Most of what happened in Uncle Ollie’s all too public life also resonated through his private transformations.
He became perhaps the first ever U.S. Secretary of Education without so much as a lowly Teacher’s Certificate in his bio, but was tapped more or less on the strength of his Certification as a Permaculture Designer, which he had ecologically mapped onto the Political Sciences of PostMillennial Taoism, in his text bearing that title.
In the early weeks of her tenure as Secretary (0)-Liver Glory, s/he now appearing only as Ms, if someone really needed a gender label to use, “…or how about Trans(0)Liver?” S/he often threw seeds toward the wind, but not all caught—that came along a little after her time with us.
Uncle Ollie agreed to speak on the topic of educational priorities during a National Governor’s Conference. S/he said, after her remarks went viral, that she didn’t realize she was to address the entire assembly, much less anticipate CNN and other media attention.
Thank you for your warm welcome here in Texas. The last time I was here I was at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport walking barefoot on the grass for a minute or so before a remarkably outraged Texas State Police Officer informed me I would be arrested if I did not get off the grass immediately.
I looked and listened to the chemically enriched grasses speak their sterilized voices, as best they could, and found no complaint from there. So I asked the Officer why would I be arrested for standing on public Texas soil.
For trespassing. Can’t you read? The signs say “Keep off the Grass.”
So, anyway, namaste for not greeting me with Keep off our Grass. I am slowly learning that, if thinking of landing in Texas, it is best that I am first invited, and second, I carefully follow written directions.
You asked me to say a few words about educational policy in the U.S., presumably because of, or even despite, germane remarks published in Political Sciences of PostTaoism as PermaCulturing Design and Healthy Education Development.
In Pronia, Rob Brezsny writes “As long as we give up our control fantasies, we’ll always get what we want.” (p. 174)
Yes, Mr. Brezsny, but is what we want also what we need for good health, for mental health, for healthy absorbent listeners and productive consumers of Earth’s richly communicating history?
I am not so new to the Department of Education to have retained any control fantasies. Yet I am still new enough to remain awed by learning what people most want to learn, to have more abundant, happy pursuits of contenting peace and political with economic justice.
What do we most want to learn? Are these reflected in our pedagogical priorities, in our learning environments, our mental health facilitation gestalts, in our Positive Psychology?
And, should this primal question of learning to live within our healthiest best integrity not remain our highest and best global educational priority?
Healthy learning outcomes for individuals, families, communities,
biosystems and ecosystems,
co-mentor healthy learning,
polypathic intentions, plans, designs,
program implementation and post-coital evaluation.
In Permacuture Design
and in Taoism
and other mindfulness-rooted ecotherapies,
we begin healthy learning with focused (0)-zone bicameral listening
to co-arise deep learning
what and why and how this healthy information,
communication,
where and when and why these cooperatively therapeutic civil eco-servants
can and will learn from each other
our self-governing evolutionary proclivities and preferences of healthy intuitive mind
and DNA-norm-rooted body development,
polycultural maturation,
consumption co-arising productive vocational rebalance,
political relationship and economic transaction as ecological coherence,
integrity of polypathic prehension through comprehension,
deep personal as public sectoral healthy ecoconsciousness,
listening-learning cooperative education,
co-mentoring co-messiahs,
revolutionarily inclusive multicultural non-verbal co-mentors,
evolving cooperative listening-learner co-mentorships
within loving life families, and schools, and communities.
Healthy,
contented,
happy minds in bodies
most want to learn how to perpetually mature,
reiterate and propogate,
resonate and resolve as recreate,
regenerate this deep learned and learning history of enculturing health,
and dissonant pathology.
I believe healthy extended families,
extending across all this Milky TaoWay of History’s Revelation,
yet especially within our EarthTribe’s polymorphic healthy Truths
as tastes-good Beauty,
and further extending back through time
to our still-emerging (0)Riginal BlackHole Tipping Point
of this our sometimes civil SelfEducating-ReGenerating Universe,
now further extending forward
toward health-regenerative educational deep learning priorities,
within vast RealTime as SpaceTime frame,
we, invested in governing,
remain most polyculturally-multiculturally ideal for experiencing,
noticing,
reiterating,
reclaiming,
remembering,
reincarnating educational health
as ecologically self-governing,
deep-learning wealth of Earth’s temporal dialects and seasons.
