What if the life you’re living is not the same as the life that wants to live in you?

 Emancipation is a loaded word, a serious often traumatic term to describe oppression, whether the captivity of one nation over another, one gender by the other, or as in the African-American experience, slavery by color. Emancipation is primarily about slavery, literally or figuratively, as in the emancipation of youth. In this article, I prefer to use the term emancipation to describe the self-imposed slavery of self-confinement.

I know about slaves; my practice is primarily dedicated to the liberation of slavery. The reason I know about slaves is because I am one.

We are surrounded by people all the time, if not literally, at least virtually, through emails, texts, phone calls, Twitter feeds, Instagram notifications, and Facebook updates. Modern technology makes it all too easy to fill up space with lots of people and interactions. Ironically, while we’re surrounded by others, many of us are still very lonely. Crowding our lives doesn’t ease the loneliness. Crowded lives and lonely people. Our lives are crowded and noisy. We’ve grown so used to the noise of technology, and the noise in our heads even the liberating thought “somethings not right,” is drowned out by the competing mantra, “but this is what everyone else does.” 

There are three human developmental periods we all must traverse in order to become ourselves. This article doesn’t permit me to go into detail about these three periods, and I will only cursorily touch on the first developmental period as a preface to the need for emancipation.

The Three Developmental Periods of Human Development are:

1. Conformity
2. Independence
3. Autonomy

In conformity we seek to belong by going along to get along. It secures our place within the family, followed by our larger community. This is a period when you don’t make waves, follow the rules as they are laid out, take direction, and are a copy of somebody else. You graduate from the conforming period not upon arriving at a certain age, or accomplishment, only when a growing part of you awakens to, “I want more from life,” flowing from a divinely inspired instinct that some aspect of my life is restricting my freedom of expression and discovery. Only then do you begin the emancipation of setting yourself apart on the independent way of restructuring your life.

Life has a way of creating mental and emotional prisons, constructed through fear. We fear we won’t be acceptable apart from our familiar, conforming community. Professionally, I believe there is something, you pick the word, wrong, broken, undeveloped, missing in all of us. I place the number as 10% or less. We instinctively know this about ourselves, it’s what holds us back, frequently defending this 10% we create egoic prisons that feel safer than the uncharted path of emancipation, the slow and patient process of becoming who we truly are, where the caterpillar of our old self dissolves and the butterfly of our true, authentic being grows its wings.

Although our private selves “take place” in public, outsiders know little about the intimate environment we’ve created for ourselves. No one has complete access to our private selves, not our closest friends, relatives, nor even the children who live with us. What’s more, we actively generate privacy by giving our various publics only selected bits and pieces of information about our private selves. We work carefully to sustain a public impression in keeping with the image we want to convey. This is why I advise having compassion for everyone you meet. Bad manners, conceit, and cynicism in others may be a sign; you don’t know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

The futurist, Alvin Toffler reminds us, “the illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot unlearn and relearn.” Any voice promoting fear and self-doubt, wishes to secure itself within the museum of changelessness.

Only in emancipating yourself from the slavery of conformities snare can you claim, “I was born an original, I’m determined not to die a copy.” Conformity for popularity, and self-esteem’s sake alienates you from your truer, more evolved self. You know this. Don’t confuse consensus with conformity. We require consensus to avoid chaos. Remember we’re talking about the slavery of self-confinement fostered by fear of the unknown.  

The pre-Socratic philosopher Meno asks, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” The emancipated life that wishes to live within you, wants a life that is transformative, but how do we go about finding these things that require extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory? The inquiry itself carries undertones of acknowledging, “we are unlikely to find out who we truly are if we’re perpetually committed to familiarity.” Uncertainty is one by product of emancipation where the role of the unforeseen, the unfamiliar, and collaborations with chance limit one’s ability to plan and control in advance.

In our present cult of productivity and perilous goal-orientedness, we’ve lost our appreciation for the art of losing oneself. To lose yourself is to surrender to being present. To be fully present is to embrace uncertainty and mystery. Emancipation is not about being lost, but a willful losing oneself, a conscious choice, a chosen surrender. When things are lost the familiar is misplaced. In losing oneself the unfamiliar emerges challenging you to become free from strategies of the cautious mind to a life that is amazing, startling, and trans formatively authentic.  

When you choose to loosen the grips of the familiar you begin to sense the world has become larger than your knowledge of it. The art of getting lost is not one of forgetting, but letting go, an emancipation setting free your unlived desire for meaning, for a larger life of passion, and creativity.

“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.”

 ~ Meister Eckhart

“The best inheritance parents can leave to their children is some of their each day.”

