-year-old is more similar to other two-year-old humans than to anybody else.

Humans share common basic processes—we sneeze and love alike in spite of variations.

Noses channel air alike in spite of hooks and curves and flatness. Breathing is controlled and taught each generation’s words. How can I tell you what is so already human as to be wordless? We will coin words together.

How?

Where to start?

There is nowhere still enough to start.

Listen to your air flow, breathing, words...

Do you read this book aloud?

Have you tried singing it?

I don’t know how to ask you to begin to follow me as I write down the story you already know but think others don’t. My problem here is to put the simplicities everyone already understands into words everyone already knows and to make you aware that you have never before seen them formally introduced.

I am asking you to exercise an old freedom that has new meaning. The new realm encourages new ways of abstracting as they enhance control of change. Choose the way you structure an event as is useful to your purpose. Be aware of what you have done. Be prepared to communicate your bias.

Observation without bias does not exist!

Each method of abstracting leaves out important information. The observer cannot be aware of all he is observing.

In a time sample problem, shifting time flow is used as the basic measurement:

“I am a drunkard,” he said

“I drink because I feel so horrible about drinking.”

Cause - Effect - Cause… the Bourbon spiral. Which came first, the cause or the effect? This is to be understood not in 2 oz. shots but as an exploding reinforcement. The same quart is empty… the rate of gulping increases with each shot… caring less what he gulped… gone before the next has begun. Acceleration. Growth in rate of growth. The faster he downed it the faster it downed him, then with less inhibition he could drink it faster. Apply this in breadth and the new time dimension emerges.

“I want a job.”

“But you need experience.”

“But how can I get experience without a job?”

“Uh, get a job!”

“He won’t go to school,”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t know the work.”

“Why doesn’t he know the work?”

“He won’t go to school.”

The dropout circle must be measured as a spiral.

TIME PROBLEM: POLITICAL MEETING NOISE. “IT’S UNFAIR! HE CAN’T GET AN EDUCATION WITHOUT A SCHOOL,” ONE INTEGRATIONIST STATES. THE SEGREGATIONIST REPLIES: “WHY BUILD SCHOOLS FOR UNEDUCATED PEOPLE?” CAN’T GET A SCHOOL WITHOUT EDUCATION; CAN’T GET AN EDUCATION WITHOUT A SCHOOL. SUCH A FUNDAMENTAL PARADOX IN DENOTING A CRITICAL PROBLEM WOULD DEMAND THE SCRAPPING OF A MATHEMATICAL LANGUAGE.

The old coinage took one side as the cause, and the other as the effect. You can just as easily say the lack of education caused reduced enrollment and inhibited the development of colleges in the south, or you can equally well say the lack of colleges caused reduced interest in obtaining an education. You can build public opinion polls asking questions either way. Politicians’ speeches use this fatal ambiguity of our language.

TIME PROBLEM SOLVING: CONSIDER THE CIRCUIT UNIT, BOTH SIDES, AS SIDES OF ONE COIN. DEVELOP WAYS OF THINKING ABOUT THE INTERFACE BETWEEN THOSE SIDES – THE RATE AT WHICH MORE EDUCATION GROWS MORE EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES AND GROWS MORE EDUCATION AT VARIOUS VELOCITIES. TO LEARN TO CONTROL THIS EXPLOSION, WE ASK, WHERE DO SHIFTS OCCUR IN THE RATE OF EXPANSION AS IT GROWS? WHEN CAN WE KNOW A CONSEQUENCE THAT WILL ALTER THE NEXT CREATION. THERE ARE NODAL POINTS, POINTS IN TIME AND PROGRESSION, WHERE EACH SYSTEM IS VULNERABLE TO A PARTICULAR KIND OF SWITCHING.

Each technique of abstraction creates its own problems. Lack of teaching about the abstractive process, its couplets and rhythms leave gullible people. The advertizing agencies wound to heal.

“You stink!”

“Buy soap.”

This is a simple fake-up problem of naming things — propaganda.

“They stink!”

“Make war.”

The old simplicity that left out time built either/or questions which within the old system had no explicit solution but could be used to deceive and to divide. Each way of abstracting has its own paradoxes – its particular foolishness. We solve these problems every day by intuition, common sense, good judgment, and cutting through to the heart of the matter.

Let’s all write down more of the data processing called judgment. You will notice a problem right away. There is a language for opposites but none for relating disconnected elements bound by proximity in time or space – except to say one caused the other. Causal relationships will seem a necessary fiction until there is new language. And there will be no new language until we give up this myth. We must cross this paradox — using judgement.

TIME PROBLEM: YOU CAN’T MAKE A TREATY WITH THAT COUNTRY WITHOUT TRUST. . . BLABBER BLABBER. . . YOU CANNOT ENFORCE TRUST WITHOUT MACHINERY SET UP BY TREATY. . . END DEEP VOICE. THE PROFESSIONAL DIPLOMAT IN ACTION TELLS HIS NEWSPAPER THE ARISTOTELIAN STORY —

“THEY WERE BAD, BUT, I FOUND OUT WHY,

I KILLED THE VILLAINOUS TRAIT, AND MADE THEM GOOD,

AND OUR FLAG FLIES HIGH.”

“WE MUST SUPPORT OUR ALLIES TO PRESERVE OUR HONOUR.” THE SIMPLE-MINDED, HONEST ACTION OF AN OLD FASHIONED RIGHTEOUS MAN NOT SCHOOLED TO HIS DECEPTIONS CAN BRING CONFUSION AND DISASTER. JUDGEMENT REQUIRES AWARENESS OF LIES INTRODUCED FOR SIMPLIFICATION.

Oppositional counter-statements are often identical. This is the work of the professional diplomat. A serbian bullet. . . reaches backwards to the same destination… ustification. Hindsight is placed in history books as if things happened that way.

Aristotelian distortion lies in formal statements that are retro-spective explanations of the forward course.

The rabble rousing Anti-Christ preaches in the fiery moralism of the blood and thunder evangelizing minister.

They are more similar than different.

It is not the unsuspected commonness between opposites that we seek to systemize, but the action flow between them.

Sweet and sour are together as in sweet-and-sour fish. They are different from sweet-and-greasy or sour-and-fishy, though both are related to saliva. Sweet and sour together form a set as does black and white. Our language must discriminate with care the similarity of opposites as well as their declared opposition. This new simplicity is taught now in first grade modern mathematics. Does this early familiarity with the relatedness of opposites in a set ensure the obsolescence of familiar Cowboy-Indian, good-evil problems? No! Fragmentation keeps math and Cowboys and Indians quite separate.

Opposites in the new simplicity are two sides of the same coins but the newness is denoting the time flow between them.

Many times I have sat listening to tales of love and hate, and felt warmly the communication of the persons so involved with each other in warm com (together) bat (war), or com (together) fort (strength). They come together.

Our simplest truths are premises implicitly taught and beyond examination. These premises joined in a marriage are taught by adults to children in combat and comfort. These nodal points are taught in bathing together. “Nasty” spoken to a 2-year-old means “don’t touch”, and “smile” means “clean”, sets a program for growing. A common signal system couples the children and parents to their family coding. Each family grows its own sets, as every in-law comes to know. It is hard to measure the flow between the oppositional positions of each generation’s own value system, or the flow between the accepted issues of two successive generations.