Healthy deep learning listeners
co-mentor health as wealth of polypathic education planning,
implementing,
assessing CQI healthy education outcomes.
Not quite a mantra,
perhaps an outline
as mutual Secretaries of Education as Deep Learning CoMentoring Vocations.
But, this Secretary would very much appreciate hearing now
from you.
As you listen to your students,
as you have yourself become a student,
as you continue pushing through as a student,
at least of your own evolutionary development,
what is most important to learn,
and therefore to teach,
if it is not how to cooperatively love healthy relationships
and eco-normic transactions?
How and where do we already focus within narrow cusps
of doublebound NOW,
where Yang’s truthing powers
and Yin’s dipolar coarising harmonic function
swim and fly,
sometimes walk too heavily Yang,
and sometimes struggle against rather than with each Other.
Yet ultimately we evolve Earth’s MidWay CoArising healthy love
of learning through cooperative
evolutionary
mutually-subsidiary education,
rooted way way back
in aptic Basic Attendance co-empathic listening,
absorbing, ingesting,
breathing Yang air in Yin’s wet flowing atmospheric frequencies out
among Earth’s co-arising Tribes.
Please use all our microphones to share with us
your own hopes for the future of learning priorities on Earth,
because all lives matter,
or life itself does not matter
because it cannot sustain healthy internal and external climates—
deductively reducing ourselves to timeless future regenerating investments of dust.
Secretary Glory,
while I think I see where this heads,
facilitating pedagogical health environments
and interpersonal relationships,
I remain concerned,
especially as Governor of Texas,
that even Lone Star states continue too much ineffective response
to remedial learning situations facing growing numbers of life’s students.
Especially those not prepared to become students,
adolescents not aware of integrities possible for becoming healthy adults,
PostMillennials who are better prepared to co-mentor abuse and neglect,
boredom and depression and chronic stress,
hyperactivity,
LeftBrain attention deficits
and death-row watches.
To discover or recover personal and public health
do we need to invest more in Anger Management
and NonViolent Communication?
Perhaps I am too addicted to my control fantasies,
but how do we get from teaching bored,
disinvested,
alienated,
angry,
frightened,
too-often bullied,
if only by ignorance and general neglect of healthy curiosity,
consumers of historical-cultural information
within pedagogical gestalts designed for happy healthy positively engaged
co-mentoring investors in learning
these hows and whys of healthy personal,
social,
political,
economic,
and ecological development?
I appreciate and share your question, Governor,
share your concern
and hope your question addresses all assembled here today.
And, while your question does not ask,
who is responsible for setting a healthy stage for learning
personal and public distinctions between healthy interests,
rather than pathological ruminations of egocentric stuckness,
co-mentored collective addictions to anger and fear management,
this is a question that I also find within my Taoist way
of understanding regenerativity as healthy balance,
wherein yin political responsibility for learning relationships
remains equitably shared, at least normatively,
within our sense of justice and fair cooperative play,
with yang’s default authority,
responsive relationships as voiced response
co-arising yang/yin self and social,
personal as also public,
responsibility within authority blending culpability for consciousness,
knowing as co-learning,
expecting actively co-operative open communication,
especially within remedial fissures and foaming fulminations
of anger and fear management,
where love might thrive as co-operative peace co-mentoring development.
Where lies this moral culpability,
where our sense of responsibility emerges predefined
by grey-limned authorities?
Cooperatively intended political sciences
produce cooperative economies
within communication’s healthy v. toxic responsibilities.
If innocence is absence of culpable responsibility,
could ignorance evolve through educational neglect of culpable authority?
Learning health emerges most apparent, vivacious,
where yang’s truth authority, empowerment,
conjoins yin’s collatorally symmetrical co-mentoring responsibilities
for learning from informing functional behaviors,
verbal with non-verbal,
thought with feelings,
positive as doubly negative,
within as doubly without,
folding as doubly unfolding.
Both innocence and ignorance are drawn to mystery,
medicine,
health
rather than stagnant pathologies,
as comprehension seeks wisdom,
as animus eroticizes agapic anima,
as love seeks life amongst ourselves,
as health seeks regenerative abundance,
multicultural learning outcomes
through active evolutionary cooperativity.
Perhaps our educational priorities are now already evolving
to teach one integrative polypathic regenerative story,
through diverse paradigmatic lenses.
