Retrospectives

It's been almost inconceivable thirty years ago that while flying from Chicago to Miami, I found myself sitting beside a man who would become a friend and mentor. His name was Will Schutz. On this trip after sharing where I was going with my business, "Success by Design", he told me with considerable compassion, "Lynnclaire how you are thinking, and what you are proposing is fifteen years ahead of  time." While it was an accurate assessment, it certainly didn't stop me. While time slips and falls from our grasp, some things remain, and miraculously (or not/knot) survive the refining and often fiery process of evolution.

Will came to mind today today while I was rummaging through some old files. His thoughts echoed  when I found the draft transcript of a presentation I made in 1997 at a forum in Portland, Oregon. Remembering how insignificant I felt sharing the podium with the likes of Sulak Sivaraksa, Arun Manilal Gandhi, and others, it was certainly the beginning of my sharpening the point of Mereon's potential. It is often worth revisiting such commentary, putting them back out on the table and comparing where we are today. Although not as polished as I would now want it to be, it is worth sharing in that this one of the first 'matches' lit in my desire to start a grassroots fire for positive change using Mereon as a model for making a positive difference.

Transforming Education

We are here tonight to talk about technology and transformation.  In the world where I am daily honoured to walk, any talk of transformation must begin with education.

The technology must be the intentional design and implementation of life-affirming principles that can reform educational systems. Such technology must be mindful, honoring counterpoints and counterparts so to unify 1) the formal dimension of education, the curriculum driven by the governing bodies that mandate what we are to learn; and 2) the informal social dimension of the learning environment where we as learners learn to lead.  

While most of us have finished our formal education, while being life-long learners, we must realize that as adults as well as children, we are all teachers. Our words and deeds leave an imprint on the lives of those we touch.  If we are to be catalysts for positive change, we must accept the responsibility that comes with it; that of trailblazing a new path toward authenticity and genuine learning. 

This means constantly and willingly relearning, consciously integrating intuition and cognition. It means honouring the dueling voices inside our heads, one a pessimist, the other an eternal optimist. It time to become realists, linking qualitative and quantitative.  When we make this transition, we will wend our way forward, and on the journey be free to tap into new sources of inspiration that will motivate meaningful and measurable innovation.  

Planetary transformation will become viable and visible only when it reflects such a change within the minds and hearts of individuals. 

To inaugurate effective and sustainable global change, we must consciously address two areas that are holistically injurious to the children -our most precious resource- those who will inherit whatever legacy we leave them; education, and crimes against the body, mind and heart.

Such offenses are the aggressive actions and defensive reactions that adversely affect any level of one’s being.  The external havoc they bring on is wrought by internal greediness, material, emotional, or mental, such avarice borne of a malignant neediness.  Look around and we see that it leads to the masses being forced to their knees, dying in dire and desperate need.  These fear based reactions now ravage all cultures, found in sexual politics behind wars that lead to gross human rights violations, gender discrimination, racialism, and industrial pollution. 

Our world is plagued by the unconscionable crimes perpetrated by individuals, organizations, institutions, and governments. Until such destructive systems and their practices are brought to conscious awareness nothing will change and internal and external disintegration will continue. 

It is time to address the agendas –overt and covert-- that not only call for, but support alienation. Why do we tolerate divisive technological tools that virtually commission conflict? Why do we turn a blind eye to political and corporate strategies that plow up the middle path, and undermine the working class? What will it take to turn the lights on religious dogma that spiritualizes separation and moralize violence? How can we afford the debt that attends nationalistic policies that restrain or outright deny human rights? Neither the human psyche nor our planet can afford to suffer the damage wrought by these crimes.

The wealthiest of nations suffer from abject spiritual poverty, this scourge now having many flat on their backs in a state of neediness. The only good thing about this position is it inclines us to look inward.  

While awareness of pain means that we are feeling something, it is not a noble way to induce change.  

Teachers have long been civilizations unsung heroes.   We call firemen heroes when they race into a burning building, but not our educators who get up every day to go into schools teeming with resentment and ire? Why is it that schools today are so seldom recognized as spaces replete with rich sources of inspiration? How often are teachers and the children alike allowed to follow a natural flow, capitalizing on the spontaneous emergence of intuitive knowing and integrating it with the systematic accumulation knowledge?  