I have also felt the bitter chill of those untouching eyes which see through corporeal being to majestic illusion. These are not eyes joined by true opposition. Their two monologues have no common coding.

Are you aware of the need for transitions?

Are you aware of my need to take you beyond the flow of your usual questions?

Let us play together!

Into the computer put questions and data which once computed prints out as new conclusions. Responding to these questions, you feed in more data relevant to your questions recontexted. It returns new and more refined questions. It helps us to home-in on the questions we didn’t know to ask, those that will make a difference to the teaching-learning process. Computers provide a metaphor. Man and machine join in a creative dialogue. As it progresses you can seek questions to answers that never before existed, and the machine also reprograms itself to home-in on questions which are increasingly relevant, to the actions you have taken in response to its playfulness. But, to teach this humanoid computer to work with us we must find out how we stay lively — how we play. In explicitly teaching the machine conventions we were taught by implication, we unlearn these conventions and are free again to find others.

The new computer once we have taught it how to search for and denominate patterns, can find patterns that are so implicit to us we cannot denominate them. As we are more explicitly aware of the basis of our system of denomination, we can enter further into this man-machine searching. Until then we will think these patterns prattle as absurd. Would we always correct the new findings our tools can produce errors? The errors of our tools have always been a source of discovery. Must we correct the fresh ways of conceiving that children produce as errors? Can we find a way to learn from our machines and from our children what we did not teach them? There is available to us from our dialogue with machines and with our children a new way to speed up our evolution so that we can learn to enhance fresh potentials — those patterns native to our species which we have learned not to use. To what extent have the machine technologists done this?

Stimulate this problem. Can you?

Old system. . . the machine’s way of structuring data is programmed to imitate the limited rigid formal patterning out of which people make sense (those who do not explain intuition or realize they think with their bodies). Intuition is added to the choice of what “you’d think of wanting to program” and how you would structure the program and interpret results. The machine output before intuitive interpretation is a mere tautological expansion of what went in. This old style machine was just an amplifier which did a man’s chores but could not create.

New Systems: Let the machine learn by the way a child uses it how the child comes to play the game of learning and teaching. The machine collects data about the child’s performances even as the child is attuned to other matters. The machine conducts its own examinations and from its results patterns a program for adding a particular child to learn. This machine may then print out to the teacher the part of its awareness of the child’s pattern that it can turn into verbal or numerical statements. The teacher then has to extend his language to match the machine’s if he wishes to help the machine translate what it has learned.

This approximation of machine and child and teacher into improved ways of machine-teaching-child-learning-and-environmental-enhancement is accepted in other fields if not in education. In medical diagnosis it has already been shown that man and machine working together can diagnose better than either alone. The computer-like V.T.R. can advance our knowledge of timing and our new denominating.

EXERCISE: PUT INTO A MAN-COMPUTER SYSTEM THE SPEECHES MADE BY PUBLIC OFFICIALS OF THE TWO MAJOR POWERS OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS. HOME-IN TO FIND CHANGE IN GRAMMATICAL PATTERNS CORRECTING FOR THE USUAL GRAMMAR OF THE PERSON AND THE COUNTRY. HOW OFTEN DOES THE PRESIDENT USE THE FUTURE TENSE OR THE SUBJUNCTIVE OR THE IMPERATIVE? EXAMINE THESE ANALYSES FOR PATTERNS OF PROGRESSIONS. PROGRAM THE MACHINE TO BE RESPONSIVE TO THE ACCELERATION IN THESE PROGRESSIONS.

USING THIS KIND OF PROGRAMMED SEARCH, PATTERN INTO CURVES THE RATE OF CHANGE IN THE GRAMMAR OF GOVERNMENT CONTROLLED NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS IN TWO COUNTRIES. CONSIDER THE OSCILLATIONS BACK AND FORTH OF THESE TWO SETS OF CURVES. SEEK PATTERNS THAT CAN BE USED TO CORRECT THESE TWO SETS OF CHANGES INTO A SINGLE TWO-HEADED SYSTEM. ARE THE OPPOSITIONAL STATEMENTS ACCELERATING TOGETHER? NOW SAMPLE VERBATIM SPEECHES MADE BY THE LEADERS IN TERMS OF THE SAME PATTERNS. COMPARE THE VARIATION IN LAG BETWEEN PUBLIC AND EDITORIAL STATEMENT IN JUST ONE COUNTRY THEN IN THE OTHER. HOW RAPIDLY IS A LEADER’S STATEMENT REFLECTED IN THE PRESS? IS THERE A BUILD-UP? WHEN IS THE LAG IN COMMUNICATION MOST EXTREME? HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO THE ACTION VALUE OF THE STATEMENT? WHAT SHIFTS IN GOVERNMENTAL SITUATIONS MIGHT ACCOUNT FOR PATTERN CHANGES?

“Mary, can you use the computer on your desk to build a picture of this year’s news that is related to your favorite style of structuring the world?”

“Uh huh. How can I decode the statements and undo the national conventions?”

“Mary, me, do this with each other. Try to break their implicit code. Try to find a major key to the way it codes its actional foreign policy into public statement Can we publicly present our adult patterns of structuring to our children so they will then have a key to our reality? They must learn to translate structural aspects of our coding that gives our words different meanings than if they said the same. This is a way across increasing generational gaps.”

“What is the direction of the editorial change? Are the editorials more ritualized, less questioning or is there there more variety in terms? Are there more abstract names today? Are there more names?What is the time rhythm? Is the war drum pulsing faster or slower? Is it changing its tone to the higher pitch of frenzy? We can practice on old papers and do sealed predictions. It will be fun to open them next year.

“John, from the look of the 1930-prewar papers and their pattern of printing display, can you machine can you categorize progressing states of alarm? Estimate. Now measure headline printing and mathematise your findings. Use the video library for the newspapers. The machine will take the measurements, but you must specify in a way that will give it your intentions.”

Words are shorter in the midst of urgency!

How does the grammar shift as tension builds?

What about the change in rate of change in the use of verbs like “must,” in the superlative, in the possessive?

How does tension abate?

Can you define the nodal points in the newspaper progression?

Does your heart in fact beat faster as the printing approximates excitement?

Turn on your heartbeat display. Does its rhythm relate in more than a random way to the shifting of the news? You’ve been reading — first reading.

Now?

EXERCISE: TRY THE SAME CORRELATION WITH YESTERDAY’S PAPER. THE DATA ALREADY STORED. WHAT PIECES OF INFORMATION AFFECT YOUR HEARTBEAT THE MOST? IS THERE A MORE THAN RANDOM PATTERN TO THE WAY THESE AFFECTIVE PIECES OF NEWS ARE WRITTEN?

IS IT THE MATCHING OF THE WRITING RHYTHM OF THE EVENTS BEING STORIED? IS THERE A CONSTANT RESPONSIVE PATTERN FOR THE WHOLE CLASS?