~author unknown

During a recent television interview the host asked what I thought the number one challenge facing the American Family Today? My response was, “Confusion regarding the time limited nature of the growing up process.”

For most of us it is easy to have children; the challenge is raising them. As almost every parent will admit, raising children is a long-range responsibility, which is seldom accomplished as planned, but the effort to achieve it is one of the most important activities of their lives.

Recently, when I spoke to a group of parents and teenagers about their relationship, I asked the audience what they wanted from each other. The teenagers wanted to be listened to; they wanted concern and respect; and they wanted time and attention from their parents. It’s an obvious truth worth repeating, “If our children don’t feel listened to at home, they will be listened to by their friends, who by default will become an increasing relevant influence over our children’s behavior.”

Parents wanted their children to understand that they wanted their children to behave. Parents are often preoccupied with their children’s behavior. These include school grades, issues of respect for parents, neglect of responsibilities around the home, use of alcohol and other drugs, and early sexual activity. Many parents commented that they were afraid of the influence of others – the peer group. Truest truth. It is the quality of the relationship between the parents and their children that will have the greatest influence, if it’s not undermined by family dysfunction.

In seeking a simple, understandable structure for the crucial life stage called adolescence, we need first to define two basic terms, childhood and adulthood, and draw some careful distinctions.

CHILDHOOD is defined as the period when a young person lives under the parental roof and is supported and raised by their parents. Roughly from birth through high school – 18 years of age. During this phase of life – childhood – parents have the right, and responsibility to set limits on the child’s behaviors, ranging from allocation of studying time, conforming to family rules, curfews, and the use of alcohol and other drugs.

ADULTHOOD, as I define it, is reached when the maturing child assumes full financial responsibility of supporting themselves. It is imperative that families plan for the age of 19 as the time in which the child becomes an adult. Should the child at reaching the age of 19 desire to continue their schooling or seek employment, but have yet to save enough money to live independently of their parents, then by mutual consent, the parents are encouraged to extend childhood longer until the child can successfully sustained themselves financially. Too many children and their parents go off to college confused thinking they are now adults and should be extended the privilege of adulthood, while still financially dependent upon their parents. This confusion of when Adulthood begins is a source of continual conflict between children/adolescence and their parents. If parent’s don’t know when a child becomes an adult, how can the child be anything other than confused as well?

ADOLESCENCE chronologically extends from ages of 12 through 18. A short transitional period of academic, biological, emotional, social and intellectual development, which young people struggle bravely, and often desperately to piece together. I am convinced the major tension between children and their parents is due to the failure in understanding that adolescence belongs to late childhood, not early adulthood.

Late adolescence ages 15-18 is an intense time between freedom and responsibility, and the clumsy integration between personal, and peer-centered influences, and the traditional values of their family. The goal of the late adolescent period is the same for both parents and children: To do all that can reasonably be done to help the growing child acquire the skills, including educational, interpersonal, and self-management skills, which will maximize the young person’s ability to function as a productive adult by age 19, or extend childhood until such skills are acquired. There are no adults financially dependent upon their parents.

Children learn to become adults by understanding, accepting and working within reasonable rules for behavior, including participation in a family life, and avoidance of alcohol and other drug use.

The wise and effective parent not only enforces necessary rules and worthwhile values; he or she helps the child see beyond them to the working principles, which underpin them. Children become adults when parents parent. These important distinctions may help.

“When We Have Lost Our Way, It Is Not the Way That Is Lost.”

~ Noah benShea

Remember the monkey bars in childhood, you had to let go if you wanted to move forward.

Someday very soon we’ll be able to claim, we were survivors of immeasurable events. This is what living through history feels like. Your today and yesterday are the stuff of which history is made of. If you appreciate time capsules and legacies, you are possibly recording your experiences in photographs, journals, interviews, music or art. Generations to come will be studying what you and I are now living through characterized as the confusion of uncertainty. Chaos Theory tells us any system of disorder and chaos is ripe for change.

The past long months, when ninety-five percent of the world’s collective governments decided to simultaneously shut down human culture, is likely to be recorded as unrepeatable as the dinosaurs and the ice age. What we’re living through is significant. Some of us are still young enough to remember when the moon was something to admire as an object in space, not a destination for a solar road trip. And how about the Berlin Wall, that permanent icon and impenetrable barrier to unification of Germany; now a fainting memory of history. Other life altering events: the end of scribes and the beginning of the printing press, the end of slavery, invention of electricity, the telephone, the advent of the automobile, flight, and revolutionary technology.

