Leonardo & Da Vinci
The Inner Game of Meta-Learning
“There is a far more natural and effective process for learning and doing almost anything than most of us realize. It is similar to the process we all used, but soon forgot, as we learned to walk and talk. It uses the intuitive capabilities of the mind and both the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. This process doesn’t have to be learned; we already know it. All that is needed is to unlearn those habits which interfere with it and then to just let it happen. To uncover and explore the potential within the human body is the quest of the Inner Game…” – Timothy Gallwey, “The Inner Game of Tennis”
“We are giving the world back to man, and man back to himself. Man shall no longer be vile, but noble. We shall not destroy his mind in return for an immortal soul. Without a free, vigorous and creative mind, man is but an animal, and he will die like an animal, without any shred of a soul. We return to man his arts, his literature, his sciences, his independence to think and feel as an individual, not to be bound to dogma like a slave, to rot in his chains.” – Irving Stone, “The Agony and the Ecstasy”
This website is a tapestry and schema on the inner game of exponential-accelerated learning. It presents a methodology and framework for taking learning from a linear and local to an exponential and global level. It gathers together in one place, a diverse range of topics and disciplines of crucial importance and significance for a holistic learning experience. And it welds these disciplines into a coherent paradigm so that they can be deployed towards a deep, authentic reconstruction of the theory and practice of 21st century education.
Why develop all this and why put it in the form of a website? Primarily because it is an effective organising principle and medium to give form to the experiential framework that we have been developing for quite a number of years.
One of the strongest reasons for writing a book is simply to bring forth for oneself what lay hidden in the chambers of the mind often slumbering for want of an outlet for expression. Expression, therefore, precedes communication and can itself be a motive for writing. As the great psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in his beautiful book, “Flow,”
“If the only point to writing were to transmit information, then it would deserve to become obsolete. But the point of writing is to create information, not simply to pass it along…The kind of material we write in diaries and letters does not exist before it is written down. It is the slow, organically growing process of thought involved in writing that lets the ideas emerge in the first place.”
So this website is a work in progress that seeks precisely to let the ideas emerge and self-organise themselves.
And a website rather than a book has more of the flexibility and structure to do that. And also because these kinds of cultural musings have been found to be highly nurturing to earnest bright young minds in quest and for whom learning in the broad sense is a deep calling.
Therefore, this website is also a road map. It is a road map for the for the beginner or beginning student representing the Beginner’s Brain-Mind. This map is filled with meandering walks, conversations, dialogues, and guideposts. The Beginner’s Brain-Mind is one of the most beautiful and enthralling experiences the human mind is privileged to. The Beginner’s Brain-Mind is not a mere metaphor. As advances in neuroscience and especially in neuroplasticity demonstrate, the beginner’s brain-mind is neurologically primed and alive with immense possibilities due to the abundant availability of the ‘Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor,’ (BDNF). The firing of this hormone in the beginnings of learning makes learning instinctive, effortless, spontaneous and exhilarating. The roadmap that we outline in this website is designed to incorporate this fact.