COULD YOU USE THIS KNOWLEDGE IN A CLASS ELECTION? IS NEWS BEING PREPARED NOW WITH THIS KIND OF ANALYSIS IN MIND? CAN YOU SHOW ME THIS EFFECT? EACH NEW ANSWER GROWS NEW QUESTIONS.

“Benjamin, using the data phone and Central Information Storage Center and video for writing, show our guests the time words for children, adults, other creatures relevant to the creatures you’ve chosen to play with.”

“Ben, from your look, I think I’m asking too much. Show me what you have been working on today, and I’ll translate it, some of the visitors who haven’t had media tools to work with may recognize my words for your non-word language.”

Fast-time is the time of a child when every moment holds freshening of cells regenerating by the billions. When growth is at its zenith any slightest change is amplified in proportion to the extent that it becomes a focus of the self-organizing process. Each change is a focus of change in the formation of a new tissue.

Fast-time is the day when so much happens that one wonders how so much was held within that space of time. But the one who wonders is observing in a slow-time. The rapidly growing child is the expert in growth — until we slow him to the pace that he can match with ours enough to gain the common rhythmic phasing necessary to communication.

Slow time is when time is so slow.

A year at 51,

A day while 17,

An hour when 2,

A second in embryo — each has its own time.

Time is the amount of organizable new information which breaks the timeless continuity into what can be patterned enough to be rhythmically experienced. What can be experienced and how depends upon self-referent clocks, structural body clocks the biological rhythm of our movements, our changing size, our weight and shape. These create functions we call ’now’. The length of now has a span which also varies with the speed of return of orienting signals sent beyond our skins. Each species group has common attributes that potentiate its kind of communication. The human species has time attributes yet to be determined. Knowing a species’ kind of time helps us to translate the variation in its behavior to a redundant language.

The scampering shrew’s time is a fast time for us to think about. But the shrew knows only its own time. Its time is a function of its size and space and its metabolic rhythms; so is ours.

EXERCISE: WATCH THE SLOW TENDRILS OF THE ANEMONE BY THE RUSHING SHREW’S TIME. THE LONG ARMS OF THIS PLANTLIKE SEA ANIMAL DO NOT SEEM TO MOVE. WATCH THEM QUICKLY; NOTHING HAPPENS. WATCH THE SAME SEA BEASTIE USING SLOW-TIME UNITS OF FIVE MINUTES PER BRIEF GLANCE. THE ANEMONE IS VIOLENTLY WAVING, ITS ARMS THRESH ABOUT. THEY REACH FOR FOOD. IT IS AS ALIVE AS ANY SHREW WAS. BUT YOU MUST WATCH THE SLOW-MOVING SEA ANEMONE IN SUCH A WAY THAT FIVE MINUTES IS A MOMENT. NOW TRY AN ACCELERATING MOMENT. AH! YOU MUST FIND ITS RHYTHM AND MATCH IT.

A responsive grandma must watch her grandchild using different time per glance than with her daughter.

EXERCISE: IMAGINE THE TIME PICTURE OF A FAMILY GRANDMA, MOTHER, AND GRANDCHILD EACH HOLDING A DIFFERENT TIME TRADITION, AND LIVING IN A DIFFERENT BIOLOGICAL TIME MOMENT? CAN YOU AT LEAST EXPERIENCE, IF NOT LABEL THEIR RESPECTIVE WAYS OF BUILDING THE TIMING OF CRISIS OR OF CRUCIAL EVENTS?

It would be easier on all if this time information were explicit. Decoding would be easier and enricher. Children and grandparents by allowing time correction can understand each other better. A mama can encode the dinner warning so it will work, if she knows her child’s kind of timing.

Explicit knowledge of the variance in time systems is important for communication between two species, between adult and child, between two children who are separated by ten years — before and after teens. It is important to integrating a ten-year plan with a day-to-day program.

As one develops more denominations of time, the time-coin becomes more and more spendable. To study time samples of five years’ duration requires the understanding of the long wave rhythms of the unit being studied. We look for long term (5 year) trends. We look for growth spurts which rhythm so as to significantly relate to the five-year period. We blur day to day rhythms.

Short and long term policy have often been separated implicitly. Policy decisions used to be longer term than administrative directives. Ten-year policy holds day-to-day exigencies, events in different perspectives than two-year planning. As change accelerates the time factor in data collecting becomes more significant.

EXERCISE: IMAGINE ONE-DAY TEACHERS AND ONE-YEAR TEACHERS. IMAGINE DETAILED COURSES SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO TRAIN TEACHERS TO GUIDE THEIR PUPILS OVER TEN YEARS OF DETAILED ONE-YEAR PLANNING. IMAGINE OTHER COURSES EQUALLY DETAILED — TO TRAIN TEACHERS TO GUIDE THE STUDENTS OVER A ONE-DAY PLAN. THIS IS A DIVISION WHICH DIVIDES BY TIME INSTEAD OF SUBJECTS. WILL THE TWO COURSES CORRELATE? ARE THEY SIMPLY PROJECTIONS OF EACH OTHER? HOW WOULD YOU DIFFERENTIATE THESE COURSES? HOW WOULD YOU BUILD TWO PROGRAMS RESPONSIVE TO YEARLY AND DAILY RHYTHMS OF THE CHILD? DO WE DO THAT NOW? EXPLICITLY? CONTRAST TIME PLANNING FOR THE ADOLESCENT AND THE AGED. HOW WOULD THIS AFFECT THE OPTIMAL TIMING OF CHANGE IN THEIR ENVIRONMENT? WILL THIS HELP OLD PEOPLE TO MAINTAIN CONTACT WITH THEIR PRESENT?

As I glance out of the window and see a building emerging from wooden forms, I know that the planning has been done by persons involved by the nature of their professions with different segments of time. The carpenters, the builder and architect of each trade are oriented to a particular periodicity.

In the new realm, clothes sewn for short term and long term obsolescence and are explicitly marked. This is balanced by a notation of wear out and boredom, a tally of growth and movement expectation in different age groups. A family, to be economically successful, must know its own wearing patterns. These patterns are passed on across the generations: four pairs of shoes lasting one quarter as long as two expensive pairs sets a four/four rhythm in the home. The two/four time of these expensive purchase may set apart a different social class. This is a rhythm that paychecks cannot fully account for, though pay checks set to two/four rhythms are a great inconvenience to a four/four family even when larger. The feedback which would describe the tempo of a family’s economics is not yet explicit information. We do know there is observable variation in time sampling from one social group to another. This rhythm is well known to manufacturers. They purchase so as to catch major critical points between too much and too little stock on hand for a particular region in a particular economic season. A razor blade that lasts too long does not relate to the family’s shopping rhythm. The lifetime of a product must be planned in terms of its customer’s time sampling habits.

Would it seem strange to have one institution involved with long-term health of our population and another involved with a short-term health program? In some countries, doctors are differently trained depending on the time sampling expected. The public health officer is trained and valued by his community in relation to a longer span of time than other physicians. The surgeon, however, may well perceive the community health consultant. Our new denomination would make the surgeon and the public health officers different in a way that has the same shape as the difference between the attorneys for short and long term loans. Naming these isomorphs (similar shapes) provides most people with a feeling that what they have long known and used is finally in words. This is a practical matter when one must program a machine to operate on long or short term returns.

