But this issue, that our common sense is informed by a cosmology, is Copernican, meaning individualistic, separated, reductionist, and by an epistemology that is unilateral. What I mean by unilateral is that in our present epistemology we learn about the world, but we don’t learn from the world. It’s one-directional. And in our programs at Newfield, there is something we do which I think is our highest achievement – we create spaces where a different epistemology is actually lived by the participants, with what I would say are extraordinary results. And that epistemology, the epistemology of a living universe and, therefore, a universe that can teach you, is what we are claiming as the new common sense.
Bill. Let me ask this, going back to your cosmology but also epistemology. Here was Rudolph Otto (1950), back in the early twentieth century, describing the numinous-an undifferentiated, dynamic system that is becoming rather than being. Carl Jung (1960) picks this up.
Julio. Steiner (1995) did also.
Bill. What was remarkable about Jung is that he said the numinous is such a scary experience that we build structures to protect us from this undifferentiated phenomenon. And what he was describing at that time was the emergence during the 1930s of Nazi Germany. We’ll desperately try to find structures to protect us from the numinous. We build these structures to protect us from the very acknowledgements that you’re talking about here. In your work, how do you keep from scaring the living daylights out of people so that they turn to some sort of Fascism or dogmatism to protect themselves?
Julio. That probably is a question that could take us the rest of the interview, and I love your question. You have no idea how much I appreciate it because the point is that the center of many of the decisions we make does not come from conceptual achievement as we’d like to think, but rather from the emotional realm. Fear, in that case, defines more our epistemology than any conceptual achievement, and that for us is another key claim. Every epistemological step, every cosmological claim, every ontological claim, lives in some emotional context. And that is what modernity has not been able to deal with.
We say that as long as we do not place the epistemological role of emotions at the center of our learning experiences, what we are seeing – the fear, uncertainty, doubt – is what we generate. For humankind, fear has been the core emotional place for a long, long time. Our claim is that if we displace fear, and, in terms of fear, let’s say now we have another emotional core- gratitude- it will shift completely what we know, how we live, how we take action. I need to say that twice. It will not shift just the emotion from what we think; it will shift what we know also.
Download Article 1K Club