Leaves with stems are icons of dynamic economic-nutritional health systems,
as seeds and eggs emerge ecological regenerative research
through embryonic revolutions of healthy learning fertility.
As I watch the CNN replay, a pregnant pause emerges from Secretary Glory’s abrupt, yet potentially fertile, end. A pause increasingly ambiguous and momentous, even as I sit before Uncle Ollie’s kitchen table, late this night, knowing how this silence must unfold.
Later, (0)-Liver sends a follow-up letter addressed oddly to the “Governors of these Yet-Uniting States”:
I am aware, in hindsight, that you, public sector Governors, and hopefully private sector healthy self-governors, may share my own curiosity about ancient, still-evolving, histories of social and economic governance.
When Earth’s self-educational story did not yet include the self-awareness resources of DNA,
when all Earth’s Tribes were RNA rooted in composting soil,
what did we learn
to personally,
and more politically and economically,
more public sectorally,
regenerate self-governance of life
through safe and healthy principles of development?
In this, our PostMillennial Era,
we discover a profoundly historical-evolutionary question,
with implications for educational priorities,
yet also for biosystemic and ecosystemic self-governance,
thinking more inclusively,
as a forest of networking root systems might co-arise
Trees of LeftBrain Economic Truth as RightBrain Political Beauty.
The PreMillennial distinction
between Moose “power”
and Owl “medicine”
goes on back toward the origins of the PermaCultural Agrarian Era.
In this time,
“power” more or less translated into what we might call therapeutic,
or health-power.
Power could not yet be a tool distinguishable from self-identity.
Rather power was most widely experienced in the context of “power with Other,”
regardless of who or how “Other” was perceived.
Power with Other to procreate,
to hunt together,
to demonstrate building of fires and planting of seeds,
co-mentoring communications,
all cooperatively functional,
competitively dissonant and dysfunctional.
This blend of therapy and power,
according to Julian Jaynes’ evolutionary theory,
emerges from Elder Right hemispheric roots
to dominate language cultures
as the correlational ability to perceive “not me”
as core identity of what later became encapsulated in “therapy-positive”
and “pathology-negative”
and both relational,
indistinguishable from “sole-identity power.”
The first cultural experience of power
becomes the ability of “self” referencing as “not-Other;”
a “self” that evolves dipolar co-arisingly identifiable from “not-self”
because of perceived,
then learned, further reinforced, spatial-temporal distinctions
deriving from Prime DiPolar CoIdentity Relationship,
distinction between what “self” could unilaterally control,
and what self could not autonomously control.
Prior to LeftBrain dominance over RightBrain aptic confluence,
our RNA-Elders, grass and trees and coral reefs,
had no possibility of confused awareness
between internal-univocal yin-power
and bilaterally interdependent, mutually symbiotic,
co-mentoring Yang/Yin CoArising Power.
The original “self” awareness embryonically emerges,
continues to emerge,
from time as light’s primal Eulerian infrastructure of “We-ness,”
an ionic,
then ergodic,
then bilateral co-gravitating ProteanYang with DiPolar Elating YinYin elective function,
confluent, mutually-held, synergy between emergent YangEgo
and composting Elder YinEmbryonicOther,
love as LaoTse’s contentment,
as Basic Attendance among our Bodhisattva Occupiers of DeepLoveLearning,
(0)Riginal temporal experience of undifferentiated integrity,
which becomes iconically languaged as Original Intent
of MedicineEarthOther,
a cooperative dipolar co-arising ReGenerative Network,
time as both Yang light c-squared,
and yinyin e-squared fractal-function
of ecosystemic EarthBound RNA/DNA thermodynamic balance.
As we compare notes across our public sector governing desks,
each with co-arising responsibility and economically culpable authority,
it seems to me that overall regenerative health evidence of history
suggests deep political learning evolves highest and best-outcome projections
with rich cooperative ecological polypathic co-investments in co-mentoring nutrients,
rather than suboptimizing remedial toxins of anger and fear management
without pro-actively co-invested love and peace development.
To believe otherwise,
to act as if learning is nurtured best through competitive words and numbers,
used as tools to outshine the sun itself,
seems to follow the path of Anger/Fear control fantasies,
rather than actually arriving in the Truth as Beauty co-educational paradise we actually want
with each Other.