Until we take our place in history, we remain in the words of astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson, “small, wet miracles without instruction, only the imperative of change,” suddenly find ourselves scattered six feet apart across a changed world, blinking with disorientations, disbelief, and no small measure of confusion about tomorrow’s tomorrow. Suddenly without solicitation, the game of life moved inward. The long thought, the quiet reflection, all in an attempt to see a strategy in the fog, the undiscovered terrain of our new future.

As the death tolls rise, the hysterical commentary we once called news turns cable television into R rated headlines of horror, the proverbial citizen in the street wonders if the world has gone mad. While all the talking heads fill the air with a doom’s day song, I offer a sharply different view.

If you believe the human story is far from ending, and suspect beneath the clatter and jangle of seemingly senseless events there lies a startling and potentially hopeful pattern, then read on. We need to step back for a long view of the evolutionary phenomenon of every revolutionary transition.

Changes in life can be known by different names: revolutions, transformations, passages, transitions. However, you name them, all transformative revolutions disrupt the status quo, dramatically alter our lives, yet each share the same basic patterns: life as we know it comes to an end followed by a period of confusion, second guessing, and distress, ultimately leading to a new beginning. As I wrote last month, “Every new beginning comes from other beginnings end.” ~Seneca c. 45 BC-65 AD

A revolutionary change is the manner in which a society, or culture is catapulted into a transformative future no human effort could have achieve on its own.

Here are the signposts of every revolutionary change:

Endings or Losses: We confuse them with finality forgetting endings are the first stage of any revolutionary change process. There are three personal phenomena you will likely experience:

• Disenchantment: The discovery that in some sense one’s world is indeed no longer what we thought. Many significant revolutions not only involve disenchantment, they begin with it. How many of you prior to COVID-19 were feeling for all your success, “is this all there is?”
• Disengagement: Divorce, death, job losses or changes disengage us from the contexts in which we have known ourselves. They break up the old cue-system, which served to reinforce our roles, and pattern our behavior.
• Disidentification: The disidentification process is really the inner side of the disengagement process, where we lose our self-definition, the stage of not being quite sure who we are any more. A sign in my office reads, “I ain’t what I ought to be, and I ain’t what I’m going to be, but I ain’t what I was.” Clearly the old identity stands in the way of any new potential growth and opportunity.

Time of Reflection: One of the difficulties of experiencing a revolutionary transition in our modern lives is that we have lost our appreciation for this gap in the continuity of existence. A time of reflection is meant to be a moratorium from the conventional activity of our everyday existence. The basic industry of this stage is attentive inactivity. In this apparent aimless activity of our time alone, we are doing important inner realignment. This is a time to surrender and stop struggling to escape this apparent unproductive stage. What to do consists not of ways out, but of ways into reflection and acceptance. This is a time to cultivate receptivity.

“I felt in need of a great pilgrimage, so I sat still for three days.”

Hafiz c. 1320-1389

New Beginnings: We come to the beginning only at another beginnings end. Wouldn’t we all prefer a simple procedure to follow rather than a process to understand? Unaware life moves forward. Even without knowing, we cooperate in doing what must be done to be renewed and changed. As much as we long for an external sign that points the way to the future, we must settle for inner signals alerting us to the proximity of new beginnings. The new beginning marks the termination point of the previous life. It is to assert that we are on our own in a much deeper sense than we ever imagined when we originally set up shop as an adult.

Endings (death to once was), Times of Reflection (reassessment and surrender), and new beginnings (rebirth) are not ideas we bring to life, they are phenomena we find in life.

“All revolutionary transitions enter the world with a terrifying uncertainty.”

~ Author Unknown

“There are decades when not much happens, then there are weeks when decades happen.”

~ V. llyich Lenin

There are moments in my life that are so sweet, living on the earth seems like a blessing and a privilege – when I first set eyes on my newborn child; when I’m lying in my lover’s arms early in the morning listening to the rain fall against the window; on that first day when I noticed Spring’s arrival, and the air is filled with promise and anything seems possible. There are times in my life when it all seems to make sense, when things happen the way I planned them, when it is easy to have faith in a world created and designed with so many abundant miracles.

Then, there are the difficult times – times when I’ve lost something I worked hard for, or someone I loved, times when my faith in goodness is tested, time when I just want the worry and fear to go away, and nothing makes sense, and none of it seems worth it, and it’s hard to believe in anything.

I’m old enough to understand that life hurts sometimes. One thing Allen Saunders reminded me, “Life is what happens to us when we are making other plans.” And as long as I live, I will move in and out of crisis and adversity, and my joys will live alongside my apprehensions and uncertainties.

