Glimmerings: A Quasi-technical Talk on Fairy Dust

Prompted by the questions, "What is play therapy?" and "If I'm more actualized/conscious than you, why does interacting with you make me want to punch or avoid you?", I've worked out somewhat of a structural analysis of interacting beyond and within an Understanding level of awareness. A slightly less personalized way of looking at this topic is to think about it as looking at the difference between play-states and "subtle" states.

The second question (punch/avoid) is easy enough to answer, although an answer doesn't necessarily change the feeling. The aggression and avoidance are two behavioral options (fight/flight) that spring from the reactivity which results from feeling that anything I do will be interpreted from a limiting perspective. This is slightly different from simply being misinterpreted from a wrong perspective. Wrong perspectives (if someone simply misconstrues intention) can be corrected with a simple, "That's not what I meant; I mean this instead." Of course, spending all out time correcting one another is not all that much fun, so that answer is not really a solution.

And if we think about Vygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development", we can reference how kids learn from one another in ways that often don't happen when overly institutionalized adults are around. See Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments. This is like the educational variation of play therapy--mixing fun, competition, and collaboration into education. Certainly, kids can be pedantic, but their groups often have less tolerance for pedantry than adult groups. If you watch enough groups of kids, you will clearly notice some times when kids are intentionally learning. But you will also be struck by how often kids pick things up that they didn't seem to be paying attention to. Adults are the same way, but we may be better at denying just how much we are influenced by things we don't necessarily choose to be influenced by.

This raises an important question: can we really design an effective educational system if we don't really know when and what people are learning? A second, equally relevant question: do we want to? Let me contextualize: if people are not clearly aware of having peak experiences, what is their motivation to move beyond a pedantic worldview? And, for the folks who are clearly aware of subtle and/or causal states, how can they share this sort of experience without being pedantic. (Hopefully, you can take my pedantic answer somewhat ironically.)

The obvious solution is fairy dust (dreadfully sorry for having a title that ruins the surprise). Think of how serious kids can be concerning its importance.

Without waking experience of higher states, the motivations towards contemplative practice (into intentionally achieving higher states) include idealization with aspiration and also suffering-avoidance. We have all wished for a better something, one without some particular cause of suffering (like hunger, back pain, reductionistic interpretative frameworks, 80s music and styles, a lamentable absence of ice cream, etc.). Idealization and avoidance both structurally mimic the up/down and in/out relationships we are instinctively primed for. This place is better/worse; this group is better/worse; I can't believe I'm part of this family; Mean people suck, nice people swallow...you get the drift.

To really move beyond the affirmation or endorsement of that sort of separative reactivity, mindfulness practice works really well, but if you're not already doing it, then we come back to the question of how to engage with contemplative practices without simply reproducing the up/down/in/out while possibly adding subtle experiences (you know, the ones that allow a spiritual-not-religious us to feel better than them while denying that we hold that truth [our betterness] as self-evident as well as backed up by our higher consciousness and their decrepitude).