Orientation Handbook

A Crowd-authoring Project on theScholarship of Educational Technology

Academia has long experienced a ‘core–periphery’dichotomy (to borrow terminology from Wallerstein,1974), with a one-way influence from the core to theperiphery. The core refers to the well-respected nativeEnglish-speaking departments, faculties and/or jour-nals, whereas the periphery refers to researchers outsideof the native English-speaking domain

You drink coffee all day long, and you smoke cigarettes right through your conversations. That is movement. It is activity—internal and external. You do not interpret it as something which could interfere with your being Centered and Listening. And yet those are activities which are not apart of the communication. You scratch your head, you shift your position for comfort, and not as part of the communication. I bring this up because you assume that the mundane movements which are not directly associated with the expression of Knowing are somehow not susceptible to Centeredness. You are comfortable when a conversation or a Workshop is occurring, because it conveys what I will call a process of education, a very specific, focused expression of love. But, you are not able to identify Centeredness with relating to Chris, or to eating dinner, or to being with friends. You do not have much basis—outside of the scope of a Workshop or of a private conversation—for being in the world from your Center. And so I point out to you that being Centered has not inhibited you from scratching your head or removing a piece of food from your tongue just a moment ago which had become lodged in your tooth, nor of drinking coffee, nor, in the case of Christopher’s coming in the room, relating to him without “teaching.”

It is absolutely correct that you are going to have to learn to be out from your Center with your eyes open. At this point, I wish to make it very clear that in spite of your experience with the bio-feedback equipment—which seemed to make it obvious that visual experience is of such a stimulating nature that it interferes with one’s being able to come out from a theta or delta frequency—the key is where you are placing your attention. The key is whether you are placing your attention at the threshold of Centeredness or at what I will call the “threshold of stimulation.” Mind you, that “threshold of stimulation” only seems to have meaning relative to a body which, in itself, has the capacity to be sensitive, the capacity to be aware—something which the body does not have, simply because it is the visibility and the tangibility of the expression of Meaning which is being experienced as a result of Knowing.

Now, you have just had “an interruption” by Chris, but you chose not to interpret it as something at odds with our conversation. You found that you were able to be present for him from your Center with relative ease, and as a result, the “interference” was very brief. If, however, it had been treated as an interference, and if you had chosen to shift your attention from Centered attentiveness to external attentiveness, with a certain degree of botheration associated with it, the event would have been prolonged and Christopher would not have felt you had been present with and for him. To be from your Center inevitably causes experience to be simple and clear and full.