My accredited knowledge

While at University between 1967 and 1971 I studied Psychology and Chemistry for one year each,  Botany for two years and Zoology for four years. I was aged 18 to 22. In academic year 1971/72 I trained as a science/biology teacher. I was impressionable and impressed.

I had amassed a huge fund of accredited knowledge and was well motivated to pass it on to the youth such that they might make the world a better place by championing the ‘green’ agenda. In the end I taught science/biology for eleven years in four countries.

Along the way I acquired a couple of Master degrees – in Agricultural Extension (and rural development) and in Education (with a focus on curriculum development and teacher training). I also taught myself the equivalent of an MBA by reading the course work of a friend who was studying it through the UK’s Open University. My accredited knowledge shifted to educational leadership, management and administration (LMA).

Then, fifteen years ago, I came to see what Bourdieu and Passeron meant when they reckoned that formal education systems can reproduce but not transform society. So I gave up on educational LMA and became a plain language expert helping to improve the communicative effectiveness of civil society organisations. My accredited knowledge base for this drew from many long hours of curriculum development, lesson planning, and materials production.

Plain language kept me busy for several years but it became apparent that clear, rational communication was not enough. If there is to be change for the better then there has to be a massive change of heart and values.

It became apparent that mindfulness meditation can lead to a change of heart and values in both its ancient eastern forms and in its modern western ways. But objective knowing about it is not the same as experiencing it. This presented me with a learning challenge to which I responded by addressing the dharma (text, audio and video); attending several weekend retreats based on a range of traditions; sitting regularly with my local sangha that follows the teachings of Thich Nhat Hahn; and learning to be at-one with the peace that comes when you drop off body and mind and just sit.

And then something wondrous happened. I noticed that a consilience is forming about the mindbrain.

Evolutionary biology and psychology are outlining the ancestral roots of the many modules of the mindbrain. And neuroscientists with their new technologies are mapping them. AND, when the minds of experienced meditators are mapped, the correspondence with 3000 year old meditative understandings is breathtaking.

There are neural pathways and there is neuroplasticity. By thinking different you can change your mindbrain. You can then change the mindbrain of your culture.

I have no officially accredited knowledge regarding modern mindfulness and the ancestral mindbrain. But the new ideas motivate me to revisit and update my early specialities of science and biology. I can now view them through the expansive lens of Big History.

Humanity is not at the centre of the universe. To escape simple-minded parochiality we must look to the diversity and sumptuousness of life beyond humanity; and in particular to the evolutionary structure and function of what passes for a mindbrain in other living things.

In the 18th century two kingdoms of living things were recognised – plants and animals. In the early 21st century there is no overall consensus. Different experts reckon that there are 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 Kingdoms. These include fungi, protista, bacteria, and viruses.

Green plants include the flowering plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts and mosses, as well as, depending on definition, the green algae.

There is no overall consensus about how to classify the animals. I still use the system that was favoured when I was a Zoology student. There were those without a backbone – the invertebrates - and those with a backbone – the vertebrates

The invertebrates included Protozoa (single celled organisms); Porifera (sponges); Cnidaria (jellyfish); Platyhelminthes (flat worms); Nemathelminthes (thread worms); Annelida (round worms); Arthropoda (insects, spiders, crustaceans; Mollusca (slugs, snails, octopus, squids); and Echinodermata (starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers).

The vertebrates included Agnatha (jawless fishes); Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes); Osteichthyes (bony fishes); Amphibia (amphibians); Reptilia (reptiles); Aves (birds); and Mammalia (mammals)

There is a vast cornucopia of living things that have been, and are, occupying the surface of planet earth. And all of them have variations on the mindbrain theme.

Most mindbrains, including the human ones, are busy maintaining a myriad of hard wired sensation/reaction groups related to the basic life processes which include nutrition, respiration, excretion, transport and circulation, support and locomotion, irritability, reproduction, and growth and development.

We can now see human beings in perspective. We have a lot in common with other vertebrates. But we have specialised on the life process called ‘irritability’. 

The sensation/response system has been dramatically reworked such that we not only think and feel but we can have thoughts and feelings about such things. We are not only conscious, we are self conscious - and ‘civilised’ and with ‘culture’: and we are understandably proud of this achievement.

BUT – the fancy thinking and feeling are very new in evolutionary terms and they occupy only a tiny percentage of the mindbrain. The potential for being intelligent, wise and compassionate exists but not yet in enough human brains. Many of our feelings and values are still from the stone age. But mindfulness offers a pathway into enlightened metacognition and towards justice and peace in the new information age.

Aha – I am well beyond the limits of my official, accredited knowledge and expertise. I have entered the realm of subjective, idiosyncratic, armchair rant. Let credit go where it’s due?