waterMind / bubbleMath. For most of us, early childhood is a profound learning experience which invests its astonishing momentum only to acquire more — and during our formative experiences of enculturation we are insatiably involved with the attempt to develop what are perceived as advanced skills, perspectives and knowledge. This process involves, for most of us, a mixture of emulation, practice, improvisation and creative development. But it also involves dreaming. Driven by our inherent fascination and curiosity, our capacities become implacable, and find their most constant developmental impetus in play, which is, it turns out, somewhat like dreaming while awake… …the child’s ‘imagination’ is not what it appears to be. It has ‘extensions’ whose nature and character are extremely difficult to imagine nevermind describe. If we can support each other in the acquisition of models that will admit us to perspectives a bit more like what’s going on, we can retrieve learning and relational capacities that defy anything we’ve seen or heard of. We’re made of them. )( . ~ o ~ . [|] Some words between the generations: “Mama?” “Yes sweetheart?” “Something … funny happened last night.” “Oh? What was it?” <Child fidgets briefly, rocking side to side> “I don’t know, something was... singing to me in a strange sound!” “What kind of sound, Honey? Like music?” “No, like... something I don’t know what it is... it ... makes a weird sound like... broken radios” “Oh, don’t worry, sweetheart, that’s just your imagination.” “mhmhm... Iyyyy ...I don’t... know. I don’t think so, Mama” “Hmm. Why not?” “Because when it sings my tummy feels funny — and … I see Grandma... and… it teaches me things...” “No, sweetie, Grandma’s in heaven now. That’s just your imagination. You were just having a dream.” “Ok Mama. But I wasn’t asleep though… and then Grandma said ‘This part was a yellow flower’.” <child points to her left shoulder> Mother: (initial confusion transforms to astonishment as she realizes that the child is describing the burial dress of her own mother, which the child can neither have seen nor heard of.) ()( . ~ o ~ . ]][ C and Y As though inserting an advanced intelligence transport that functions somewhat like a map of the game into a piece of candy, many brilliant authors have encoded crucial ‘game assets’ within stories in a form accessible primarily to children1. As a matter of course, most of the adults around the children will say (even to each other) that these stories are ‘just nonsense’2 or, more complexly but with similar dismissiveness: ‘metaphors’. This is an extremely dangerous situation for adults and children alike. The adults are deepening groves in their minds which their methods of thinking generate, but never overflow. And they are (usually unwittingly) setting up children for the same tragic rip-off. As if the god-like local voices of adults were not enough, a strangling chorus of swarming authorities screams at children from their own and other times through books, ‘education’, music, tv, the internet, movies, plays, governments, laws, experts, and many other transports. Effectively, these cultural transports and paradigms treat children as a -resource- to be converted or used (up) in their behalf. ‘Gifted’ children are often quickly shunted into technical, engineering, scientific, or theological pursuits. Though initially excited by their elite status, they will soon experience a backlash of shock at the naked lack of inspiration that comprises the whole paradigm of learning in Western countries and elsewhere throughout the world. In most cases the reward for ‘graduation’ — a job or career — is another step down into a kind of conceptual and behavioral slavery, rather than up, toward some actual sense and experience of liberation. Throbbing before them like a fiery wall of hubris, ignorance and stubbornness, this monster masquerades as the very gate to learning — and (nearly) all the adults and authorities authorize and credential it. Yet all the children can clearly see that this bizarre chimera lacks all of the essential features that announce the amazing experience of learning to them. They know what it is: a collar. Again and again the child will experience the shocking and tragic realization that many if not all of the adults teaching them have forgotten the very basis of learning themselves, and thus cannot teach learning. They teach subjects. Once they figure out the whole collar game, most of the kids largely drop out of that game, even if they are physically present in the cage under threat. Subjects particularly as they are commonly handled in the crucial elementary and high school levels, result in the primary expulsion or enslavement of the imagination, and damage the relationship with the [learning ally]. This severely (and often permanently) injures children’s relational anatomy. Any feral kid knows this in his bones and can’t say it, the common city kid hasn’t the slightest inkling of these matters. And the things we all want to know are not subjects. They are blazing questions about the nature of life, meaning, our origins, love, death, fellowship, and... yes... while we're at it, we may also have a few really shiny questions about time, light, language and mathematics, too. >< . ~ o ~ . >> from Moundville, Alabama [] . ~ o ~ . )) That the adults are writing books to save children from what they will soon be deprived of by other adults (writing books and such) is a puzzling process, somewhat analogous to performing a great deal of physical labor in order to earn the money to purchase a car — so that you could then mail the key to the trunk to the manufacturer. Yet neither these authors nor the children are confused: it is the necessary outcome of our hyper-representational cultures. Now, the problem that arises here is confusing. Children don’t need books at all, but since adults have millions of books, we need something more like children’s books for adults. I suspect that this is what many of these authors were secretly up to as they struggled to accomplish a very peculiar set of goals. One was prophylactic; to set up a protective substrate and processes that compete against invasive forces poised to co-opt our inherent relational momentum and intelligence. One involved returning something that had been lost to our common experience. Another involved revealing some uncommon features of our membership in the world, each other, and the universe. And each of these relates to the [learning-orbital] and our obscured relationship… These authors (and many other children, artists, and creatives — from every culture on Earth and throughout human history) chose to become living vessels of wonder, and in doing so, purposefully or accidentally emulated the activity of the [flux pet]. Many of these mantic prophets are or were shunned, killed outright, or destroyed by relational problems. Others manage to essentially hide within the relatively safe box of the ‘children’s author’. The role of author represents a somewhat more modern option. Engaging their imagination openly and vulnerably, their gift insured that some knowledge pertaining to the game and the lost