At your bank there is a long-term loan officer and a short-term loan officer. These two operations have in common that they both involve the lending of money. The long-term loans depend upon an investment’s potential for growth. Short-term loans depend upon present security. Skillful evaluation of these two kinds of loans requires different data and data processing. As computers help even more to determine the odds of a good return, these two kinds of banking (and decision making) will become more separate. Now it is intuitively managed by choosing different kinds of loan officers.

So what?

An office in the U.S. Cabinet for a Minister of Human Enhancement seems appropriate only when long glances of fifty years or a hundred years are the units of observation. This man would have as his responsibility taking those measures useful to avoiding extermination of our species. He would be a conservationist. This requires a different kind of man than one who will save a few men today on the eve of election.

Likewise, the capacity to translate from one time sampling to another seems valuable if we are to explore the world that exists beyond the constraints which restrict what we consider to be “natural” human experience.

Our new coin does not conceive of time as duration of travel between fixed points of a given distance. It is not linear. Drinking causing drinking, heat causing heat in oily rags, tension causing tension — these are self-generating spirals, self-organizing systems growing, living, swelling, but we are accustomed to readily to constants. It is the swelling growth of a crescendo, the break, the discontinuity, that marks the nodal point that makes patterned experiencing possible. The bamboo sprig is broken. Growth the common feature of all living creatures, holds human interest. Experiments with artificially induced constancy and boredom indicate that they can destroy human life. Those experiments called sensory deprivation suggest that change is as necessary a food as time itself.

Adventure with time control. Vast amounts of data become available when we regard time as a variable and denominate time process. Complex novelties become important, simple and common.

The time telescope slows motion films watch the opening of a flower revealing a rhythm which has not existed to the eye untutored to the denomination of time. The time microscope, the high-speed computer catches microframes built from electronic pictures and samples the unfolding of the micro-age not apparent without such time devices. Much of the data that you thought an intuition is short or long time sample observation sampled differently than the conventional moments.

Intuition is for creating newness and not for maintaining formal traditions of what one is not supposed to know. A child’s time is so different from a grown-up’s time, why not declare the difference? Write about it. Retire such busy knowledge to a greater knowledge. Make it grow. Everyone knows the secret — they could not bring up children; but as long as this knowledge is not formally declared the development of an educational science is constrained.

All denominations are a function of our capacity to perceive. We cannot name into units what we

do not know to exist.

Each time is by definition, and when one realizes definitions can be changed to one’s purpose, a new world opens. The child is now taught to add, subtract, and multiply using a number system base seven, base three, as well as the usual base ten; he understands base ten as one possibility.

Time must be similarly taught, not only base solar system, but also base human species, base geological time, base shrew’s time, base Sunday supplement, and base Russian Five Year plan.

Fast time, slow time, circular time, spiral time, growth time... A thousand different kinds of real time can be measured once time is no longer considered a god-given constant.

Time is man’s own invention to be used for his own changing purpose.

CHAPTER FIVE: IF TIME IS BROADENED, CAUSALITY DROPS OUT, AND CONSEQUENCE DEVELOPS

The dog pee’d an eternal river on the rug.

“Soda water is best to clean it,” called the well-trained guest.

I brought soda and water, soda powder and a glass of warm water.

Warm water on the rug then just a sprinkle of soda — no, it needs more soda — just a little more water, dilution you know. What a stain!

From the dog’s pee?

Yes and no.

Causality: the urine could not have done it, but the combination of urine and soda was followed by a yellowing stain to the rug.

The dog did it.

No, the pee did it.

No, the rug did it.

Next, I did it.

No. But it was foolish to bring soda instead of soda water. Imagine my wife saying to new guests,

“He, (pointing to me) stained the rug.”

Why, I am housetrained. She did it. She bought it. If we had a nylon rug it would not have stained, so the rug caused it.

No, the floor did and so ad nauseam.

Define your system, don’t swim in it!

Causality is always a retrospective statement of a linear direction.

That without which it would not have happened is considered the final cause. No rug, no stain, the relativist says. Hit the soda, Pop.

The cause of tuberculosis is tubercle-bacillus. That is simple. It was settled in the 19th century. The convention carried useful information for that time.

The germ era defined which-germ-doe-which-to-what and demolished the “spontaneous generation” of pre-microbe days. The thoughtful Dr. Koch worked on this problem. He did not say that the germ caused the disease; he set a convention that the specificity of a microorganism (to a disease) is not demonstrated without the fulfillment of the following:

The microorganism is present and discoverable in every case of the disease;

It is to be cultivated in pure culture;

Inoculation from such a culture must reproduce the disease in susceptible animals;

It must be reobtained from such animals and again grown in pure culture.

Koch’s law was a useful one when the tuberculosis germ was newly discovered, but like all abstractions it emphasized a particular way of cutting a line across the phenomena in order to highlight the newness he presented. But you public health moderns will say,

“Germs, yes, but tuberculosis is caused by bad housing, malnutrition, fatigue, hopelessness. The germ is always present; poor health allows it to disease us.”

Is this another point of view, to be asserted in a different context?

All of these are part of the same spiral.

If we add malnutrition (M), germ (G), and disease (D) where are we now? We have added to our conceptual system a new complication. “Don’t mix them together, they’ll multiply!” the shriveled librarian yells.

Why not? Let’s add two more, emotional stress (E), population explosion increasing proximity (X): Then, using a computer as the oven, let us bake these ingredients into a life situation. Old conventions soon fail us.

Why make life more complicated than it is? Everyone knows tuberculosis is caused primarily by tubercle bacillus; there are secondary causes. We older ones take things like that for granted.

Let’s not.

To instruct the computer you must make explicit what you take for granted. You are not interested in technology? You have no choice! You must keep up with your machines to control them or the vacuum will be filled by less benevolent action.

If you multiply 10 to 15 factors like housing, fresh air, constitutional endowment, germs, etc., you come to a new level of abstraction — growth. There is fresh perspective in this new simplicity.

Malnutrition,

poor housing,

tuberculosis,

depression,

bad air

TIME PROBLEM: GROWING SICKNESS...

BEING SICK…

MAKES ONE

MORE EASILY

MORE SICK

All the above factors, M, G, D, E, X... to a long finite series, can develop in phase to rhyme like a poet building crescendo. Rapid growth, a small wind in phase with a bridge’s swing — Smash! This is more than a listing of puffs. Consequences grow from their parallel timing.

Who can work well enough to gain a good living and buy good food if he is malnourished?

Misery multiplies...

It’s harder to think when you get past a certain point of hunger. If you look thin, who will enjoy you? No money, hungry, feeling depressed... who has energy to make money, to work well enough to gain a good living... to get out of the hunger. They multiply each other. This whirlpool is well known. It’s the skid down Skid Row. It’s the same skid we use to get across the can’t-get-a-job-without-experience-or-experience-without-a-job-paradox.

If all the factors get into phase and if each error or success catalyzes more — as on a bad day — you build a chain reaction accelerating in one direction or another. Diseases do make resistance lower. Health improves one’s ability to do healthy things. Disease and health grow. They are in flux.

