It’s not a course, of course
Power To Stand: A Course In Greatness – many of you reading this have signed up to be beta-testers of this on-line course we’re creating here at VisionForce.com. But as you may have noticed by now, it’s not really a course, per se. It has no real beginning or ending. There is no way to complete it. There’s not even a way to tell where you are in the course!
The name, course, itself implies that it will take you from point A to point B. There are some problems we see in calling it a course. Here are of the problems we see,
a) many people take a course, learn some new ideas and then move on–as if they really understand the concepts presented. Courses you may have taken in school aim to teach you a set of ideas. The course is generally considered complete when the student has learned the concepts, meaning he/she either 1) knows the concepts or 2) understands the concepts (or both).
1) we generally say we “know” a concept as soon as we are able to recall it from memory. A friend starts telling you about somethiing you already read in a book, and you say, “Yeah, I know that.” He stops explaining and you stop questioning.
2) we generally say we “understand” a concept as soon as we have gained a little familiarity with it. A friend explains a new concept from a book, and we relate it to a similar concept we’ve already learned. “I understand,” you say. He stops explaining and you stop questioning
There is a grave error or blind spot in this approach, especially if our objective is to affect the student’s character, decision-making process or behavior. If we’re learning math, science or history, that’s one thing. If we’re learning concepts to change our behavior and habits in life, then maybe it would be helpful to have a new definition of what it is to “learn” something.
Just because you can recall a concept from memory and talk intelligently about it–or even use it in your everyday language–it does not mean you’ve integrated the concept into your mind in a way that affects your behavior. The Power To Stand “course” is not intended to just put forward some interesting concepts. No, the concepts themselves can change your life and change the world.
In a Positionary world, it’s enough to teach the “right” or “true” ideas and make the student follow and obey. In a world of visionaries that approach is quite obviously backwards. What we’re up to here at VisionForce is building a world of visionaries, and creating the tools that make that world possible.
Soon, we’ll share more about the new way we are thinking about our on-line “courses.”
Comments?
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This one strikes home for me.
I have been helping a friend with some personal issues and as I explain concepts and choices the replies are “I understand”.
Then I get to watch them make the same potentialy harmfull choices again as if they understood nothing.
THis helps me understand why.
The logical mind can repreat my words buth the inner mind has not utilized the practice.
Michael in a very real esoteric and exoteric sense, you are talking about a ‘lifestyle’ of learning and the application of that knowledge into every day life.
You are exactly right, there is a huge different between simple knowledge and integrating that knowledge into usable, productive behavior.
This is living life and therefore a lifestyle, definitely not a course. As you inferred, ‘it has no beginning and it has no end.’
If you are seeking the truth, using the term “Lifestyle” defines the processes that you are sharing with others while encouraging others to apply them into their life for transformative purpose.
In the Spirit of Service,
Rev. Jim Hillelson, Interfaith Minsiter, Spiritual Counselor, Independent Product Consultant
For the record, I have no web site. When you use the word “positionary”, it seems relative, externally-oriented, coming from a sense of relatedness. Is that how you mean it? If that’s so, then I wonder if it’s wise to use either/or language, as if that orientation has no value in the context of the Shift you speak of. Maybe in a major shift of thinking, the Visionary becomes manifest and the Positionary becomes more latent ….. like an Ego in “true” perspective ……. Just wondering here. Inclusivity would have us enlarge the circle into both/and …. wouldn’t it?
I want to believe
Hi Michael!
I just sent my combo of comments via Zaadz…You’ll see why in a minute! Thanks for all!
Standing with you,
Jeannie
the postition vs. stand one really stuck out to me, it’s something i’ve been thining vaguely about for the past couple of weeks, and it really helped make it clearer in my mind the origin and everything like that for people in our world today. coolness.
~peace~
Yes, Lets create a world of Visionaries. A world of
Visions and ” Visions in Action” that sets the stage for
Humanity to enter into being like it has never touched down before. Let our”Visions in Action” launch the necessarry
mind shifts to really cause a avalanche of old mentalities melt
into this mind shifts within all of us Visionaries that truely
causes not only ourselves to step into our own Awakneings on a daily basis, also to set reality apart from mentalityies to mind shift in such a way that enhances this already arrived Visionary Age orVisionary Era if you would call it. Werner Erhard used to call it :The Evolution of Evolution….I really believe this is what we are smack dab in the middle of…
This Evolutionalry Visionary Change is occuring within us…It is possibly where their is a mind shift that aligns the Spirit and the Mind is this “Alignment of Benevolience.” Actions of Benevolience to me, as I experience seems to awlays show up as these “Visions in Action.” How is it that people like Lance Armstrong, Clare’ Barton, Jack from Jack-in-the-box
set Miracles in Action. The secret to the Vision is in the Action one springs out of. WWelling up within the soul lies the Fountain of all Insight that crosses between the Spirit and the person that makes exactly whom we become. In this Individualism somewhere launched in the deep sea of within lies….Visionaries, Vision, & The Vision in Action…..
After engageing my thought listening to MIchael Skye in VF101
and following along this Visionary Path I began to encompus
being brought aboard this huge sailing ship. Once aboard,
I viewed the sails, the sun, the wind and alllowed my own Vision to emerge. I than proceded to the ships cabin and began to stuidy the archives of audio’s nestled in the ships libray….It was their I discovered this AWakening…I leaped for the Launching pad with my Visionary Path hit the deck to view the sails, the wind, and the sea again and…Once within myself I saw… my” Visions in Action….like a metaphor in Life
this path this Visionary Way has now become everything I live for….
Visions in Action….has now become ..
“The Navigational Course” in which I leave the meantalities of the past and take a MInd Shift that becomes you and me….