What is needed today are learning environments that are wholly supportive of teachers and learners. They must nurturer learning and healthy social skills, fostering the emergence of the authentic self.  Reframing education means designing innovative ways to show children a new way of being in the world, showing them what it is to become humankind, living lives of purpose, and on purpose.

It means no longer propagating the lie of ‘forgive and forget’, lest we doom ourselves to the insanity Einstein warned against, by doing the same thing over and over again. We must learn to forgive and remember, remembering allowing us to reconnect and grow on together.  Every great teachers has said that the reason for our presence on the planet was to know love, receiving and extending compassion to one another. Doing so frees us to be conscientious care givers of Gaia, Mother Earth.  If we continue to forgot who we are, there is little in the way of hope for renewal. Think about the word ‘forgetting’ as ‘for getting’; it means taking, perpetuating our gross conspicuous consumption, the rapacious need to acquire more money, better things, or different people, hoping that they will somehow fill our inner void and make us feel complete.

The ten most important words we can teach our children - by example- are; I admit I made a mistake. Will you forgive me?  Forgiveness leads us into the remembrance of our fundamental unity. Everything is made of one thing —stardust.  The only difference between us, a frog, the pond scum the frog swims in, a dirt rimmed rock, and a flawless diamond is how the atoms are arranged.   There is only difference. Nothing is different.

I find it exceedingly distressing at some of the covert ways we miseducate our children and in the process, delude ourselves into believing that we’re doing something good. Three years ago someone murdered a woman named Nicole Brown Simpson, and a young man named Ron Goldman. As heinous and tragic as these deaths were, in my opinion there is an equal and perhaps even greater crime being perpetuated in its wake.

Out of this tragedy a non-profit foundation was formed for the sake of the children who are affected by domestic violence. While there is no doubt that this organization was created out of compassionate intent, it is an inadvertent antagonist. While proclaiming to be an advocate for victims of abuse, it implants into the minds of innocents, the mantra, “Hands are for not for hitting.” 

Every parent and teacher knows that by the time a child is two years old, the #1 word in their vocabulary is “No”, and by the time they are four years old, their most perdurable phrase is “That's not fair.”  What this means is that by the time a child enrolls in school the words ‘no’ and ‘not’ are so embedded in their psyches that they don’t even hear them! We all know that if you tell a child, “Don't spill your milk.’, we may as well walk to the kitchen to get the sponge or mop.

Think about it; if we tell a child, “Hands are for not for hitting.”, what do we think they hear?

They hear, “Hands are for hitting.” Take this truism to the extreme, “No more war!” It is time we ask ourselves when has war, physical, emotional or mental, ever been the catalyst to a lasting peace? Imagine what might happen if we were free to show and teach the children that “Hands are for hugging.”; “Hands are for holding.”, “Hands are for healing.”

Attempting to instill a positive by embedding a negative simply doesn’t work.  How many times have I gone to the market to hear a parent yell at a child, saying, “You're a bad boy.”? Please, there is no such thing as bad people, merely good people acting out abhorrent, ungrateful or distasteful ways. 

How often have we heard, “Children are to be seen and not heard.”?  Tragically, this is too often true. Even if a child can get an adult to listen to them, more often than not, the adult does not hear what the child is saying. Kids are too often discounted simply because they are kids.  I’ve often found it interesting that the human ear is shaped like half a heart. We need to start listening with both ears, giving those who ask for our time, desiring our undivided attention. Only then will we be able to truly hear, making a wholehearted connection. 

Education is not found in “Repeat after me” , or in being told to “Color inside the lines.” It is about inlightenment, helping ourselves and children break out of the box labeled normal so they can find what is natural to their own soul. This requires that we distinguish between teaching the fundamental skills required to live in this world, reading, writing, math, and science, and the social skills necessary to learn to lead.

Our job as parents, family, friends, and teachers, and educators is to find and hold a sacred space in which children can discover and articulate who they are so they can eventually matriculate into their authentic self.  When we free the heart of the children, liberating them from the rigid confines of right versus wrong; good versus bad; and black versus white, we empower them to brilliantly color the future. 

Whyning

Have you ever thought or experienced the question “Why?”,  as someone else’s brain begging your heart to lie?  While we are all accountable for our behavior, no one should be required to explain, justify, spiritualize, moralize, or defend their authenticity. As guides and guardians of the children, we must create safe spaces, places of trust where there are as few no’s as possible, where our yes means yes, and our no means no, all decisions reached after dialoguing, not a demoralizing monologue. We must empower the children to find their way even if we think that way is going to be the hard way.  

