Abstract
Focused in the physical, people are primarily experiential learners. Yet with the creation and sophistication of measurement techniques at the turn of the century, an understanding of experiential learning from the inside-out began to expand through neuroscience. There was recognition that people are holistic beings, and that the heart and mind are an integrated, biological, and complex part of the embodied human system. And within this system, through research in neuroscience, there are hints of what is possible. There is a brain/heart-mind/soul continuum, which brings to mind and to soul the potential for an existential state of learning while focused in the physical/etheric reality. Whether played out in the “virtual reality” of the mind or psychecology educational games, this existential state of creating, imagining, experiencing, and learning can fully engage our creative imagination while simultaneously engaging our higher mental faculties. In essence, through existential experiencing we are creating a symmetry, becoming the mirror of our soul. As above, so below.
TopIntroduction
There is so much we have learned about the mind/brain since advances in brain measurement instrumentation and excitation technologies at the turn of the century accelerated research in, interest about, and public awareness of, the importance and potential of neuroscience. We increasingly recognize that we are holistic beings, and that the mind is an integrated, biological and complex part of our embodied human system. As we move into a Quantum frame of reference, recognizing that energy and matter are indefinite and that thought affects energy (Heisenberg, 1949; Plank, 2015), more and more individuals are realizing that the limitations and boundaries we create close us off from fields of possibilities.
When David Kolb’s experiential learning model was published in 1984, it was recognized that adults learn primarily through experience following their formal education. This behavioral model gave way to an expanded model (Bennet, D. et al., 2018) as neuroscientists acquired the ability to explore adult learning from the inside-out. We begin with a short grounding of experiential learning, then briefly bring the concepts of infinite symmetry and symbiotic thinking into play before taking a closer look at concepts emerging out of neuroscience that offer hints for higher or existential states of learning.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Thought Forms: Forms made of emotional-mental matter, “energy complexes on the subtle levels of reality that are analogous to physical things” (Besant & Leadbeater, 1999, p. xx). Thought forms are sent out into the environment where they attract sympathetic vibrations, those vibrations that resonate with the thought and feelings being produced.
Experiential Learning: Learning through experience, which is the fundamental way that humans learn. The four primary ways adults are influenced by experience are through (a) creating a wider range of individuated differences, (b) providing rich resources for learning, (c) creating the biases that inhibit or shape learning, and (d) providing a grounding for adult self-identity (Knowles et al., 1998).
Consciousness: A private, selective, and continuously changing process beginning with an awareness of self and including a sequential set of ideas, thoughts, images, feelings and perception (Bennet et al., 2020a) with self-orchestrating subject-object and object-object relationships among that which is perceived as “within” and that which is perceived as “without”. “It involves wakefulness, receiving and responding to sensory inputs, imagination, inner experience, and volition” (Carroll, 2016, p. 319). In Hawkins (2002) mapping of the energy field of consciousness, levels are correlated with specific process of consciousness including emotions, perceptions, attitudes, worldviews, and spiritual beliefs. In a logarithmic progression from 1 to 1,000, below 200, attitudes, thoughts and feelings are associated with force (making people weaker) and above 200 they are associated with power (making people stronger). This model can be used to measure human thought.
Existential: Existentialism emerged with the 19 th and 20 th century philosophers, putting the individual at the center of reality. Everything was subjective, and the meaning of life created by each individual is all that exists. In this context, the universe was unfathomable, and each individual must assume ultimate responsibility for acts of free will without any certain knowledge of right or wrong or good or bad. However, recognizing that patters repeat themselves throughout nature we can imagine a “being” cycle based on thought versus action, howbeit thought no longer bounded by the limitations imposed by the physical connections of the mind/brain, rather fueled from the viewpoint of the soul. From this higher viewpoint, the experiential model of acting-reacting-synthesizing serves as a foundation for the soul’s existential state of being-reflecting-planning.
Symmetry: Proportional or balanced harmony, with the exact correspondence of form on opposite sides of a centerline or point, a harmony of proportions (Weyl, 1952). The idea of infinite symmetry is appealing. Consistent with the spiritual axiom, infinite symmetry insinuates that we know much more about the Universe than we know that we know, with two parts of a whole reflecting each other. This means that if we can understand the models of life within our context, we have the keys to understanding higher-order patterns beyond our cognizance ( as below, so above ).
Mind/Brain: The brain is the physical structure that hosts our thoughts. It is a molecular structure that floats inside our skull, with fluids flowing within and through that structure. The mind consists of neuronal firings and their connections that occur in the brain and throughout the body, encompassing all our thoughts. The mind/brain refers the entirely of this system of thought.
Invariant Form: Storing sequences of patterns is one way the brain anticipates the future. The core of a picture or an event is stored as an invariant representation serving as the basic source of recognition and understanding of broader patterns (Hawkins, 2004; Kandel, 2006; Bennet & Bennet, 2006, 2011). This is analogous to the neocortex physical design, which can be described as “a sheet of cells the size of al dinner napkin as thick as six business cards, where the connections between various regions give the whole thing a hierarchical structure” (Hawkins, 2004, p. 109).
Beauty: A transcendent state in common human experience which is based on individual choice and perception. Humans have long associated beauty with fractal patterns, infinitely complex repeating patterns with each part of the pattern including seeds for the whole. There is a direct connection between the senses and beauty such that when an individual is focused on the “now” experience of beauty—something good, deeply purposeful, pleasing, attractive and satisfying, specifically, a combination of qualities, impressive to touch, feel, look at, taste, smell, listen to and think about—the senses in the body are enhanced and unified, lightening the field of thought around us and expanding our consciousness. (Bennet et al., 2020c)
Experiential: Experience is an apprehension, the ability to use our senses and mind to understand the things around us and within us as we participate in and live through life. It is our total response to living at the physical/etheric level, “what he or she thinks, feels, does and concludes at the time and immediately thereafter” (Boud et al., 1994, p. 18). From the viewpoint of the self, the human journey of experiential learning is one of acting, reacting, then synthesizing, with each new action building on all of the acting-reacting-synthesizing cycles that have come before. (Bennet, 2018) Synthesis, a concept of self, is the process of singling out and accentuating what is significant and connecting these events to historic events to create a narrative unit, which can be described as a fictionalized history, an imagining, a fantasy .
Symbiotic Thinking: Recognition of the wholeness of concepts; A relationship not from causality but from existence (Bennet et al., 2020b). The very existence of a thing or idea requires the existence of something else. For example, object and space, matter and antimatter, cause and effect.
Mirror Neurons: A form of cognitive mimicry that transfers actions, behaviors, and most likely other cultural norms. When we see something being enacted, our mind creates the same patterns that would be used to enact that “something”, and through repeatedly “seeing” those patterns, they become embedded as part of our behavior. Thus, mirror neurons link our perception to the priming of the motor systems that engage the same action (Bennet et al., 2018).
Soul: The animating principle of human life in terms of thought and action, specifically focused on its moral aspects, the emotional part of human nature, and higher development of the mental faculties (Bennet & Bennet, 2007). From the philosophical aspect, the soul is the vital, sensitive, or rational principle in human beings (Oxford, 2002).