Dear Friends,
A little over a decade ago, when I was living and working as a volunteer at a drug rehab center in Costa Rica, I decided that I had to branch out in my mission in order to fulfill my mission. I was working with young men, trying to help them to get off of drugs. However, life for young people growing up in the impoverished community where I was working was rather bleak. Most of the children's parents were unable to graduate high school and found employment only haphazardly, so with hardly any prospects, what did these children have to look forward to in life anyway? Most didn't have a great deal of hope in the future. This is why so many turned to drug dealing and drug abuse. Seeing this, I decided it was even more important to work with, strengthen, and inspire the younger kids than it was to work with the teenagers and young adults who were already steeped in drugs and crime.
This was a whole systems approach. In every area of life we are discovering our deep need for whole systems health in order to solve our problems. Without a whole systems approach, our efforts are often wasted in actives that feel far to much like whack-a-mole games or like running around in a caged rats running wheel. Examples of how we often win our battles and loose our wars in our fragmented approach to life are too numerous to list, but for starters let us acknowledge a few brief models of this basic problem. We now know that when we take too many antibiotics we kill off most the good bacteria in our body as well and create more health problems from trying to solve an earlier problem in this fashion. We also know now from much experience, that when we fire up a coal factory to power a city and drive around with millions of cars burning gas, we solve our electricity and transportation problems to a degree; but at the same time, we choke up the air with so much smog that we can barely breath in some of the world's cities today were we don't offset or limit that pollution sufficiently. Everything from the body-personal to the body-politic requires mindfulness of whole systems health in order to function well long term. Life is an entanglement of cooperative relationships, not a series of autonomous replaceable parts. Life is a synergistic system that creates a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts. This is the basic fact of life, and we must start working with it rather than trying to work around it.
Much work needs to be done to defragment the many systems we depend on in our lives. We need to bring these systems on every level into greater cooperative harmony. To these ends, my fellow board members and I are forming the non-profit organization "Whole Enterprises." Our motto "R.E.A.C.H." expresses how we will reach our goal. At Whole Enterprises we are "Rebuilding Educational, Agricultural, and Community Health," and in this order. Education can be vastly improved by teaching information in a deeply interconnected, associative way. We learn far to much information in a disconnected, topic by topic, fashion. As the joke goes, academics now often learn more and more about less and less in there path to specialization until they know everything about nothing. We must reweave together the information we teach both to adults and to children to make this information come alive with meaning. Next, in agriculture, we are beginning to realize that the predominance of monoculture crops and homogenous herds is like a cancer creating ever increasing destruction on our planet. It is deeply unnatural. We need to create highly productive and efficient agricultural ecosystems grounded in healthy heterogeneity to produce diverse products in unity that support each other in balance. Better agricultural models at places like Polyface Farms as well as work in Aquaponics (blending AquaCulture and Hydroponics) are beginning to show us as vastly better ways to feed the world and to save the environment all at the same time. Finally, human communities must be rebuilt and repaired on many levels. People have become far too fragmented communally with far reaching consequences. This will be our last mission to work on, so I won't limit the scope of this work by mentioning specifics here at this time.
Whole enterprises all begins though with the light of knowledge. As detailed thousands of years ago in Plato's Republic, the foundation of a healthy society is always in education. If we can break down our past limitations and vastly improve the way we educate people, we can solve every other problem in the world as well. That is why the timeless story and metaphor of Solomon feels so right. Solomon, we are told, was informed by God that he would be granted one wish. He asked God for wisdom, and God said, because you have asked for this instead of asking of long life, or great riches or vast territory, you will get this wish and everything else in life on top of it. It is for this reason that we say "knowing is half the battle," and indeed, it is also the first half. Sun Tzu and the Chinese Taoists teach us the same thing. Knowing that knowing comes first in the pursuit of success is universal knowledge throughout our many cultures. Knowledge is so important to us, that even in science we have named are selves the species that knows itself, homosapiens. And here in the scientific name that we have given ourselves, we are confronted with an even more profound truth. The first form of real knowledge must be reflexive. It must be meta-knowledge, knowing how to know or knowing what knowing is. Solomon, in the very beginning of the story, was already wise to ask for wisdom; he had meta-wisdom, the wisdom to value wisdom.
Our journey as an organization with Whole Enterprises will begin the same way. We will start our work by working on the way we learn and acquire knowledge. If the blind lead the blind, they will both fall into a pit. We must first become expert learners before we become expert teachers. Therefor, we will start our work in the realm of adult education first. Our first project will be to create a framework for adults to master new languages in a more profoundly integrated and ultimately easier and faster fashion. Then we will transition to using this technology to helping children to learn languages more easily and enjoyably as well. Beyond this, we move into launching a full K-8 curriculum for the children's project in Costa Rica and for charter schools in the U.S. and for any other forum that becomes a natural and productive outgrowth of our work. We invite your feedback, your dialogue, your interest, and your support.
May our journey together prosper!
Sky Thoth
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