Everyone is aware that the man who has TB is more liable to get worse tuberculosis than someone who is healthy.

Disease causes disease!

Am I going back to spontaneous generation when disease just happened without any explanation — like spontaneous combustion?

No!

We are not going in magic circles unless time is left out, or turned into a thin line. Day-to-day is time, cough-to-cough-to-cough is time till you can hardly take in air without losing blood. Symbols can repeat — coughs don’t. They are not print. Cough produces cough into a rhythm is everyone’s experience. They involve your whole body — and everybody’s body around you.

Disease producing disease is not the same as disease out of nowhere. If diseases produced disease means it came from nowhere, we are back to medieval times and must explain with hobgoblins. The time axis of our spiral is important. It cannot be left implicit. It must be written down — described. What forms seem natural to you? I begin with finding many analogues; then an image develops that includes them all. The image finally is condemned to a symbol. What is your time vocabulary like?

The time factor has a modern rhythm. If those electrons really get fired up as they burst away at each other they can build up enough speed to knock off a proton with the release of energy which increases the bombarding until…well, it’s like a chain letter. One gets two, 4, 8, 16, 32, 63, 128, 256, 612, 1224, 2448, 4896, 9792, 19,584, 39,168, 78,336, 156,672, 313,344, 626,688, 1,273,376, 2,564,752, 5,093,504, 10,187,008…siren…put in the lead absorbers…calibrate the growth or the atomic generator will degenerate with one big bang. And you?

The calibration of growth is necessary to gain control of change.

Call the bang one critical or nodal point. This critical point is a point of unaccommodated change that patterns the rhythm so that it is perceptible as information. For every system there is a set of critical points—points of change. The rhythms that have been studied are those that grossly change the pattern. Something going faster and faster bursts into a new system. This reaches our awareness. We may rhythm it to a new pace. We may simply change what we are doing.

Tiredness normally acts as a governor when we spin too fast. Tiredness denied, the old system breaks. No longer a governor uncontrolled by the effect of its speed up, the flywheel is now pieces of metal flying... or a civilization progressed to disaster... or a money man making a fortune.

Death has been the only well-known nodal point of the wheel of life. Medicine now documents life’s rhythms during sickness. What are the rhythms that characterize our species? Actuaries working for insurance companies seek to know the human rhythms so they can bet without losing.

Rhythms within a single person, the ebb and flow of pulses, the changing tides and concentrations of salt in our fluid and the brain waves can be mixed as one flow together. The flow patterns discovered are abstracted. Any old phenomena can be patterned as flow if this is the choice of the observer. This only seems abstract. Have a little beer folks…take a rest in your local bars.

Watch two people in the bar bombolading. Joe bristles at Jim’s remark, Jim flips a dig at the end of what he said to show Joe that Joe’s building didn’t escape him, but Joe sees the dig as more insult. Now watch the bouncing, burgeoning bombolade. Watch a proton flyoff. The contrapuntal echoing of two choruses, Joe and Jim, nave and apse, are melded by the build of their reverberations amplified by the silent barroom’s now expectant exaltation. The register chimes...Splendid, thrilling...The thrill of two immortal contact. A filthy knifing.

Joe and Jim in one battle.

There is a rhythm to the battle and to the lowering and heightening of the accelerative process. A riot develops like an explosion. The bartender feels the air crackling and calls police reinforcements. Too late. Knives flash.

Joe has the chest wound. His old tuberculosis flares. It’s war had reached a stalemate, but with the wound his resistance is lowered, it spreads. Joe’s heart can’t take the extra strain the tuberculosis brings. Joe had a coronary long ago, but was too poor to reach the doctor. After that angina - pain with slight exertion. So much pain was depressing. Forget the drink!

It was the only way he could stay at work.

There’s a rhythm to it all. Joe’s stab wound becomes a nodal point, he has a rest, his chronic TB is activated and treated. His angina is relieved by proper medication. As his chest clears his hear is less loaded. He is helped find a job. When he leaves the hospital his depression does not beget depression. His fortunes are reversed. Joe’s whirlpool no longer drags him toward death. He is in fact more alive now than before his stab wound. Being severely stabbed caused him to get beyond going to bars and being stabbed. The rhythm is no longer in crescendo. At last, the tension is off and the sun shines through. Joe bursts into blossom.

Can you catch the theme? Do you have words to impart to your children of your own everyday capacity to catch the rhythm of a situation, to know how fast it is building to crescendo, how high it will be before it explodes at a nodal point into bits and pieces? When is the build-up tension past the point of no return to a previous stable state? When do habits become immune to innovation? You feel the moment when you can interfere with neighbors’ quarrels or quarrels between your children. You sense the resistance you will meet. You judge how much you wish to be like those lead bars descending into the uranium reactor tonight. Damp we resist not by going to a movie. No. It’s getting too late — the acceleration is accelerating — the children murmur more rapidly with every new pace. The house is jumping. Its acceleration grows…jump out of the reactor…or push it to a crisis before it is ready to explode.

The growth need not be toward destruction. For the young child, each word shared, when has meaning, brings new interest and skill at learning words; the vocabulary increases more and more rapidly. If you catch the child’s rhythm, you can teach him much more, he will play with your rhythm too,

So what!

Nonsense! Who cares about the rhythm of real events?

I do!

How else can we know if little Jim or Joe is learning rapidly? He knows many words today. But he may have learned them yesterday. What is his curve of learning?

Jim is five feet high! A fact, yes, but if he was four feet yesterday, his five feet today is not the same. Rate of change in rate of growth is a measurement intuitevly respected but formally neglected.

High or low is important. Bench marks on the nursery wall tell of final height at one or several moments in time. The point of highness in music must be unusual and pierce our ears. A child can be so tall he should join a special club –

true, but a change in the rate or speed at which growth was made is important to measure as every mother knows. Have you ever seen tables that say how fast a child should be growing? They are different from the historical table – how many inches he should have grown in a specified time. The new scale starts by classifying the child into groups with similar growth rhythms. Then it predicts the sequence of changes in rate of growth from large sample averages.

Once music was constructed on an eight point scale. Does the music of the streets go “DO RE ME”? No! Such regular intervals are man-made, unusual. The wind as it rises to a piercing shriek does not rise by constant intervals. Some ears – once trained to the system may tune in only eight points. To them – the wind is not music. Remember... the straight line is a man-made oddity – a special case we have historically conventionalized as simple. It’s man’s way of recognizing his own houses but it is less useful, in abstracting his nature. Horizon and plumb line form the original cross on which man crucified himself.

Do you think in terms of static points?

... or in reference lines?

... or n-dimensional grids?

Why he’s five feet tall, how nice! I remember I was five feet tall, too, when I was ten years old. Oh, so nice to be five feet tall, has he been growing rapidly? Faster and faster, eh? When I was nine I began to grow very rapidly. I hardly knew how to use my body, it changed so much from week to week. Why, my mother let out my trousers constantly. Acceleration in rate of growth is no real secret. But scientists don’t worry as much about it as manufacturers do! During the cheap-clothes period, clothes are never worn out, just grown out of, so they advertise appearance, not durability. Imagine, his size zipped up the scale during his twelfth and thirteenth years with increasing rapidity until he reached 6’3“, and then it stopped. Sure, that’s tall, but the rate of growing one foot in six months is important. There is a rhythm in growth that has been neglected. Imagine teaching children using their own growth as their reference for measure.