One prominent aspect of being human is that I’ve come to cherish the familiar. I cling to my routines, my daily rituals, my favorite chair, my parking spot, and my side of the bed in an attempt to give myself some sense of certainty and control over what I secretly know is a totally unpredictable universe. And so I’m frightened of unexpected changes – they rob me of the safety I’m accustomed to and plunges me into an emotional free-fall I experience as a loss of certainty.

Change, truthfully, is often an exchange, but no less a personal form of loss – as when I lost my youth, some of my hair, my younger figure, now with the potential loss of my job, my comfortable naiveté, or my dreams, and even the energy to make them come true. And I know the losses will continue when I grow apart from those I was once close, or when my friends or loved ones move or pass away, and I’m alone again with the question, how did this happen, much like today.

Life is among other things a series of unacceptable losses, and never easy transitions. When I’m more grounded than I am right now, I know these difficult, never easy times, are usually when the greatest amount of transformative change and awakening occurs. During the challenging times in which we’re all presently living, I find within them an invitation to pause from the frantic pace of my life style. Doors to my inner world of reflection that are normally blocked or I keep locked open, and I’m forced to feel everything. And it’s in fully feeling whatever is happening to me right now that I re-experience the true value of living.

Sudden changes, and the losses they foster, force me to pay attention to my life, to my relationships, and to my values. I am not shaped by crises, I am revealed by them. The hidden hero, the leader, the comforter, the anxious worrier, the pessimist, whatever is in me rises to the surface and is uncovered during trying times. We all have a role to play. And for me, I can choose to step into opportunities that will emerge from the chaos and confusion, or I can wait and loose my place in line.

Times like these have the potential to draw people together. There’s renewed opportunity to bring out the best in our human nature. Difficult times elicit our compassion, our generosity, and our innate kindness. They help us transcend our differences and celebrate our oneness. Difficult times invite us to experience more love in our lives for others. For me, finding love in the confusion is simple. I need only reach out to others and they will reach back. Say “I need help,” and miraculously help will appear. I have so many more resources in my life than I realize – friends, even strangers, and people who love me. Sometimes it takes difficult times for me to acknowledge how truly loved I am. Difficult times can be rich moments because they are rich with human kindness. I need to become what I seek from others.

In Homer’s Odyssey, there is a passage in which Ulysses meets Calypso, a sea princess and a child of the gods. Calypso, a divine being, is immortal. She will never die. Calypso is fascinated by Ulysses, never having met a mortal before. She envies Ulysses because he will not live forever. His life becomes more full of meaning, his every decision is more significant, precisely because his time is limited, and what he chooses to do with it represents a real choice.

In order to do something I’ve never done, I’ll have to become someone I haven’t been. I am realizing the world just recently pushed reset. A new opportunity, a real choice exists. Humanity needs new leadership. I’m holding my place in line.

“Every new beginning comes from other beginning’s end.”

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca – c. 4 BC – 65 AD

 

There is so much to say about the subject I am about to introduce that I could begin this article from any number of directions. I believe there are stories and there are dynamics. I want to draw your attention away from the charismatic thrill of the story and invite you to look more deeply at the untidy dynamics behind many of the stories the story-tellers tell.

A compulsive need for anything has little to do with the object itself.

In a previous article entitled, “The Sixth Sense,” I taught you that feelings were not to be shared, they were to be experienced. If you are not familiar with the article, please go back and review it before continuing with this months article. Cutting across the grain of conventional wisdom, I want to touch upon the dynamics supporting a growing addiction and the subject of this article – Overeating. I believe overeating is an addiction in the classic sense. There is only one clear statement that applies to all addictions from heroin to food –

Uncontrolled use despite negative consequences.

To understand the subject of this discussion – Overeating – which I prefer to the more popular term Obesity, you will need to understand tension. Most human feelings and needs are pretty much the same. What gets complicated is how we defend against them. Tension is the pressure caused by chronically denied needs and/or unresolved feelings, which due to pain and hopeless, have been disconnected from awareness or consciousness. Unfulfilled needs and unresolved feelings do not disappear. They continue throughout life exerting forces, channeling interests, and producing motivations toward the satisfaction of those unattended needs and feelings. Not only are unattended needs that persist to the point of intolerability separated from consciousness, but also their sensations become relocated to areas where greater control or relief can be provided. Unfulfilled people learn how to disguise and change their unfulfilled needs into symbolic ones.

Overeaters are not hungrier than anyone else. Overeating is symbolic and as such is self-perpetuating because symbolic satisfactions cannot fulfill real needs. In order for real needs to be satisfied they must be felt and experienced. Unfortunately, pain has caused those needs to be buried and are rarely recognized as such; rather a gnawing empty craving masquerades as hunger. And yet, overeaters do not eat out of physical hunger. Ascending tension, painful feelings on the rise, is largely stuffed back into themselves by whatever food is readily available. Food is their drug, dependency, and addiction.

