CHAPTER 1

Learning is Discovering that Something is Possible

... and you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand.Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself.

—J. Krishnamurti

To be educated is not so much to be taught as it is to be awakened to who you really are.This chapter invites you to open to the journey.

From My Heart to Yours

The ancient Greeks believed the location of the human mind was in the heart. Theyreasoned that since the mind was essential, it must inhabit the most vital of all organs.Wounds to the head were not always deadly, but wounds to the heart were. Theyassumed, therefore, the mind must live in the heart.

If my heart could do my thinking would my brain begin to feel?

—Van Morrison

A friend of mine who is Chinese points to the center of her chest whenever she says, "mymind." She tells me this gesture is common in her culture.

Although we know new blood is constantly flowing through the chambers of our heart,renewing our entire system, once we are adults we assume the capacities of our mindsare fixed. We close ourselves off to a myriad of possibilities: "I'm just not an articulateperson." Or, "I'm a left-brained kind of a guy." But what if we could open our minds to aninflow of new ideas about what we are capable of doing, knowing and being?

I want to bring you into a comfortable kinship with the open mind of your heart. Hopefully,as a result of reading this book, you will begin to trust yourself and to know the world innew ways. I'd like to think that your curiosity will rekindle into an alive, available resource,and that the barriers you have created—the hard, solid crust that keeps the rest of theworld out and you isolated within—will soften into boundaries that define your own spaceand allow a fundamental intimacy with others.

People Learn in Different Ways

This book invites you to learn how you learn. It will not tell you how smart you are, but itwill help you discover HOW you are smart. It is written as an operator's manual for adultswho are attempting to grow up as they grow older, for adolescents who are about to gettheir license to drive their minds on their own, for teachers, care givers, and lovers. It iswritten for anyone who defines himself or herself as a learner, or who has difficulties withrecall, organization, or absorption of information and experience. It is for those of us whokeep getting stuck in communication gaps when what we are attempting to create is ameans of getting through, a meeting place where minds can touch. It is for eagles who aretired of living in cages as if they were chickens.

What is included here is what was excluded from school. The immense educationalsystem in this country teaches people how to do quantum physics (well, some peopleanyway!), speak German, analyze the syntax of a sentence, and use fancy laboratoryequipment and expensive computers, but it never teaches them how to operate their ownminds.

The self is learned. What is learned can be taught

—Virginia Satir;Peoplemaking

We live in an age when we are being forced to deal with rapidly increasing rates of socialand political change. The organization of information and the development of humanresources is our new frontier. Of necessity, we must learn to facilitate the process oflearning. Rather than merely accumulating new theories and more information that will beoutmoded in a few years, our focus must shift to learning how to learn.

You will not find ultimate answers or solutions here, but I hope this book will lead you to asense of the divine, a respect for the mystery that is involved in being human. It will not tellyou where to go or what to do, but it will help you find the path with a gait that is your own.It will not make your life easy, but it will help you understand how you can think, learn, andcommunicate more effectively.

My intent is to create conditions where you can make discoveries about yourself andothers, but there will be no real surprises. The principles are new perspectives of oldlandscapes, a useful vocabulary which enables you to talk about and grasp what talentedcommunicators, teachers, and therapists have known intuitively all along—that peoplelearn in different ways.

This book will help you understand which of six particular patterns of natural intelligenceyour mind uses to concentrate, create, and mentate, and to understand its traits, gifts, andidiosyncrasies. This is not a two-dimensional mental technology that you do to otherpeople. It is a guide for communicating with others at work and home as they are, ratherthan as you think they should be.

This is not the only model for studying mental syntax, the order in which people think.There are systems that utilize similar processes to some you will find in this book, but theirmore technical emphasis on categorizing the workings of the human mind takes them in avery different direction.

The coming to consciousness is not a new thing; it is a long and painful return to thatwhich has always been.

—Helen Luke,The Inner Story

I wrote The Open Mind so you could learn to trust your own mind with all of its wilddetours and unrelenting obsessions. I designed it so you could rediscover the naturalimpulses lost from your childhood. I conceived it to help you create confidence in your owncapacities.

My hope is that this book will provide you with a frame over which you can stretch thecanvas of your own experience. It is meant to give direction and shape, to bring to light theart that lies dormant in your life.

As a heart pumps, it opens and closes. As I've put out these ideas over the last thirtyyears, there has been a tremendous inflow of feedback from others about how to teachand use them effectively. Consequently, this system itself has continually beentransformed.