The collateral damage from what we call education is stunning. To many children school is punishment. Dropouts report their reasons for exiting early as boredom, bullying, gross malfeasance, injustice, and apathy. The fear of being wronged or doing wrong too often results in the perpetuation of separation and abuse in all its most dysfunctional forms. Its aftermath is a global society filled suffering and dying from an epidemic of loneliness.

Only when our minds and hearts are open, can we extend our hands and arms, and come out of isolation, embrace life, and invite others into our experience. We can bond without creating bondage; nurture without suffocating, and be cherished without feeling smothered; we can be mutually supportive without needing to grasp; and feel fully appreciated, without suffering the false obligation to find fault; we can know what it is to care deeply, absent any compulsion to take care of; to know we can hear and be heard, without fear of suppression; and finally, we can participate in a dialogues of hope, and dance in peace, no longer required to carry on in mindless monologue of the past, or feel like we have to walk on egg shells. 

It is time that the global human family make a life or death run for life. In our quest for a rigorously articulated scholarship of consciousness, we must find the polestar between technology and spirit. We must make a commitment to do more than listen; we must give ourselves the time to hear, focusing on and expanding points of agreement. Only this will lead to respect and the re-creation of education as a domain whose field is inclusive, unifying the academic, the psychological/social, with the best of technological.  Unity is not the work of any one person, or any one nation. It begins with me. It begins with you. It is time for each of us to come home, honor our own name, and proclaim the purpose of our spirit.  We are discrete beings who emerged from a single source, a unified soul.

Our lives are adventures, each of us on a journey without a destination.  It is up to us to determine the quality of our quest, making sure that the adventure of a lifetime culminates in the reunion of families, neighborhoods, cities, countries, and our world. Unless we take remedial action now, the sense of futility rife within education will grow to lethal proportions.  Empires have come and gone, each demonstrating how the demise of education is the death of civilization.

In order to be effective catalysts for compassionate change mediated by justice we must cultivate within ourselves and others; 1) an insatiable curiosity; 2) we must find the courage to ask difficult questions;  3) we must embrace the willingness to personally answer those questions, and live the best answer we know in that moment;  4) we must realize when that answer is no longer viable;  5) we must foster our ability to wisely discern devoid of bias;  6) we must harness the tenacity to climb out of our rigid thought boxes, and fly into the void usually known as the unknown; and finally, 7) we must to be bold enough to take the first step without being forced or otherwise coerced. 

At any instant life can catapult us into a new state of awareness.  Our opportunity is to touch those moments, leaving our fingerprints without stomping around and destroying the experience.  In the blink of an eye what we thought we knew can be cremated, the ashes of who we thought we were scattered in the wind.  Think about it; we are made of stardust. And so it is that from the ashes of change, we can return, healthier, stronger and yes, better. The ‘other side’ of anything, life, an argument, or a war is merely another perspective of a singular reality anchored in time.  What could happen if our divergent points of view were seen and honoured simply as diverse perspective? Might we be able to find a point of reunion?

It is time for humankind to evolve.

It is time to make a commitment to bring all our heavenly minded ideas down to earth for earthly good, because this is the only place where we can know that what we do matters, and know that we count. 

We must do it now. Earth is the home we share. I’ve come to see “HOME” as a new acronym: H= heaven; E = Earth, the two domains bridged by the sound of OM, the vibration of the heart. Yet we must also remember that there is certainly more to reality than we see. Time is invisible, yet we all feel it and see its evidence. It is the thread that laces all dimensions, criss-crossing the +-3% that we are able to perceive with the 97% that is ‘missing’.   True and mindful communication is the strongest bridge connecting the technology and our essence, fusing our brains and our hearts in tangible ways.

While the technological implications of the Pattern are being investigated, it is already demonstrating to be a powerful instrument for the renewal of conscience. It is a blueprint for designing systems, rituals and practices that can permanently alter old and deeply ingrained impressions. Its beauty brings people together in new ways. My hope is that it will an invitation for people to join together to revision education, our own learning, and that of the children who will hopefully survive our insanity.