Overeaters who must continuously eat are using food as a relaxant much like a constant injection of a tranquilizing drug. One individual expressed it this way, “I used food to eat away the tension which was eating away at me. My whole life was planning for the next meal. There was so little else in my life so food had to do and be everything for me.”

No one is more ingenious than an addict out to score.

There are many dynamics that go into making an overeater. What is crucial to keep in mind is that eating is an outlet for many kinds of needs. Food quells pains that are unrelated to physical hunger. Thus to discuss food problems is often useless therapy and support. Food may be chosen to quell pain instead of drugs or alcohol because a person’s subculture placed a heavy emphasis on eating while having strong prohibitions against alcohol. Some people fear becoming sexually attractive. Another eats because food is more available than love. Others overeat to fill up so as not to feel unfulfilled. One woman confessed, “I never lived in my body because there was too much pain. So I lived in my head and fed my body food to quiet the gnawing hurt.”

If it is true that inside every fat person there is a thin person desperate to be recognized, then be assured, there is a real person inside every unreal one. If the truth were known, the obese person is literally presenting an unreal front to the world in an attempt to insulate the real person inside.

From my years of private practice I have observed the more normal the body the closer the person is to their reality, a truth destined to set them free.   Following successful Bariatric Surgery with the unreal front removed, overeaters must be watched almost as closely as a drug addict when their defenses are down. Post-surgical patients will be vulnerable until most of their real needs are felt. Addiction switch is a real possibility.

As long as the overeater can dwell on food they will never learn the truth of what happened when.

One patient expressed it this way, “If I got thin and life was not any better than it was when I was fat, I’d really be out of hope. There was hope in being fat, hope of getting thin. More than that, I could feel that it was my fatness that caused my social rejection and not really me.”

If you want to lose the weight that surgery could not fix, then please commit to scheduling a therapy appointment with a trained professional that will do much more for you than count your calories.

There is as much hope in the world as the responsibility any one of us are willing to assume.

Some readers of my Second Opinion articles have characterized my posts as mature. Others have said my posts are not likely to be appropriate for young readers. I’ll let you be the judge, but if the truth is to be written, both genders worry about how they will perform, and getting it right in the bedroom undeniably has its rewards.

There are five steps to getting your bedroom ready for what we all desire:

1. Get Rid of the Clutter: Having to “watch your step” en route from the door to the bed is a mood killer. Glancing up to see a pile of papers you have to read for work tomorrow invariably will spoil the mood.
2. Get the Lighting Right: No one wants to do it under harsh, unflattering light. Prepare the bedroom with dim lighting.
3. The Sheets Make All the Difference: Even if your ‘bed’ is just a box spring on the floor, the least you can do is make it inviting. You should own a set of nice, high thread count, really soft sheets!
4. Fill the Room with Fresh Air: Leave the window to your bedroom open during the day to fill the room with fresh air. Air in the house is usually worse than the outdoors.
5. Light Music Elevates the Mood: The music should be non-vocal, light sounds to put and keep you in the mood.

The Naked Facts

It all comes down to consensual choice. Some people prefer to start naked; others prefer to start moderately clothed then peel off layer after layer, depending how hot they get. Some people prefer to shower before, others like the experience of au naturale. Whatever your taste and predilection, if you want to get better in the bedroom, talk to an expert who has perfected the bedroom act of Sleep.

A 2013 Gallup poll found that Americans sleep an average of 6.8 hours a night, but get far less sleep than Americans got in 1974 when the average American slept 7.9 hours per night. Unfortunately, a lack of sleep, and especially chronic sleep deprivation, has serious health consequences.

Sleep is incredibly important for optimal mental processing. While we sleep, our neurons rest, and the brain constructs new neural pathways, which is why sleep is so important for learning. Even mild chronic sleep deprivation can have a serious impact on creativity and innovation. Getting enough sleep is important to physical health and healing. While we sleep, our bodies produce cytokines and other natural antibodies pivotal to our immune system.

Sleep deprivation increases the levels of the stress hormone cortisol, while at the same time decreasing the hormone leptin which lets our brain know you’ve had enough to eat, and increasing ghrelin, an appetite stimulant. Thus, getting more sleep may be an important factor in helping you with dieting and making healthier eating choices.

As you begin the New Year, one of the healthiest gifts you can give yourself is eight hours of sleep a night. You are likely to notice significant changes in your mood and an improved ability to regulate your emotions. There are many benefits to getting better in the bedroom.

