Toxic Psyche Toxic World
Something much deeper than thought and imagination is needed, a completely new approach.

We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.

This may seem strange because our culture prides itself on thought being its highest achievement. Almost everything we see in the world was created by thought, all the cities, the buildings, science, technology, and even most of what we call nature. Farmland was created by thought, so were factories, airplanes, nations, and governments. Thought is very powerful and has created many good things, but if we don't notice how it works, it can become very destructive, as with the present danger of nuclear war, pollution, and mass destruction of natural resources. Therefore, it is necessary to look at the structure of thought and knowledge, to see what the problems are and to explore the question of insight, which is required to bring knowledge to order.

David Bohm
Knowledge and Insight

It is being proposed that technology, artificial intelligence, more properly ‘machine learning’, can and will soon replace human teachers and physical classrooms, that digital systems will tease, challenge and program each student with interactive screen experiences that will lead to predefined, conditioned outcomes, far more efficiently, with greater precision and most importantly control, than sloppy humans could ever manage. When viewed from within the realm of existing knowledge, why would anyone object?

What is generally not considered are the limitations of existing knowledge, not only as data or content, with its implicit misinformation and propaganda, but more deeply, structurally, as a state of consciousness, and the simple fact that screen media filter out the most important qualities and capacities that define being human.

We are faced with a breakdown of general social order and human values that threatens stability throughout the world. Existing knowledge cannot meet this challenge. Something much deeper is needed, a completely new approach. I am suggesting that the very means by which we try to solve our problems is the problem. The source of our problems is within the structure of thought itself.

David Bohm, Knowledge and Insight, 1981

Education as we know it, even most alternative educational models, exist in, and are limited by, the field or the state of mind David calls ‘existing knowledge.’ A metaphor that describes ‘the known’ is a house of mirrors, reflecting and re-reflecting bits of past conditioning as mental images, infinitely within the mirrored room. While this appears to be novel and vast, all this activity remains encased in the limited realm of a relatively tiny room, one small corner in the near infinite potentials of human consciousness. We call navigating the relative realities created in this house of mirrors - education.