Change in rate of change in any phenomenon is worthwhile adding to its description.

TIME PROBLEM: PROSPERITY BREEDS PROSPERITY.

COUNTRY A PROTECTS ITSELF AGAINST COUNTRY B, WHICH BUILDS MORE BOMBS TO PROTECT ITSELF AGAINST A WITH, AND A BUILDS MORE BOMBS TO PROTECT ITSELF FROM THE GROWING STRENGTH OF B. . .TO CATCH UP WITH A. . . A TO CATCH UP WITH B. . . RHYTHMIC OSCILLATION. . . LISTEN TO THE RHYTHM OF THE MOMENTARY THINKERS, UNWITTINGLY DANCING IN THEIR DANCE OF DEATH. . . SO MUCH OF THE PEOPLES’ MONEY IS IN BOMBS. . . EACH THINKING THAT THE TUNE THEY DANCE TO, IS THE OTHER’S. . . IT’S LIKE A HOLY ROLLERS’ MEETING, . . THE EXCITEMENT BUILDS, . . JIM AND JOE KNIVES FLY, . . IT’S LIKE VOMITING, . . FIRST THE BUILD UP. CAN YOU TRANSCEND THE MOMENT, THE CAUSE-POINT SYSTEM? LISTEN TO THE A AND B DANCE. CAN YOU HEAR THE CRESCENDO OF THE DANCE? CAN YOU CATCH THE RATE OF CHANGE OF RHYTHM? OR ARE YOU TOO BUSY DUCKING OR MANUFACTURING HAND GRENADES TO PROTECT AGAINST THEM AS THEY PROTECT AGAINST YOU? YOU ARE GROWING TALLER EVEN AS YOU FIGHT. CATCH AN IRRELEVANCE TO HELP YOU GAIN PERSPECTIVE, IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE DANCE AND DECIDE WHETHER YOU WANT TO STAY IN IT, OR HOW TO GET OUT.

INTERVENTION IS LIKE CATCHING THE MAN BEING DRAGGED INTO THE WHIRLPOOL – HEROIC NEAR THE VORTEX. AND COUNTRY A AND B BOTH ARE UNAWARE THAT THEY SHARE THE SAME WHIRLPOOL LIKE THE MASTODONS AND DINOSAURS THE SLOWER MUD.

THE INTERVENTION NECESSARY IS INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL TO THE INCREASING RATE OF CHANGE IN ACCELERATION. SUDDEN CHANGE MAY SIGNAL WARNING; GRADUAL CHANGE MAY BE ACCOMMODATED. THERE IS A PACE THAT IS LIKELY TO BE LETHAL – SUDDENLY TOO LATE. SO TOO WITH HEART DISEASE. AS THE HEART PUTS OUT LESS BLOOD TO THE MUSCLES OF THE BODY, THE HEART WALL MUSCLES TOO ARE LESS AMPLY SUPPLIED, AND THE HEART, BEING LESS SUPPLIED WITH BLOOD, PUTS OUT LESS BLOOD. IT IS THE ACCELERATION AND ITS CHANGES THAT COUNT. WHY DON’T WE COUNT IT? ARE THE BOMBS OF A AND B TO BE ADDED OR MULTIPLIED.

Two men lying side by side in the heart ward of a large hospital may at the single moment, have the same blood flow measurements. One’s rhythm: he looks worse every evening but is better in the morning. His oscillation slowly progresses — like a chronic case they say, like a cold or chronic war. The other’s rhythm is acute: he needs heroic intervention! On the chart showing rate of change in accelerating, acute process is on an accelerating curve, near the Vortex, and chronic process is slowly moving, padding through the flatland. The same intervention, give them both the same drugs, relatively speaking is not the same treatment.

Measure intervention as it changes rate of change. An overview measures the changing rate of growth of a war or an uneasy peace. The system is defined to include A and B. It is not the two faces that determine our coin.

Repeat. Country A and B protect themselves against each other. Does the rhythm rise to explosive crescendo? Is their whirl nearing a vortex? Can it be prevented? Is it too late? What are the nodal accelerators and decelerators to this feedback situation? What insulators can break the feedback circuit or at least decelerate it? What irrelevancies powerfully energized? Can the Country-A-versus-Country-B system of rhythmed acceleration be tired in minor explosions that shift the rhythm? Can small controlled wars out of phase prevent total explosion? Can humor?

Some suggest that we wage perpetual war — against poverty, insufficient food supply, misery. I must admit I have hoped that Country A and B might involve themselves in a space race rather than an arms race, even though the rhythm stays the same. The system can be changed by being made explicit.

Awareness of the whirlpool of rhythmic phenomena, the opportunitsm of touching the pendulum just as it is turning will help the average man to think more constructively of a domestic-foreign situation. Strung out into a straight line the whirlpool is invisible. We all think in non-word time as other animals do. But, the linear thinking we need for word exchange is being programmed at our children powerfully. It will not allow survival.

The new realm has a new simplicity - the process of living growth becomes a way of thinking. The rhythms of living processes are not beyond our knowledge.

CHAPTER SIX: IF WE LEARN PROCESS WE FIND A LIVELY WAY TO AN INTER-SPECIES WAY OF BEING

Walk intuitively off the cliff,

through the air

across the chasm

to the other side.

Having reached firm ground, then construct the bridge

or,...more accurately, real-ize the bridge walked across.

Unlearn. Then the next step appears out of nothingness. Even the predicted next step exists unknown until it bears weight. Each fresh step makes available a simple set of choices, new possibilities appear unknown in the past.

You are process.

You are a flowing, moving, constantly changing field of energy, of space flowing matter, of time organized in rhythms. In the process world space, time, energy, and information are living first.

Coin your own labels but denominate explicitly.

The sense of being process in a process world is the feeling of aliveness. Need we relegate this sense to the language of a status? Many years have been spent seeking corpsed final truths.

Listen to breathing and feel the swelling moment of a breath span. This is no timeless truth.

You are not soundless ever.

Listen, feel your lips pressed together or apart. Watch your heart beats on the electrocardiogram. Count the time of listening in breath spans. Speak in rhythm. Sense the connectedness of one person to another… in so many ways... that chest rhythms... sometimes pressed together... sometimes distant... sometimes many of us... give revived conviction without words.

Tissue and vessels are alive to each other. More work releases muscle changes which signal tiny vessels to dilate... bringing more blood cells which carry oxygen gulped by the mouth or dissolved in plasma. Yes, cells signaling release the warm-touch of human odor which encourages aliveness... the kind of human movements when symbols seem to vanish and for a moment time seems timeless.

It is sometimes strange that process is so actively denied — or is it?