Helpful hints on setting and maintaining a healthier sleep regime:

1. Make Sleep a Priority: Determine to give yourself one of the most inexpensive and yet most effective health benefits available – at least 8 hours of sleep a night.
2. Develop a Sleep Routine: Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. Studies have shown going to sleep at 10 p.m. and waking at 6 a.m. works best for the body’s natural rhythms. Always go to bed the same day you woke up.
3. Make the Bed a “Sleep Only” Space: Many people convert their bed into an all-purpose area. Eating in bed, watching TV, or even working in bed can make it more difficult for you to sleep in it at night.
4. Avoid Eating and Exercising within Three Hours of Sleep: Important to remember that eating and exercise energizes the body so it is not ready for sleep.
5. Turn Off The Lights (and Devices): The sleep area must be dark and quiet. The hormone melatonin is produced in total darkness, and the longer you stay in the dark, the more melatonin the pineal gland produces. Melatonin regulates our sleep and wake cycles, destroys free radicals, increases the immune system’s killer lymphocytes, and more. If you need a night light, a dim red light is best.Additionally, blue wavelength light emitted from TVs, computer screens and cell phones suppresses melatonin production more than other wavelengths, so if you want to get better in bed, avoid exposure to blue wavelength lights 2-3 hours before bedtime.
6. Listen to Your Body: Once you’ve committed to a sleep routine, your body can awaken on time naturally. Listening to your body is the best measure of whether you’re getting sufficient rest.

Science has established beyond reasonable doubt that the polar ice caps are melting, the oceans are rising, and the earth is in fact warming due to the burning of hydrocarbons – The “Greenhouse Effect.”

The scientific community reported recently that an asteroid nearly collided with the earth. It missed doing so by only 500,000 miles. Had the collision taken place it would have been equivalent to several thousand hydrogen bombs all exploding at one moment. Whether we like it or not, science is in the news and outer space is here to stay.

Through advances in technology, we are being increasingly exposed to information previously thought impossible. But is all this awareness help or hindrance? We’ve accepted that ignorance isn’t bliss, but often a cruel form of self-imposed resignation, yet what are the dangers of overexposure? Are we prepared to know too much? Are we emotionally prepared for the kinds of decisions this advance information requires? Are we ready? Some of us just got over post-traumatic stress. What’s next, pre-traumatic stress disorder? The future is upon us before we have processed the past. If superconductor technology has its way, the future and the past will be the same moment. What will be required of us to keep pace?

Astronauts of the future must be trained to depend upon forethought. Forethought is anticipatory thinking that foresees the relationship between a present decision and a future consequence. Alvin Toffler ranks as one of the best-known futurists. His book, Future Shock, became a popular phrase signifying the stress of change on our personal lives. In it, Toffler maintained that changes in every dimension of life were going to accelerate to such speeds that they would overwhelm people and organizations in high-tech urban societies, leaving them in a state of confusion and disorientation.

We are living through one of the great transitions in human history. From an industrial mass society that emphasized conformity to a de-massified society and economy that encourages diversity and individualism. As the speed to which we are being introduced to those things unfamiliar increases once familiar navigational references will become archaic or nonexistent. Precognition and forethought will emerge as the sin qua non of navigational aids for all future astronauts.

Precognition is the ability to relate to events not yet experienced. It requires unusual perceptivity and discernment. Precognition draws upon antecedent experience or knowledge. Each of us depends every day upon antecedent knowledge. It’s a fancy term for knowledge acquired from previous experience.

The second navigational aid is forethought, thinking in anticipation of an event. Forethought acknowledges the relationship of seemingly unrelated events to one another. It correlates a decision made at one point in travel with its natural and logical consequences or future destination. Navigational aids of precognition and forethought will be standard operational procedures for all future travels whether in space or on the ground. For we are all astronauts traveling at different speeds toward an uncertain future. What differentiates us is the speed in which we travel and the destination to which we hope to arrive. What unites us is the quest for navigational dependability that will serve us in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Mental health on space ship earth is currently retrospective. Practitioners of the healing arts are limited to eloquent discourses regarding the causes of human misery. What the past one hundred years has taught us is there is no cure in diagnosis.

Twenty-first century travelers must no longer rely upon hindsight as a suitable navigational aid owing to the speeds at which we now travel. The training in forethought and precognition, the linking of today’s decisions with corresponding effects of tomorrow will be critical if we are to avoid a variety of volitional hazards. For instance, we know today that excessive alcohol consumption relates to a decrease in health, memory, and an increase in birth defects, and that certain family units produce emotionally immature offspring. The debate is over. Twenty-first century computers enable us to demonstrate in a fraction of a second the reciprocal relationship between two seemingly unrelated events. As a population of astronauts hurling into an uncertain future, we must begin to acknowledge our innate abilities to make similar connections.