Welcome Aboard…All Visionaries Welcome and set your navigational course and set the sails for The Mind Shift…
signing on…swordofthespirit/anchorofthesoul/Cheryl
I agree that it’s not a course, yet I am aware that I was drawn to it because it was described as a course. ‘Free course’ spoke to my shadow and made me click the link as it wanted fed and felt like a ‘course’ would do that. Now I’m here I don’t care what it’s called as I can see the value and am moved by the distinctions. Sometimes we use the words the listener can understand before becoming more complex as we jointly progress.
Because I’m a Brazilian I have some difficulty in understanding the real meaning of the word Stand. In some contexts “stand” means “position”. Can you clarify this for me, from a english dictionary point of view? Is “taking a stand” the same as “taking a posture” or “taking a attitude”?
I registered in your web site because I felt it was something real and authentic at this very moment in the world : we can “vibrate” in the same frequence. We can have a vision, we can be visionners but we can´t act in our real world as we “vision” in our minds because there is a path we have to walk which means that we have to introduce little by little changes in our ways of living our life in order to permeate through our “actions” the world where we live. That means that we have to open spaces inside of ourselves to comprehend the real world where we are and only then we can pemeate that world with our vision. It´s a path… it´s a process… that means time… that means patience… that means to be in touch with people who are in the same path… who are having similar movements and changes inside of them and that want to make them real in the action in the reality we live. I think we are in the same quest of truth and essential life… Sharing our views among us is a possibility to open our minds and to give birth to a major movement based on the essential values. I can´t express what I think better because of the language limit I have. I´m Colombian and I speak Spanish and French and a little English but I just tell you that I have put here all what I think and what I feel about the possibilities we have to open wider spaces to understand and respect each other in the world. PEACE, Josie.
Yes, in agreement.
One hundred years back, One philosopher had commented that ” Philosophers, so far, have interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” and in my opinion, that is THE difference between Stand & Position.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. The internalisation of the message and the implementation of the message are the steps that are required to attain knowledge. Once one attains knowledge there is nothing more to do. So a course as you describe is comparable to the sower, the content is the seed. The sower spreads the seed and then it is up to the quality of the seed, soil readiness, quality, environmetal conditions. There is a time for everything and resdiness to receive and act on the message is up to each and every person.
Hi all,
I didn’t experience your course, yet, but for many years I live it in practice with the awareness that to advice and to be understood is different than to be followed in practice.
As a medical practitioner, a psychologist( Noetic type), a spiritual councellor, a mentor , in time, I had to use more emotions and empathy in “teaching” and to adapt my message to the consciousness level of the person in front of me.
The left hemisphere is not enough, but the tendency in using it is higher than for the right one.
I realised that in my profession, the change I made is a NATURAL born gift in myself: to perceive, to translate and to send the message according to the emotional status of the other one and only this way, even repeted, if needed, the positive results come into practice.
Without soul, nothing is. This one seems to be “closed” in many persons. Feelings and emotions are two different entities and the emotions block feelings , better logics and the effect is worse practical application.
Counsciousness+feelings are the main spiritual features of a HUMAN being and they make the difference in practice and in between us, in all fields and from all points of view.
The difference of HOW is made by them in the same WHAT we are all doing, apparently.
I have been teaching courses with titles like visioning society, alternative culture, social change. I talk alot about transformative visioning and spend most of the courses trying to have student participate in dialog about their conditioning, their inhibitions towards change. becoming social artist.
I really like the ideas in what you offer. I hope to borrow some of your approaches to add on to what I am doing. I think this approach is clear and would be fruitfull as core exercises in a course that attempts to have students become involve introspectively . I am interested in effective learning and not the learning of ‘facts’ per se. I want students to be engaged with the living.
Australian writer David Malouf suggests that if you develop an opinion on anything, you’ve decided to stop thinking about it. George Orwell was a writer who didn’t stop thinking. In Volume I of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This, Sonia Orwell says of her late husband in the Introduction:
‘For years he had been examining [ideas] in print in one context or another, arguing them out, as it were, with himself in public. It would be hard to find another journalist so prepared to contradict himself, who hammers away at an argument so as to turn it around from every angle before he felt it had been properly examined.’
There is a strange discussion out there that there is somehow a disconnect between taking a stand and holding a position. There is an even stranger idea that was posted here that when you develop an opinion on something you’ve decided to stop thinking about it. AND the way it is being talked about is taking the force right out of any vision!
Clarence Darrow once famously asked “do you think about the things you do think about?” Does anyone read a dictionary anymore? What would living without an opinion look like? What would taking a stand without a position look like? Do you think about the things you think about?
To suggest that having an opinion is to stop thinking is in itself at once an opinion (hello!) and terribly linear thinking – two dimensional, black and white…. How sadly a limiting perspective. One’s opinion is simply what one thinks is so NOW… While I go on thinking about it….. opinions change. But you have an opinion at any given moment when you make a statement about something that is your belief about anything! And to take a stand without position is to be bystander. Having no point of view is to “be a real no where man” (to quote the Beatles). Your position is your opinion for now about something – anything – for, against, about…. It is what you stand for and where you stand. If you are not clear on your position – even if you are still questioning it all the time – as a truly multidimensional thinker will – is to be unable to articulate what you stand for and therefore be less effective in taking a stand. How you stand is a position too – violent, nonviolent, passively aggressively….
Thinking gives vision power. So, please think about what you think about…… Standing for something with certainty – saying what you mean and meaning it (!) – is what make your stand effective – even if tomorrow you change you mind because, well, you thought about it and/or someone made a better argument. Never stop thinking but know your position – what you stand for – at all times! That is Vision Force.