For their sake it is time to see that we can no longer afford the exorbitant price of war, those declared and clandestine. It is time to realize that there is no such thing as a holy war. It is time to stop the insidious emotional wars, things like cold shoulders, looks that kill, and words that maim. While we must honor and do what is appropriate for our body, we must give up our stranglehold on the need to be right.  For humankind and the planet to thrive we must get over our personal stories, and rise above our idiosyncratic survival strategies. The need for security is suffocating us, in many ways driving our oppressive, insatiable quest for material possessions. It is time to dethrone the inner autocrat of greed whose ruling creed is “You will never have enough.”, “You will never be good enough.” 

Educating the children is calling forth what is in their mind and heart, doing so in a rigorous yet heartfelt manner. It is time to show them that inner peace is the consequence of realizing they are loveable and loved. That world peace is the result of understanding and acceptance of differences. The awareness of wholeness is only discoverable when we realize we are not dying of terminal uniqueness. It means understanding that while we are perfect in our being, perfection is not something we can be or achieve in our doing.

It is time for Consciousness to come to conscious awareness. It is time to abandon our silence and bring what is real for us to light as conscientious objectors.  When understanding, justice and yes, I dare say love becomes our conscious objective, peace will find fertile ground to send down a strong taproot.  It is our task to tend it with tender loving care. When we diligently seek, and find ways to be compassionate, we will begin to experience tangible, measurable, and lasting peace into our lives, our relationships, and our world. The realist in me holds a firm believing that a new harmony is possible, that the world we want to live in is arising within each of us, and that one day soon, we will hear the first whisper of the music of the spheres.

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffective, concerning all acts of initiative and creation. There is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now."       --Goethe

Jim Channon, Arcturus, Inc., Hawi, Hawaii, 1991

As a visionary artist, Jim's unique 'touch' was placed on this work the day that he and Lynnclaire met, February 14, 1991. Suffice it to say, it was one of those moments...

Seven years later Jim was the 'guide' for the first Sequoia Symposium, leading fifty scientists and futurists on a four-day exploration of what was then known of Mereon. While the knowledge and understanding has expanded greatly, what he wrote about both Mereon and Lynnclaire that week remains valid still. Read on...

"Lynnclaire has journeyed for years from one scientific mogul to another, innocently bur firmly presenting her “discovery,” a small but powerfully loaded social invention. From one perspective, Mereon appears to be a ‘designer’ version of the atomic symbol we grew to respect and fear in an earlier incarnation. Change your point of view and the symbol changes as well.

For years Lynnclaire has continued to invite a wide array of academic minds and innovative thinkers to help uncover its meaning and destiny, and this invitation itself, is a key to her many gifts. Her willingness to jump disciplines and paradigms is another, one that invites others, in. During the discussions that follow, Lynnclaire may engage her fellow travelers in compelling exchanges about Mereon, dialogues that may at first seem to throw the assumed and yes, perhaps artificial boundaries of logic and reason out the window. In truth, she and Mereon, unify intuition and reason. The intriguing part about the dialogues and adventures that ensue is the number of dimensions she is willing and able to include in the blink of an eye, demonstrating how we can include an unbelievable number of dimensions in our world at the same time. Her small but loaded dynamic icon, believed by many to be a linked to sound, light, time and matter, exudes precisely the same possibilities.

As such, this dynamic and brilliant matrix is a powerful new linguistic element, fostering a new kind of thinking and a new language.  Our present thinking is limited by the language we use, language that is loaded with independent and reinforcing dimensions of activity. Mereon however, evokes thinking much like the first model of our solar system must have, reflecting the wonder one experienced when looking into the mechanism of a twenty-one jeweled watch.

In a world where integrating and unifying the frontier dimensions of thought is so critical to whole systems solutions, Lynnclaire is carrying around a noun that is also a complex verb. Mereon is a dynamic framework for complex relationships, and no matter what label is given to this intriguing graphic engine, the impact remains ‘unifying.’ She is personally, one of the most beautiful and charming things to happen to science in long awhile.

Her work, now being defined in terms of rigorous physics biological, chemical and technical aspects, is opening many minds into the micro function of mathematics and physical manifestation. Lynnclaire’s job is that of an intelligence agent, one who carries about “the Secret Formula.” Best described, she has discovered the logo of relationships. Mereon is the designer version, and so is she! Anyone who seeks the council of frontier minds will always be recognized as clever. When in the process, they pollinate the flowers with a new thinking tool they have to be thought of as gifted."