If it is possible to resolve the problems of today, could it be possible to avoid the problems of tomorrow? Yes, I believe it is clearly possible. What is required is the ability to anticipate life events. We must be able to see into the future. Forethought and pre-cognition is that ability.

 

Parenting is full of contradiction. “Do as I say not as I do.” Regretfully, this ill-conceived advice is still being modeled by those who intended better than they practiced. The by-product of this double standard generation raised more than children. Liberated from childhood’s restrictions, our generation exercised its freedom by ushering in the most crippling health crisis in American history – modern obesity.

We love our children, as did our parents. If we have learned anything we now know that health decisions we make for our young children today will still count when they are 50 years old. A growing body of clinical evidence shows that childhood is actually the best time to start protecting an aging body. “Do as we do regardless of what the advertisers say,” is an enlightened mantra for all of us to follow.

Most parents would never dream of putting a child in a car without a seat belt, or ride a bike without a helmet. But what about the things that will end up killing most of our children once they reach adulthood? How can you go about protecting your child from heart disease, strokes, diabetes, and high blood pressure? It all starts in childhood where the only window of opportunity to markedly influence certain aspects of later health exists. What health impacts will you as their parents have upon their vulnerable lives?

DO AS I DO, not as the advertisers say.

We know that eating behavior and food preferences, perhaps the biggest determinants of long-term health are primarily decided in childhood and adolescence. Studies show that eating habits and obesity can affect risks for diabetes, liver and heart disease, and many other health problems. And while adults certainly have the power to change their eating patterns, much of how we eat and what we like to eat is powerfully programmed by our experiences in childhood, making us exceedingly resistant to change as adults.

Many of you as parents already know that healthy eating habits, exercise and weight management are the keys to long-term health. This is not an opinion. I know from which I speak from years of experience performing psych assessments for a prominent Bariatric Surgeon. I’ve worked in adolescent and adult obesity for years. The challenge is how do you get your children to follow these practices? It seems like an insurmountable challenge in a world where the Golden Arches are now more widely recognized than the Christian cross. Surprisingly, influencing a child’s lifelong health isn’t about big changes. In fact a series of small, subtle shifts in the way you raise your children can actually translate into huge advantages well into adulthood.

The next time you sit around the table while eating with the TV turned off begin a discussion about the small, simple changes everyone in your family can make resulting in a powerful influence on everyone’s future health and happiness. Remember, children are emulators; more things are caught than taught.

You owe it to those who will never think to thank you.

Recently I served on a faculty committee of a progressive university organized around the essential question: “What must the university do to stimulate the development of creativity in the minds of our future student?” I offered this second opinion.

Creativity is one byproduct of Imagination. The terms are used interchangeably, yet one gives birth to the other. Because no thin line separates the two, Creatives are deviants in the most indigenous way. To illustrate the point I shared an apt experience from my traveling days as an international tour guide having lived among Indigenous tribes in the West Papua New Guinea Province (previously West Irian Jaya’).

When I asked an indigenous tribesman to point the way to the past, they would point in front of them. If I inquired which direction they saw the future, they would invariably point behind them. To this tribe, they could see the past through engaging their memory, thus anything one could see would be in front of them. Because no member of the tribe could see the future they reasoned the future was behind them. Because they did not value intellect, they became wise. Deviation from the norm belongs more to an Imaginative Intelligence than academic agnosticism.

If we are ever to provide an environment which fosters creativity, we have to abandon our love affair with conformity. A deviant is defined as departing from usual or accepted standards, and is synonymous with atypical, irregular, nonconforming, an individualist, who may be eccentric, unorthodox, and exceptionally idiosyncratic; threatening to some, yet welcomed by a growing constituency of imaginative thinkers. Third world societies frequently deviate from the customary Western mindset, providing justification for their special role in enriching a student’s educational experience. Education would do well to entertain the development of non-violent deviants, thus disruptive mindsets. One has to look no further than architecture’s experience with post-modern deconstruction

The fear of being wrong is an educational invention where mistakes are stigmatized. We must be careful not to educate people out of their creative capacities, remembering we don’t grow into creativity, we are educated and socialized out of it.

If our students are not prepared to be wrong, they will never come up with anything original. It’s unfortunate that our students are educated from the neck up, focusing on their heads, and slightly to the left side.

Academic ability dominates our view of intelligence. The entire system of public education is designed as a protracted process for university entrance where most students go to school to graduate rather than get an education. It can be said, traditional education strip-mines a student’s mind in a fashion not unlike the way we strip-mine the earth.

