The Direction of Intention

Split Gate photo by rishwei

I’m preparing to tell the story of Sisyphus to educators in Hastings, Nebraska. Patti and I are helping them shift their perspective so they might consider some alternatives to the madness in which they find themselves. They, like educators everywhere, are desperate. They find themselves locked in a system that has less and less to do with learning and teaching. It’s no wonder. Our system of education was established in another time for reasons that no longer apply to the world in which we live. What they (we) are experiencing, a hyper emphasis on measurement and assessment is a fairly predictable pattern of behavior: it happens when the world changes, when the demands of a new circumstance collide with an antiquated system. Overemphasizing assessment and measurement is the strategy leaders take when they don’t know what to do; it is an attempt to fix something that isn’t broken (it’s antiquated); it is action for the sake of action in the hopes that something different will happen.  Rolling a rock up a hill in perpetuity would seem to be an apt metaphor.

It’s more apt then you might imagine because the metaphor, when you know the whole story, isn’t about punishment or meaningless action. Like all great stories, Sisyphus is a story about transformation of consciousness. The image of the man rolling the rock up the hill forever is only a horror story if the symbol is read literally (and taken out of context). Sadly, taking a symbol out of context and reading it as a literal “happening” is a symptom of a community that’s lost it’s guide star. Story is the glue that binds and the metaphors within the story provide the commons, the place where all the varying points-of-view can meet. By reducing metaphors to the literal the community closes the door on its capacity to unite and transform. Everything becomes political and economic. As Yeats wrote in The Second Coming, “The center cannot hold.”  The essentials are lost so we test.

In Bali you often pass through a “split gate” when you enter home compounds or temples. They are beautiful, ever present symbols. Two opposing towers that look like a single structure cleaved in two to form a gate. The halves are symbolic of the polarities, an architectural yin and yang reminding the Balinese of the polarities of our existence and the importance of balance in all things. Budi took me to a split gate and said, “The half on the left is the masculine, the half on the right is the feminine.” He asked me to pass through the gate and to turn and look back at him. Once I was on the other side he asked, “Now which is left and which is right? What was left in now right, what was right is now left!” He threw his head back and laughed (Budi has a great mischievous laugh, a broad Cheshire grin), saying, “What is important is that you remember that you must pass between!” He was teaching me about balance, about the middle way. This symbol for balance, this split gate is the metaphor for a life transformed, for how it is to be done.

The split gate and Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill are the same symbol. If you knew the whole story and were capable of reading your metaphors as metaphors you’d know that the rock was symbolic of the masculine aspect and the hill is symbolic of the feminine. Sisyphus task is to bring into play the masculine rock with the feminine hill. His movement is between the two, which is to say that he lives and loves and labors in the field of dualities, just like me and just like you. The purpose of living is not in the achievement of the task but in the quality of the engagement, the dance between the poles.

When the masculine (objective, quantitative) hijacks the feminine (subjective, qualitative), balance is lost, the center cannot hold, the essential is lost. Which loops us back to education. No amount of measurement, testing, or forced performance standards will bring about the transformation of the system. They remove the teacher from the equation, reduce the child to something standardized and stifle the single, essential aspect necessary for genuine learning: a quality relationship engaged in genuine inquiry. Measurements, in this case, are actions meant to knuckle-down and control, to fix “what is.” That’s why the educators in Hastings are desperate. They know what is needed – especially now – is the kind of wild imaginings that are only possible when we step into unknown territory and create new structures that support learning (systems based on the latest brain science and learning theory – not the 19^th century system that we still champion today), something relevant in today’s world.

Sisyphus is one of many stories that can show us the way.

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