Standing alone with one of my children, I quickly glanced at a tree and saw it as the stillness of its picture. Then I changed the time sample with which I watched. I took a long look and saw it sway and the tree came to life and its movement joined the clouds and the rustling to the rhythm of the wind... and I saw my child as a process and spoke to her of the tree’s swaying. And she knew what I meant but what do so few words.

Dry leaves dropped down and changed my time reference to seasons, and I tried to speak of seasons and growing and found myself caught with her questions...

“Why did the tree begin?”

“Who planted it?”

“Where did they get the seed?”

The tree and man himself with no beginning, no ending is process. I ask myself why did I allow her to go to school?

“So what!” you respond...”

Not! Listen! What if children at school could play with living things? Approximated in a way, that enrich their involvement with each other. Decisions which a plant is making by setting rootlets in a particular direction are predicted by the child who can influence the environment of that root, adding water as the root behaves to show its appetite for water. And the way the rootlet decides changes the airflow round the child’s mouth – or his lunch.

The child lives that precipitate less directly in the way of a gnarled old tree that lives in a time frame of many-hundred years. Without harm, the tree and the child seek an understanding, if only to know that they live in different moments of now. The flow of sap can be sensed and related to the child’s kind of blood flow which can also be sensed. Images of the flow of each are set each in terms of the other. We have no way yet of knowing the way plants demonstrate behavior, but then, we have not considered that plant survival requires intelligence.

The child’s play may be carried on at a distance by radio telemetry. How far can plants send and receive messages? The plant or animal to be studied need not be first domesticated so that its intelligence is like that of a child who has been bred over generations so he can be predicted.

EXERCISE: A KITTEN, A CAT, A CHILD ARE ALL REDUCED IN SIZE AND TIMING TO THE SAME RHYTHMIC RANGE. USE A VIDEO TAPE RECORDER AND MAGNIFY THE KITTEN’S IMAGE BY ZOOMING, NOW OVERLAY THE CHILD’S IMAGE ON THE KITTEN’S WHILE THEY BOTH ARE WATCHING. THE CHILD AT LEAST CAN IMITATE THE KITTEN — AND THE CAT. THE KITTEN AND THE CAT MAY NOT WATCH THE IMAGE, BUT WILL THEY BE MORE EXPRESSIVE IN PLAYING? WITH THE CHILD WHO HAS PLAYED WITHIN AN IMAGE OF THEIR PROCESS PLAY WOULD BE PART OF KINDERGARTEN FUN. LEARNING TO SENSE ANOTHER CHILD’S RHYTHM OR A MOTHER’S AND A FATHER’S AS THEY DEVELOP CRESCENDO — OR TO DANCE AGAINST AN IMAGE OF SOMEONE, UNKNOWN, OR A NEW CREATURE — OR THE UNFOLDING OF WILD FLOWERS, THESE PROVIDE A HIDE AND SEEK THAT NO BOOK OR PRINT CAN FIND.

Consider yourself as a signal sending, storage and receiving creature, and walking down the street catch the signals generated by these other similar systems each with an aura of heat, smell, sound which rebounds with you. You responsively pattern to each other’s way of coding, even without intuition. Have you been limited by your skin? Forget the limit. It’s useful only in buying shoes.

As you walk down the street, you pass another energy system... a house... a lady... a dog... a child... a daffodil. Each extends beyond the limits we learned from images in children’s books. Your voice resounding down the stairsis you outside your skin. This shift in concept does not require anything more than a change in conventions. Your smell, image, like the daffodils will not show in an outline print.

The sense of aliveness holds process in its stride and thereby gains intimacy with the liveliness around us.

Each species has its own kind of learning and its own kind of time. To its own species, it is intelligent for it shares the code that makes its thinking common.

Does a dog spot another dog by the color of its hair?

Or by the wealth and silkiness of its fur coat?

Is this fur coat naturally worn for warmth, or does it like the brilliant colors of the parakeet tell other dogs about the story?

I am a police dog, watch out, see my badge, precinct one... shape, color, and fur. Grrrrrr... The other dog bows its head or changes paths.

How much does information exchange have absolutely to do with thinking?

How much with talking?

How much with action?

Is thinking internal talking?

Are lions thinking when they hunt cooperatively?

How much does information exchange have only to do with being a particular species?

Does each species have its own message exchange system?

Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to decipher the code of another species?

EXERCISE: TAKE YOUR CHILD ON A WALK. YOU FOLLOW HIM... THEN SLOWLY, GENTLY JOIN HIM… LET YOUR DAUGHTER JOIN YOUR PROCESS, SENSE... OPEN...

Watch the nurse in the operating room translating the surgeon’s action language. Speech in the operating room has its place. But most of the communication exchange is by action – patterned movements. The surgical team has a language linguists would fin precise. A dog’s lifted tail communicates as does the surgeon’s rap. An urgent rap,, a sudden ear pointing – a pointer’s tail outstretched. A radar disc suddenly altering its scanning rhythm – action pours down into an operating field. The hand action is translated to ear messages by another surgeon who explains the language to the medical students. The nuance is not easily translated outside the field. Is this denomination? What more is needed? Is there a way to spend explicitly what is so elegantly silent?

The fighting dance of the fighting fish or the sex dance of the courting fish or the human “twist” are all considered ritual. What do we know of our own ritauls as being like that of other creatures. What would a martian think of our courting? The courting woman and man use the basic biological communication. Everyone will acknowledge this language transcends their words. It is more. It is mammalian. Word language is limited. It is less intelligent than the action language that we sniff at. Reading a play is very different than acting it. The actor can communicate to the audience a richness of content far beyond his lines. What does the actor know of his way of being different people. Can his art be transmitted in ways other than apprenticeship? Can it be denominated? Is there a language making it easier to transmit action knowledge? Why is verbalism so highly valued?

Long before verbal language, the infant and his toddler sister share intense communication. Variations in crying, the way his body moves, or tugs at the playpen bars, says he wants to get out. She laughs. He is not the dog. His language is not dissimilar. Their puppy play is a great source of humor.

The child has a capacity to learn while in the preverbal stage of development far beyond what he is presently taught. Should we accept this limitation of our teaching? Is it a way of preventing intrusion into what works well enough? Is this a personal matter or a species wide habit? Already we acknowledge great variation in the level of developmental learning from family to family. We have not studied the variation with an aim to accelerate the learning by enhancing what has happened accidentally. Is it better that way? Some parents fear that their genius child if given all the learning can absorb will be too unnatural. In times of rapid change the children will seem unnatural.

A teacher who leaves her mirrored looking glass which reflects her own childhood and the conventions of that time, can use action teaching which emphasizes learning of immediate value to the child. This does not breed empty symbol or fact filled automatons, but (breeds) children who are skilled in the science and art of teaching themselves about what is relevant to them.

I am not speaking of training in the style of training pigeons, six grains of corn for every seven beak raps – though pigeons have been felt to be exceedingly intelligent at beak-rapping for a graduate thesis.

Can you imagine teaching pigeons in a wind tunnel to be more expert at flying? Can you imagine letting him teach us how to use wings in a more biological way than is our own habit?

The pigeons who are trained to go through a maze are learning human styles. When the graduate can swoop in the air and pick a small piece of corn from a large height, he will have decoded and found useful some of the information that, even the commonest bird long ago mastered.

