We are becoming aware that our humanity is facing an increasingly perilous situation. We are becoming aware of how uncertain and threatened are not just the prospects for our modern civilization, but even for our survival as a species.

We can say accurately that at our current level of functioning, we are not going to make it. At our present level of being able to work cooperatively together in the common interest, we are just falling further and further behind our problems.

What we must have is an leap to a higher level of consciousness and awareness of our common humanity and its needs -- an evolutionary jump in level. We must have this profound increase in our ability to work together in unity to meet problems before us and to secure our future.

We are at the end of an historical cycle, a cycle that has brought our humanity many wonderful advances, but enormous problems as well. Those problems have gone beyond the available tools of this cycle to solve. If there is not a new cycle available to us, a new cycle with the necessary tools of consciousness and human understanding to deal successfully with the problems we are facing, then there is no solution.

What could bring about this new cycle?

My answer is this. We require a new school of the human psyche, one that will enable us to reach our full positive potential for dealing with this Emergency. The more and better we know ourselves, and the more we have clarified ourselves internally, the greater will be our contributions towards the solution. Our highest possibilities, our greatest contributions will come individually with the achievement of Total Enlightenment, and collectively with the realization of the Unity of all Humanity.

Such a school to meet our historical necessity must meet five crucial requirements. In this blog we will be examining these requirements in depth to understand why they are so important. We will also discover what has been accomplished towards providing this urgently needed school.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Brief Project History

The Built-In Solution" is a project which now spans nearly six decades.  It has produced my recommendation for how we can achieve the higher level of consciousness and cooperation essential for solving the many serious problems we have generated for ourselves, problems which now threaten our continuation as a viable species.  This is a brief summary.

I first became aware that we were heading towards this crisis in the mid-1950s when I was in high school.  At the same time I became convinced that overall we were going to try to deny the upcoming problems as long as possible.  Hopefully, when reality started breaking down that denial there would be a window of opportunity for change.  I decided that I would try to have something useful to say or helpful to offer when and if that time came. My initial internal decision that started this project was no more specific than that.

In late 1974 I was recovering from some construction injuries.  I spent my available time just thinking seriously and extensively about what I had learned about our growing problems, and about what might be helpful towards speeding their resolution.
  
After five months, I had concluded the best possible solution would be a major increase in self-knowledge and self-understanding.  We needed a gathering across humanity of all this kind of information.  We needed somehow to distill it down to the essentials and make it easily available in a new school.

By my thinking, this school would need to meet five requirements: 1) It would need to be complete if that were possible.  2) It would need to be as fast as possible in its teachings as our problems were growing rapidly. 3) It would need to be an Open School, as any kind of cult would be unworkable in a free society. 4) It would need to be practical in the sense that it could be added into anyone's ongoing situation.  5) It could not be any kind of religion; its knowledge would need to be presented across reason and demonstrable experience; in that way it would be open to anyone of any religion or of no religion.

A school embracing a full understanding of the totality of the human psyche!  A school meeting those five requirements: Complete, Fast, Open, Practical, and Not a Religion!  That seemed then, and seems to me today the optimal solution.  If such a  school could not enable the enormous increase we must have in our ability to work quickly and effectively together in the common interest, I couldn't see how anything else could.

But was such a school possible?  In early 1975, I returned to NYC and started seriously investigating what knowledge, tools, and organizations were already available.  I was tough in my questioning, and found nothing that could meet more than one or two of the requirements I was proposing.
  
But in the summer of 1977, I encountered some materials from what I must for now call just "The School."  For the first time, I saw a possibility that our historic need could actually be met.  After three years of taking courses, all of which produced in me the results that were described in advance; and after much careful checking, testing, and re-testing, I reached a conclusion.  I had actually found a school I was satisfied met the requirements I had defined as essential.

I thought I was now ready to present my findings.  But I wasn't.  Privately testing and validating were one thing.  Public presentation, especially under the internal pressures I experienced every time I would try, was something else entirely.  I realized I would need to do a lot of work on myself.  Without ever entirely dropping my careful scrutiny, my focus with the school's trainings shifted to my own clarification and strengthening.

And now, I am feeling strongly that it is time for me to present my findings to as wide an audience as possible..

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

The Five Requirements

A New School of the Human Psyche Must Meet Five Requirements if it is to Enable the Jump in Level 
Needed for Our Unity and Survival 

1. Complete
2. Fast
3. Open
4. Practical
5. Not a Religion


1. Complete 

If complete is possible, then we must have it. If the school is not complete, there would be areas of the psyche, our innate structure of mind, that we wouldn't know about. We wouldn't know how big those areas are, and we wouldn't know whether they contain positive things that can help us, or negative things we need to be aware of so we can control them.

*Further, since the psyche is an integral whole, only a complete knowledge of the psyche can enable complete accuracy in all the trainings. If a training designer has complete knowledge, then he has all the information he needs to create trainings that will produce positive and demonstrable results. But if a designer is working with incomplete knowledge or distorted information, the danger is real that his trainings will not only fail to produce positive results, but will actually create problems in a student's psyche that block further progress. A well-known metaphor for such faulty trainings is that of a lead key: it fits the lock, but when you try to turn it, it breaks off, jamming the lock, now preventing the insertion of a good key.

2. Fast

The trainings need to produce their results as quickly as possible, because we don't have much time left to make the necessary jump in consciousness.

3. Open

The door of this school needs to be open in both directions. Everyone must be able to participate or not as they see fit and make their own decisions about what trainings to take and when. Any kind of coercion would be unacceptable in a free society.

*Further, since freedom, self-responsibility, internal maturity, and enlightenment are inseparably linked, any kind of authoritarian control and manipulations that would take responsibility away from participants for what should be their own choices would be inherently contradictory to the purpose of the school.

4. Practical

If the trainings, for example, required all participants to quit their jobs and go off somewhere for years, that would be unworkable. The trainings need to be presented in a form people can blend into their ongoing lives, such as night and evening classes.

5. Not a Religion

The school's understandings and teachings need to be coherently explainable, and produce experienceable and reliable results: philosophy, science and reason, rather than faith and dogma. In this way, the school's knowledge will be open to anyone of any religion, or of no religion.


*With the exception of the two paragraphs marked with an asterisk, this presentation reflects my thinking on this subject as of April, 1975.  I have included this additional information to help the reader understand the importance of these requirements.  It came to my understanding later, primarily from working with The School.