DR. JOEL LAZARUS
transcend logocentrism and to embrace performance, art, music, meditation, and movement in learning spaces. Through my personal work on self with life coach Matthew Painton, I have been able to stop thinking for the first time in personal memory in order simply to feel – an experience that has reconnected me to an evolving universal consciousness and enabled me to recognise that consciousness as the true subject of history. I seek to manifest this consciousness through my own life and work. From this perspective comes a knowledge that precedes and transcends reason – a knowledge that, to quote the Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh, we ‘inter-are’. It follows that a dialogical approach to life and learning must be central to helping us discover and deepen our sense of this inter-being and our connection to each other and life. Centre for Transformational Learning and Culture The work I am involved in concerns the development of very different models for learning – models that I believe herald and can catalyse radical democratic transformations for human society. In the current crisis of everything, as our current hegemonic social systems crash hard against the psychological, spiritual, and physical limits of planetary life, I subscribe to Murray Bookchin’s thesis of social ecology. Only an end to all forms of hierarchy will end environmental abuse and exploitation. What is dismissed as naive utopianism is actually a grounded realism: only by democratising relations with ourselves, each other, and our natural world can we redeem ourselves from destruction. This brings us to questions of political strategy and of institutional development. We must ask ourselves whether the kind of models we need can actually be developed within current dominant institutions. I have seen first-hand the institutional intransigence and structural conservatism of the modern corporatisated and bureaucratised university, for example. Nonetheless, without downplaying the increasingly precarious nature of academic employment and the disciplinary function of university management, I feel that often the entrenched nature of our belief
22