According to UNESCO, United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, more people will be graduating globally with an education in the next 30 years, than since the beginning of recorded history. In the not too distant future, degrees will be worth less because everyone will have them. This will give rise to the term, “Academic Inflation.”

The challenge is how to prepare students for a future no one can predict?

We need to Imaginatively rethink our view of intelligence before we can envision a new future for education. Currently intelligence is the expression of intellect, a product of academic training. By contrast, Imaginative Intelligence is the distinct integration of imagination and intelligence an important alternative for the future of formal education and characterized by Three (3) distinct components:

1. Imaginative Intelligence is Diverse – Visual, Auditory, Kinetic, and Abstract.
2. Imaginative Intelligence is Dynamic – “Metaphor of the Intersection” – where different perspectives occupy each corner absent the duality of intellect (good or bad; right or wrong; positive or negative; true or false).
3. Imaginative Intelligence is Distinct – It’s not a retread, it’s unlike other forms of knowledge, it is as distinct from intellect, as invention is to innovation.

Dame Gillian Lynne – a famous Choreographer responsible for “Cats”, “Phantom of the Opera”, and many other productions of Andrew Lloyd Weber was thought a failure in school – mentally defective – because she was a fidgeter who couldn’t sit still. That was until some Imaginative Intelligence reasoned she needed to move to think.

Imaginative Intelligence embraces the richness of human capacity and ushers in a new concept of Human Ecology. Imagination is as important as literacy, and should be treated with the same status.

In conclusion, I believe every future student should be required to have two years of real world experience, joining the peace corp., serving on a mission, or in service to some domestic or international Non-Governmental Organization – NGO, or non-profit agency, before they would be allow admission to a university.

You are moving too fast for a world that is round. Sooner or later you will catch up with yourself in a great rear-end collision. How much information do you need, and what are the repercussions? Are you prepared to know too much?

Mass communication fatigue is on the verge of becoming the newest public health crisis for a modern world anxious for news and overfed by a media willing to deliver information, the likes of which, you would never swallow were it food. “Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know.  Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.”  When Friedrick Wilhelm Nietzsche wrote these words in 1888, he was not worried about CNN, faxes, e-mail, and hours surfing the Net. In a century that prided itself on the accumulation and classification of facts, Nietzsche’s concern was with what facts helped an individual live a full and productive life. Nietzsche knew that the sheer accumulation of facts would bring an individual no nearer to the good life.

Expressing a similar reaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe confessed, “I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.”  Goethe, likewise, had a problem with too much information.  One hundred years before Nietzsche, Goethe expressed his reservation about the growing influence of the press. Goethe protested, “I must hold it the greatest calamity of our time, which lets nothing come to maturity, that one moment is consumed by the next. Have we not already newspapers for every hour of the day!”  Ironic, but today a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17^th century England.

If you adjust for style, Goethe could be referring to Entertainment Tonight, The Enquirer, or a variety of social news sites. Admittedly, the amount of information you absorb in a typical day by turning on a television, paging through a newspaper and going on-line is by anyone’s standards, a virtual avalanche of potential useless facts. Concerned as they were two centuries ago that wisdom must set limits to knowledge in order to foster a vital, creative life, how much more urgent their recommendation would be today in sheltering you from the hourly carpet bombing of your senses in the name of news and information.

The information age is not solely an information explosion, but an access revolution due to advances in the technology of transmitting and storage of information.  Two contributors have ushered in the present health crisis I have termed Mass Communication Fatigue Syndrome, information overload and information chaos.

Information overload happens when your cognitive space is flooded with information glut. After the mind swallows enough factoids, it finds it difficult to discriminate between useful, useless and harmful information.  You then enter a dimension of cognitive agreement in which the boundaries of discrimination collapse, where you are liable to accept any statement of presumed fact as valuable knowledge.  The wheat is buried in the chaff. As discrimination dwindles, the obsession with information increases, yet its value decreases. When this goes on long enough, you enter the next stage.

Information chaos is essentially a condition of context less facts. I’ve always taught everything makes sense in a context.  Information chaos occurs when the context is lost or thought irrelevant.  Information is no longer fixed in place by the gravity of a recognizable standard of morality, but instead finds support in massing information as though quantity equated to quality. Believing such, you enter a world in which everything is relevant.

Wisdom, that which sets limits even to knowledge, is the capacity to judge among competing interests, to understand the difference between information and meaning, between trivia and relevance. As news becomes increasing more graphic, you must decide between what you need to know and what you are better off not knowing.  If you want to control images before they crowd your mind, you’ll have to set limits on the amount of mental junk mail you consume at the alter of “staying abreast.”