An Experiment of teaching more efficiently
In the past two decades of introducing new and unheard-of concepts to larger audiences, I routinely encountered an initial blankness. The more uncommon the new concept was, the more profound was also this ‘blank’.
In parallel we see a pattern of confusion during the initial stages of a SkyWork procedure. A SkyWork is a personal group=work of witnessing together the interaction of people simulating the relations between other people, which we call ‘constellations’. In this work, the forces of nature gravitate towards solutions by themselves and respecting them will optimize a malformed ‘constellation’, no matter whether they occur in co-living of family members, in processes of nature itself, or in the co-operation of business partners.
In the early 2000’s I realized that the so-called Learning Curve is simply an example of this seemingly odd behavior of human consciousness. Soon thereafter, I realized that there exists an elegant explanation in the Ifá philosophy. It is also compatible with observations of the state of something in general, by some called the ‘Conditions of Existence’. It even shows up in statistical processes of mass behavior such as reflected in stock market numbers, known as the Elliot Wave.
In this short introduction you will find these observations welded together into just one proposal.
The experiment of the LearningWave consists of tests of how to stagger information clusters over time in order to optimize the process of learning new things, not just abstract data or words but also skills, like playing a musical instrument, for example.
Tests made within a scientific setting showed a surprising fact: students learning a piano piece were dramatically better evolving if the lessons were short and separated by a night of sleep instead of longer instruction sessions. They could assimilate new contents much more rapidly and effortless and achieved a better quality of performance than conventional teaching provided which invest a lot more time and effort.
The first time I had an idea in this direction was in the mid 80s. A friend of a co-worker had made a suicide attempt. Someone remarked that she should have read a book that was in vogue at the time, the ’10th Insight’ by James Redfield. This may have helped her to avoid her depression. My friend had never heard of the book. I had a copy and lent it to him. The next morning at work he commented that he had read the entire book in ‘one swoop’ the same night. I was suprised about that. I had read the book and reflected about each chapter before diving into the next one. I questioned him to some of the key contents of the book and it turned out he had not understood a single one of the various proposals which are brought forward in this book. Regardless of how useful the information in this book may be or or not, it struck me that its message never arrived at this particular reader.
This prompted me to think about how it could be done better. With the strong encouragement of my co-workers at the time, I started my career as a writer. I published one story every other day on my ‘Daily Log’, a brand-new idea which would become the precursor of the BLOG concept later on. Every story contained one philosphical concept observable in daily life. The ‘Logs of JD Flora’ were born, today available as book form: 144 stories in three books, to be read in 288 days, one story every other day.
Fast forward 25 years and I find myself experimenting again with the content of ‘delayed information delivery’. Starting with a regular ‘aula’, I will add info-bits througout the following days and we will see if the information arrives better than in the past.
The initial subject of the teaching is at the core of the problem of teaching itself, or of life in general: ‘Cause and Effect’ – a crash course in what we should have learned already as infants.
To have an idea of a cause manifesting as an effect we’ll look at the basic layout of the First Wheel of Ifá as described Dawson&Sandor in “Polar Dynamics 1”:
The effect being caused is called a ‘change’. This is not merely a creation of sorts but any change of existing pattern. For example, causing a movement to stop means changing the path of events: it is a change in our definition.
If the progression does not repeat itself after breaking down at ‘9’, it will leave the current Universe and it will enter a Universe below (descension) or above (ascension), via Odi and Iwori, and Ika (contraction, expansion, and birth). The boundary is the first Eshu realm beyond the human Universe, a space divider of type number 17 to enter the domain beyond at 18. To do that it must first pass 15 (Otura, affinity) and 16 (Irete, perfection, freedom), both key concepts in most (all?) religions and philosophies.
This (expanded) model of the First Wheel contains the complete mechanism of this Universe. It was known during the times of the Vedas, about 6000 years ago as it is said, but its symbolical representation (the svastika) has been usurped and is not useable anymore for the sake of political correctness. Its anti-clockwise progression is destructive.
We could call it the logical pulse of the Universe we are living in. On a cosmic Oscilloscope we would see something like that:
If you know electronics, you will recognize this signal as the one created when a power source gets switched on and off.
Completely independent of our musings here, you may be aware that this behavior violates the law of an effect always following a cause: somehow the electrons ‘know’ of the switch to become enacted BEFORE the switch is actually done, a rarely talked about enigma in our modern technology which can be observed by anyone equipped with a basic oscilloscope and a fast-switching circuit, such as a simple TTL chip.
In any case, we shall use it in the challenge of teaching new concepts in its molding as a “LearningWave”.