Intellect vs. Intelligence, JC Pearce & Iain McGilchrist

Chapter 17 serializing of Growing Sustainable Children; and, Schools Worthy of Our Affection.
My best guess how, in the next 100 years, whole-child K-12 schooling can evolve.

Prior to puberty, kids are naturally disinterested in written definitions. This is why dictionaries sit mostly unused in K-6 classrooms and why dictionary work, matching definitions with words, is used to punish kids in elementary and middle grades.

The incompatibility of part-to-whole thinking with children before puberty, explains why even the most lovingly and lavishly illustrated dictionaries go unused in most K-5 classrooms. The forte of children prior to puberty is integrating sensing, feeling and thinking; not, left-brain-only analysis and criticalness.

On a Magical Child public lecture tape circa 1984, Joseph Chilton Pearce makes a valuable distinction between ‘intelligence’ and intellect.’ He says intelligence concerns itself with the well-being of the whole. For instance the body is intelligent. If cut, broken or diseased, it always tries to heal itself and return to a balance of the whole.

The intellect (left-brain hemisphere only) likes to define its own terms; then for any subject, form a hypothesis about how it could be different or better, “Is it possible, if I did X, Y would happen?” Pearce says this is why we have great intellects working on nuclear bombs, who give no thought to how nuclear arsenals might affect the planet or humanity as a whole. The intellect only cares about its terms, its understanding and the next little detail coming to its atention. The “whole” feels too overwhelming for it to consider effectively.

A famous story about Michelangelo describes how one day he was carving an angel out of a block of marble. An onlooker amazed at how Life could be wrung out of rock asked, “How do you do i t?”

The sculptor answered, “I see the angel in my mind’s eye. Then I take away everything from the stone which doesn’t look like the angel.” This is the discipline of thinking whole-to-part, allowing your inner pictures to be brighter than you outer sensory percepts, keeping the essence in mind while the external particulars are refined in line with your inner image.

In your classroom what happens? Do you use one, the other, or both? Do you train the child in skill one, skill two, skill three — to 12th grade, trusting at the end, each child will then, at that point, have an attractive, desirable wholesome glow?

Or do you endeavor to nurture the glow in the child in kindergarten, nurture her glow through each grade, each lesson plan, to nourish the child’s inner glow at each age, so at 12th grade, the seeds planted in kindergarten grow into a sturdy young adult with a good balance of inner glow and outer groundedness?

If your school wishes to assemble intelligence like a brick building; then, your faculty are like Humpty Dumpty’s King’s men, trying to put the whole person back together in each grade, at each crisis.

If your school intends to nurture and stabile the inner glow of children from kindergarten on up, it will be more work. Yet at the end of Grade Twelve you produce more than the usual number of lighthouses, young adults whose inner calm and clarity affect many people they interact with.

Iain McGilchrist Appreciation~analysis

Appreciation and analysis are the two opposed poles of the adult waking psyche. We need both working together as teammates. Why? Because what lies between them is Feeling and feelings are everyone’s most powerful tool ~ Ian McGilchrist paraphrase

Yes, it’s somewhat true, most women are stronger on Appreciation; most males are stronger on analysis.

In brain lateralization, individual, analysis and uniqueness comes from the left-brain (intellectual intelligence).

What comes from the right hemisphere? Appreciation for flow and evolution within the whole of things (heart intelligence).

What’s in the middle between these two? Feeling, feelings of all varieties, hopefully governed, modulated and regulated by a healthy conscious Self expressing, calm, compassion, courage and confidence.

Appreciation and analysis are so much more powerful and effective working together, as teammates, than either can be working alone, one-sidedly.

In this Iain agrees with an earlier author, Joseph Chilton Pearce (Magical Child, et al). Left-brain, the emissary, became over-charged. The weaker half to the older-wiser Appreciation, came to dominate academia and mainstream culture everywhere. To Learn More, see McGilchrist (2009) and his Youtube videos.

Habits as Greatest Hit Records in our psychic jukebox

Each category of invisible, sub- and unconscious memories and memorized behaviors, stand ready to be re-played, at a moment’s notice, like a jukebox full of 45 RPM records, your own, personal ‘Greatest Hits collection.’ Old conditioning is not more nor less than old habits, old memorized patterns, “old songs.”

We used to say, “He who doesn’t know his history is doomed to repeat it.” We can say more precisely, ‘Whoever neglects their Habit Body, has the same behaviors repeating tomorrow as repeated yesterday.’

In terms of growth, we can say personal growth is upgrading our habits on any of these levels. When does a habit change or upgrade, or be deleted? Our habits PACME remain in reserve, on-call, until conscious Self is ready, willing, able and wanting to change the habit.

One healthy exercise of our 5% of free choosing is to focus on a small habit we wish to change or upgrade. If we continue re-directing a small old habit in a new direction daily, in 32 days or fewer, we will have a new habit pattern.

Q: Do our accumulated habits carry over from prior lifetimes?

A: Thousands do. In each 3D embodiment, we accumulate thousands of new habits. New habits are replacing old habits so gradually over time, we don’t notice this much.

Q: How come we don’t notice this?

A: It’s more efficient for Conscious Waking Self to allow the Habit Body to create and archive habits automatically than for Conscious Waking self to do this wakefully.

New habits come in primarily from the top, new behaviors initiated by conscious waking Self. If Self allows or promotes a new behavior, a new habit is created.

When a new behavior is repeated often enuf, it is learned sub- and unconsciously. Now it will repeat in subsequent lifetimes, and so on.

For example, our habits of self-esteem — or lack thereof. These inhere in our gut brain and Conception Vessel.

Another large fraction of unconscious habits are stored in our head. These are habits of identification (self-concept), things we have identified with in the past.

The phenomena of live patients’ brain touched by electric probes and remembering is a real phenomena. It may NOT be primarily a physical phenomena. More likely it is first etheric then physical. What if electricity stimulates a location in our etheric head. Such stimulus opens the nested fractal storage forms.

Functionally, our habits on each level, physical, imaginal, emotional, mental and mythological (PACME) live in reserve, on-call, until situations, circumstances or conscious Self, calls them forward to express yet again.

Based on results, from the neck-up, we don’t know as much about our habit body as people like to imagine.