In rereading the first book I wrote about this approach, The Art of the Possible, I realized itdid not come near to expressing the collective current thinking about how people's mindswork, so I decided to write a new version. What you now hold in your hands is a paperreplica of what has been shared with me, a collection of flexing mirrors held up to the light.

The Spring from Which This Book Flows

This approach to understanding how your mind works is based upon a matrix woventogether from the wisdom of my grandmother and the most important practitioner andteacher of medical hypnotherapy in this century, Milton Erickson, M.D., as well asresearch in clinical and educational psychology, perceptual modalities, learning theory,hypnotherapy, expressive arts therapy, and the martial arts. Strands have been addedfrom 30 years of teaching in classrooms, and a private practice in psychotherapy, as wellas hundreds of consultations with a broad spectrum of people from business, health care,education and social service organizations.

My grandmother taught me that it is possible to see, to hear, to feel through your heart,and that if you really want to understand someone, it's necessary to open your mind.Milton cherished the uniqueness of every human being he came in contact with. Throughhim, I developed a passionate curiosity about finding each person's unique naturalintelligence, and what condition would most help him or her manifest it in the world.

I do not much believe in education. Each man ought to be his own model. Howeverfrightful that may be.

—Albert Einstein

I have been inspired by the excellent and extensive research that Marie Carbo andKenneth Dunn and others at St. John's University in New York have done into the effectsof teaching children to read using their "unique learning style," a combination ofperceptual, environmental, and organizational preference.

When I was in graduate school, training in psychological and educational assessment, myprofessors taught me that we all think in the same way and that some of us have moreintelligence than others. But when I was student teaching in the "inner city," the childrenhelped me discover that we are all naturally "abled" in different ways. The ones I wasdrawn to working with were the "odd ones," those that everyone else had given up on.They were a motley assortment of "unteachables," classified as unsocialized, retarded,learning disabled, autistic, emotionally disturbed, dyslexic, hyperactive—the wounded andbroken ones. I was supposed to figure out what was wrong with them, put the diagnosis inblack ink on a white form, and keep them out of everyone's way.

I spent three weeks trying to be a "teacher." Control was theirs and my jaws resembled apair of rusty vise grips. I was thinking seriously of other careers—driving a fork lift truck inUtah, for example. Since there was no way to be Right with these kids, I was terrified. So Idid the only thing I knew how to do when terrified: I read a book. Fortunately I stumbledupon one entitled Beyond Culture, by an anthropologist named Edward Hall. Although itwas neither psychology nor education, the kids I was working with were certainly beyondany culture I had ever known in my sheltered suburban upbringing! While riding thesubway from 125th Street to Grand Central Station, the following words by Hall illuminatedmy desperation:

"All of my experience and research in how people perceive, life experiences teachingvarious professional groups, clients, students, who image differently in their brains,created sufficient impact to jolt me out of the restraining perceptual and conceptual bondsof my own culture. I began to ask all students how they remembered things and how theirsenses were involved in the process of thinking. Most of them, of course, hadn't theremotest notion of how they thought or remembered and had to go through a long processof self-observation. When they finally did begin to discover something about how theirsenses were ordered, they invariably jumped to the conclusion that everyone else was justlike them, a notion they tenaciously held ... This common projection of one's sensorycapacities or lack of them may explain why teachers are frequently impatient with orunsympathetic to students who do not have the same sensory capacities as the teacher."

People are different from one another. A leader must be aware of these differences, anduse them for optimization of everybody's abilities and inclinations. Management ofindustry, education, and government operate today under the supposition that all peopleare alike. People learn in different ways, and at different speeds. Some learn best byreading. Some by listening. Some by watching pictures, still or moving. Some by watchingsomeone do it ... One is born with a natural inclination to learn and be innovative.

—W. Edwards Deming. Ph.D.,"A System Of Profound Knowledge"

Not only had I found the information that had been missing in every learning theory I hadbeen taught, but Mr. Hall's words also pointed a finger right to the children. Ask the kids!Why didn't anyone ask the kids how they learned?

I couldn't wait to get to school the next morning, too excited even to do the New YorkTimes crossword puzzle on the subway. I burst into the classroom, and before the kidswere out of the coat room, I was besieging them with questions about how they learned.Needless to say, my approach was a bit overwhelming. Samantha, who was all pigtailsand wide brown eyes, looked at me quizzically and exclaimed, "I don't understand whatyou are askin' me, Miz Dawna, but you sure got a burnin' in you!"