relationship either leaks into or is purposefully included in the (largely horrifying and toxic mess) we call culture. From every time and place, from every human culture, they encrypted stories that can be read alone, but can also link together with others of their kind to form a kind of ring — a tribe of stories, together forming something too amazing for any single story to reveal. This moment, here, together, is a part of that wondrous lineage as well. Some such stories comprise parables which highlight certain features of character commonly elicited from an ‘impossible’ friendly doorway which apparently lies near at hand. Others show how it got lost, or directly supply recipes for recovery. Because these are evaluated by adults as ‘silly’, and ‘make believe’, ‘metaphoric’, ‘inventions’, etc — other adults cannot authorize them. Therefore, with few exceptions, adults cannot find or use the door. Adults believe that, in general, only experts and other highly trained people can locate doors. But no infant is an expert… One species of adult expert, a hypnotist, might explain all of this away as the outcomes of suggestibility. Others called Neuroscientists or Psychologists employ different but strikingly similar methods of dismissal and reframing. Some will box it up and label it ‘the imagination’. Thankfully, there are many astonishing exceptions, but the closer you get to Authority, what you find is this: the work of human experts is largely convincing human beings that their minds, intelligence, dreams, and feelings, are simply elaborate machines accidentally assembled in an uncaring universe where meaning is produced by humans and otherwise does not exist. Their opponents, often associated with cults and religions, have a similar if somehow slightly more authentic model, and nearly all of them are extremely poorly assembled, and more poorly maintained. This is part of the method by which the door is kept locked, and by which adults are kept outside. One of the hints about the door is that it can involve language-games. In some cases, the peculiarly folded linguistic trope called a ‘pun’ is an excellent example of a way to activate the doorway — at least briefly. It is the peculiar way that the pun folds back on itself, re-informing what had previously only been informed, that is the crucial hint: recursion of a peculiar sort opens windows. To surpass windows, you must create a door. But first, have a look out the window... Although an adult may require an entire story to get anywhere near the door, for a child, already moving at such great velocity and dancing inside in 7 ways, a simple pun will often suffice: Y-O-U (why? oh you!) spells you was the first one I encountered that I remember, and the door yawned before me, immediately. I was overwhelmed, and I balked, becoming momentarily determined to get my mother to admit she had “just made that up” (I could not believe that the linguistic construction of words from letters could be so creatively advanced (as to encode complicated recursive puns within spellings)). Experts bounce off the door with a sound not entirely unlike a fly hitting a window at great speed. [Listen, in your mind — can you hear it?] They immediately fall unconscious. Later, they awaken, falling through mid-air, having no idea what took place. They never saw the door, and thus have no idea what they struck, or even that a strike occurred. As you hear the wonderful sound of many experts bouncing off the ancient doorway, it will become like rain in your mind, washing away all their provocations, threats, demands, and proofs. Let it lull you back to a time before you encountered the strange stuff we call language. Listen closely to the tails that follow, within them is a peculiar sort of wind… this wind has lift! — t e t a s a o Children tend to be gifted “in general”. The problem they face lies in the standards our adult cultures attempt to force them into ceaseless comparison against. The basic goal of these normalization protocols is to get children to shed their relationship to novelty and dreaming so that they can “live in the real world”. The actual result is a world which is largely uninhabitable to children or adults. Inexorably ensconced in a representational prison whose fires are stoked by abstract cultural form and habit, many children first languish, then lose hope, and then… abandon themselves. But there is a secondary problem. The maturation process ordinarily includes a personal introduction to something from beyond culture. Something ... alive, outside of culture, yet to which each child is uniquely and personally related (and relating). Not only is this generally lacking in our modern cultures, but the substitutes are highly distorted, self-aggrandizing, and extremely confusing. I strongly suspect that this is the great mystery that at least partly inspires juvenile adventurism and also criminality — both of which may be understood (at least in part) as a quest for re-union or the re-activation of this unconsciously recalled and intimately crucial relationship. Footnotes: 1. And people like yourself. Some children (and even some adults) will fortunately absorb the seeds of these ideas, some of which will form a protective substrate that causes immunity to many of the more dangerous competitors for the assets that comprise their capacity for intelligence. An excellent example is the story ‘Escape from Witch Mountain’, written by Alexander H. Key (AH! (finally! the) Key!). It revolves around two orphaned siblings, Tony and Tia, who have moderate paranormal abilities. Tony possesses the ability of telekinesis, which he can access most readily through playing music (note this), whereas Tia can unlock any door (note this) by touch and communicate directly with animals. Although Tony can only send messages (communicate) normally (further exposure to repCog causes us to lose the 'receptive' aspect but retain the 'penetrating' aspect — a set-up for catastrophe), Tia can both speak and also receive (this is because she is younger and thus less representational!) via ultrasonic speech audible only to Tony and others of their kind (crucial note!). Other examples: A Special Trick, Mimsey were the Borogoves, The Alice Adventures, A Wrinkle in Time, Watership Down, The White Mountains Trilogy, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Lord of the Rings, (Donna D Q Doughnut), White Fang goes Dingo, The Phantom Tollbooth, WOZ, &c. 2. Translation: no purchase on reality at all. Although wishy-washy at first about this, Science, Religion, or Some Similar Authority will next be brought to the conflict, and the child’s remaining doubts will be destroyed. Prior to that, they are sustained in checking with other children, whose agreement is that other universes accessibly exist. Later, however, one by one, the children will fall to the convincing arguments and proofs of the adult interpretation, which is covertly used to dismiss that which cannot be explained. The metaphor excuse is even more bizarre, since anyone who has done even a modicum of research becomes immediately aware that metaphor is the actual foundation of human intelligence!