We have used experience with birds to build analogies which are not formal language but vernacular. “He has an eagle eye” refers to an eagle’s vision much more than is usually conceived. Such expressions have a formal meaning. We have tried to describe ourselves in terms of what we experience as the lives of other creatures.

What about the teaching methods of other species? Do mother birds teach young ones to fly, or do older young birds teach the Younger? Research in education is just at its beginning.

Information exchange includes the information that signals flowers to turn to the sun,

…babies’ mouths to hold their mother’s breast, and piglets to hold to the sow

…And sows to return to the barn and kill them.

Is it just that living mouth and nipple fit?

The well-selected unusual child who, being gifted with a broader framework refuses to accept the common rules for discarding information can teach other children the patterns that he sees. Techniques devised by older children for teaching younger ones who are more like themselves than adults, need to be studied and written down.

An appreciation of the information that is available even to the fetus, the child before he is born, can be frightening. Hormones telegram instruction. An arm bending into softness pressing around a belly around an unborn child is a communication. The unexpected chop of an unborn knee transmits something.

The little boy liked to sniff the chairs in the room after a family party. Then he would tell his older brother quite accurately which family members sat where. It was a private game they played. The little boy had not been allowed to come down to the party, so he had no visual way of knowing where they sat. The brothers giggled together — because they had this private secret.

But incense is important in the rituals which have captured our biology while still religion. Trying to keep away from being an animal can be very expensive.

Give a man a gun and a cause and watch him crawl on all fours and pounce like any other animal. Watch him with his mate and see those animal hip on hips. Watch the pack of wolves organize a scientific meeting, each hungry for the honors yet loyal to their traditions. But our interest is not in depreciating or appreciating. Our new learning builds from a knowledge of ourselves. A child when very young is more the child of all other mammals than like his own father. Pig and people embryos look more similar than adult pigs and men.

EXERCISE: USING SUCH KNOWLEDGE AS YOU CAN MUSTER, CONSIDER AN ELEPHANT’S OR A BIRD’S VIEW OF OUR CHARACTERISTICS.

Each species has a particular view of itself and its neighbors. . . we are no exception.

Man’s perception of himself is not more or less accurate than the elephant’s perception of elephants.

Like the elephant and the bird, man’s own definition of himself is limited by his own perceptive apparatus. These perceptions man abstracts into his various cultures. Each of these cultures defines a perspective. Each perspective cross-sections what he sees from this point of view.

Each culture teaches its children by example both intentionally and unintentionally a way of searching and arranging into patterns from that which exists. Each family teaches its children how to learn. This early beginning from mother to daughter and from father to son, leaves large areas of abstracted mystery.

Blind people have taught me to sense with my ears what my parents by example taught me did not exist. My ears are not special, nor are theirs. I had learned not to hear what was called useless in the days when the limiting factor was capacity to think. Now early learned and uncontrolled retardation in perceptual input limits the progression of our learning explosion. A new perceptual intimacy is needed if sensing the perceptual explosion in learning is to keep up with our fact growth. What is now considered “normal” is retarded.

RemeIt the old forms to discover new basic nodal points. Use these to build language that contacts more experience. Use the new ways to construct new language. This is the learning spiral. The only way I know to unlearn patterns considered natural to all humans is to reconnect this nature with the help of other creatures. Can our love extend beyond our species to the process of Earth?

Too much explosion-like dread turns the skin cold. Ideas without body become empty. The new language is built of contact. Contact is keeping ideals close to our senses. The body is ideas. Ideas without skins, muscles, bones, bellies, buttocks and — are tiring. Smells and wind, leaves rustling, natural to the ear; our species home is among others. Can you recall the taste of a fresh picked raspberry in your mouth, on your lips? Remember it with your mouth, with your tongue licking jam.

Can you smell garlic bread now?

A fresh baked loaf with deep brown crust or a lover’s soft touch?

Can you trust in ideas without a sensory base?

It is not possible to leave our sensational world. A word invented labels a sensation or a sensory pattern, or patterns of patterns. This foundation is often forgotten and the loss of immediate and literal sensory meaning removes the original strength from the word.

Dictionaries are the writing down of grunt variations which in many members of the same species awaken similar sensations. A less abstract situation is one more full of sensational experience.

How rich is the word “rose” to you?

Is it rich enough to touch?

Can you smell a rose?

Try it now…

You don’t need to hold a living rose. Recall a rose, look at it, smell it in your memory, touch it gently with the memory in your fingertips.

Feel your neck stretch out to smell it. . .

Ah, you have a feeling— a rosy feeling.

Is there no way to remember the existing rose? A child-hugged neck. Unfurl a fern, you will feel its spring in your fingers. Lean between two trees, the wind is there moving your back.

Does your nose have a memory?

Your neck?

Your back?

Beyond words!

Abstraction is a way of coding what you sense. It is inevitable. The word “cause” is a way of coding what you sense. It is a way of patterning sensational experiences. . .

It is one way, there are others. . .

Abstractions are ways of condensing memories of things happening. Can you taste the cherry as you hear the tooth bite through the skin? I cannot hear your tooth ping through the skin. The ping is a dense memory. Your own closed circuit of bone conduction carries the sound to your ears. Do you see a picture of a cherry? Can you remember the sound and tell me about it withough your heard and I never can ou hear the sound of your tooth in your ear as you hear it. We are as many species even with each other.

It is not possible to gain a perspective about the survival of our species except within the broader system which compares and contrasts and overviews man as one of many species. Must the Martians arrive before we give up the notion of human supremacy?

Each species has its own different mode of using information just as it has different organs. Each has different pleasures and different ways of surviving. A mole is not a man in its size nor in its ways of life. Its enemies are not the same enemies, its survival does not depend upon the same information. Its eyes and ears and brain are different not just in size. Its rhythms which determine its redundancies and patterning are not the same as man’s.

But. . .

Man is no special beast.

Except that I am a man

and because I am me, man is

a special beast.

To each species its own species

is special.

Squirrels enjoy squirrels and chase themselves and chase each other as well as nuts. And life is not confined to one species nor to fish nor to plants nor to rocks nor to any species’ conventions.

When man realizes that other species have talents, rhythms, modes of communication peculiar to them, he opens up a new territory of learning. Communication with other species can help man learn to enjoy our self-indulgent supremacy without carrying this pretense to the enslavement of other lively creatures, the living sea and mountains and ourselves. What has this to do with time? Am I writing on a new topic? No! Yes! I am multiplying contexts for time process is common ground for all lively creatures.

The time image of a man and a plant has more relatedness than their chemical anatomy.

How much process commonness exists between the infants of related species, where is the difference? Children would enjoy this kind of knowing that is close to their sensations.

EXERCISE: A FISH HAS BEEN REPORTED THAT USES ONLY FLUCTUATIONS IN ELECTRICAL CURRENTS AND RESISTANCE TO GAIN ITS INFORMATION. WHAT TIME CHARACTERISTICS WOULD YOU CONSIDER LIKELY TO BE ORGANIZERS OF THIS FISH’S INFORMATION SYSTEM?