I humbly spent the rest of the day being dumb, something I had not given myselfpermission to do since I was five. It became immediately obvious that there were manythings these children had already learned how to accomplish. They may have been lost ina world of paper, but there were worlds in which their various intelligences could be found.The standardized IQ tests told me how unsmart they were, but when I was willing to get"dumb," it became obvious how they were smart.

Samantha was right. Something in me was burning, and has continued to for the last 30years. It takes a lot of hard work to make a young child not learn. A lot of control, a lot ofde-skilling. When you were young, you learned the incredibly complicated tasks of walkingand talking, naturally. You did not have to be motivated or formally instructed. Each of uslearns in his or her own time, in his or her own way. An oak already exists inside an acorn;the possibilities of our lives already live within us, waiting for enough warmth and light tounfurl.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modem methods of instruction have notentirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

—Albert Einstein

It would not be at all accurate to say I discovered the approach that is outlined in thisbook. Children taught it to me. The Odd Ones. The kids who couldn't, wouldn't, andshouldn't fit into neat little standardized diagnostic compartments. The kids I taught in theslums of Harlem, the migrant labor camp in Coconut Creek, the suburbs of Larchmont,and the back woods of Orfordville. The kids who helped me know that it was myresponsibility to uncover the specific approach for each of them. It was my responsibility tofind the needed resource, the ability, the health already there and to foster it. I name themas my teachers, the Joes and Jeromes, the Janes and Samanthas, for they truly havebeen the muses of this work.

My dream is that one day this book will be passed into some of their hands, whether theyare in prison now in Florida, driving a freight train through the corn fields of Iowa, orperforming appendectomies in an emergency room in Nairobi. I delight in imagining themreading these words and standing a little straighter as they discover how deep afingerprint they have left in the wet clay of my mind.

Using This Book

The Open Mind teaches you to use the instrument of your mind to learn more easily andcommunicate more effectively. There is conceptual information presented for logical,organized understanding; there are narrative descriptions of people applying thisapproach to their lives, as well as practices for experiential, empirical understanding; thereare stories, dreams, and anecdotes to support intuitive comprehension.

When I am teaching, I find myself continually slipping into stories. To know throughmetaphor is to uncover the design, the pattern of possibilities, the whole of a thing. Toknow through a story is to know through your heart.

In acquiring any new global skill, the initial learning is often a struggle, first with eachcomponent skill, then with the smooth integration of components ... Later, one almostforgets about having learned to read, learned to drive, learned to draw.

—Betty Edwards,Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

Many of the stories in this book are anecdotes drawn from the lives of people who havestudied with me. They are actual, honest- to-goodness people whose stories, statements,and questions are included because their individual journeys seem to transcendpersonality, and speak in a common voice. Unless labeled so, they are not composites,reasonable facsimiles, or fabrications of my fertile imagination. However, I've disguisednames and certain identifying details to protect their privacy, and sometimes presentedcondensed versions for clarity's sake.

Chapter 2 helps you to identify and understand the functioning of the three different statusof consciousness—beta, alpha and theta—that your mind uses to think. Chapter 3describes the symbolic languages your mind uses to process information in order toorganize, sort, and make new patterns from your experience.

Chapter 4 gives you an overview of the thinking patterns as well as some tools to help youdiscover your own. Chapters 6–10 give you an in-depth understanding of each personalthinking pattern, as well as guidelines for getting along with people whose minds use thisform of natural intelligence.

Chapter 11 is concerned with using this skill to meet your personal needs and get unstuckin your thinking, while Chapter 12 concentrates on the application of this skill to relatingand communicating compassionately with others. Chapter 13 is an open inquiry,containing the most frequently asked questions about this approach. And Chapter 14discusses the ethics of using this information and its larger implications.

After making such a fuss over the fact that all minds learn differently, it would be anabsurd contradiction to share this model with you in only one way. Therefore, theinformation of this book is presented using several different processes.

One will ask you to learn through your body, kinesthetically; another will show theinformation visually, using charts, diagrams, and photographs; still another will present theinformation through verbal descriptions, dialogues, and interviews. In addition, there arestories and anecdotes to illustrate the specific ways this information can be used in dailysituations.