Starting with DREAMS

This was my first post on Medium. I’m editing it. Deleting a preamble about who I am and what I’ve done.

I want to talk about DREAMS. It’s an acronym of course:

• Dialogue: Open, respectful communication to foster understanding and connection, creating a space for meaningful exchanges across diverse perspectives.
• Reflection: Thoughtful consideration of experiences, ideas, and actions, promoting insight and deeper understanding of oneself and the surrounding world.
• Ethics: Guiding principles focused on integrity, empathy, and responsibility, ensuring decisions align with values that respect individuals and the environment.
• Awareness: Cultivating mindfulness and perceptiveness, encouraging attentiveness to both inner states and the external environment to respond consciously.
• Meditation: Practices for grounding and focus, enhancing mental clarity and emotional balance, fostering a sense of peace, presence and connection.
• Storytelling: Creating and sharing narratives to express ideas, emotions, imagination and identities, enriching community by connecting through shared and unique experiences.

STEAM and DREAMS

Following a discussion about STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) with university academics who wanted to reach out to local businesses and community organisations, I suggested that the entities, Netstorms Unlimited and Newham Mosaic, that I’ve been working on for a while, with their partners, could complement the STEAM agendas and focus of institutions through a focus on DREAMS: Dialogue, Reflection, Ethics, Awareness, Meditation and Storytelling.

While STEAM provides a technical and academic foundation that permits us to, well, ‘steam ahead’, DREAMS provide a necessary contextualising dimension to our engagement with technology. Together, they can provide a holistic perspective that embraces both technological advancement and human purpose. A space of BEING from which we can reflect on DOING.

Einstein is credited with saying “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” This thought is drawn out by the philosopher physicist, David Bohm:

“… Almost everything around us has been determined by thought — all the buildings, factories, farms, roads, schools, nations, science, technology, religion — whatever you care to mention. The whole ecological problem is due to thought, because we have thought that the world is there for us to exploit, that it is infinite, and so no matter what we did, the pollution would all get dissolved away.

When we see a “problem,” whether pollution, carbon dioxide, or whatever, we then say, “We have got to solve that problem.” But we are constantly producing that sort of problem — not just that particular problem, but that sort of problem — by the way we go on with our thought. If we keep on thinking that the world is there solely for our convenience, then we are going to exploit it in some other way, and we are going to make another problem somewhere. We may clear up the pollution, but may then create some other difficulty, such as economic chaos, if we don’t do it right.”

Source: David Bohm — ‘On Dialogue’

Explorations

I am proposing, and pursuing, a number of initiatives arising out of or incorporating the DREAMS perspective. One of these is the establishment of ‘dialogue’ as a transformational, liberating, discipline. Not necessarily as Bohm specifically prescribes, but in the same sense and with that same aspiration for the liberation of thought:

“ We must have an empty space where we are not obliged to do anything, nor to come to any conclusions, nor to say anything or not say anything. It’s open and free. It’s an empty space. The word “leisure” has that meaning of a kind of empty space. “Occupied” is the opposite of leisure; it’s full. So we have here a kind of empty space where anything may come in — and after we finish, we just empty it. We are not trying to accumulate any- thing.”

As an educator, I think about ‘explorations’ rather than ‘courses’ or ‘workshops’, about ‘learning communities’ rather than schools. I’m not suggesting these as alternatives but as complements, as DREAMS complements STEAM.

How can we work together to develop ‘explorations of learning’ that intentionally go beyond ‘expositions of learning’. How can we engage in a process of collaborative learning that is creative and transformational on both an individual and a societal level?

How can we create flexible, accessible ‘learning communities’ where participants can explore and exchange skills and knowledge and reflect on the responsible, effective and collaborative use of such skills and knowledge?

“And Gaia Herself”

We live in a time when we must, out of existential necessity, “think globally and act locally”, coming together to enlighten and empower ourselves, to protect habitats and the organisms that live within them.

Ethics and Awareness are central to the DREAMS agenda as well as in the acronym. Ethics is, at its core, concerned with interpersonal and environmental justice, with how we respect and justly share the planet’s resources with others including the totality of humanity, human individuals, future generations, other life forms and Gaia herself.

“More”

I will be writing more on Medium but I’m inviting you, if there’s anyone reading this, to do more than read. I’m inviting you to build something with me and to permit me to build with you those things that are part of our shared dreams. Perhaps together we can take our dreaming to another level.

You can also find me on my Netstorms website and on the Facebook Group ConsciousCompassionateCreativeConversation. If any of this resonates with you drop me a comment there or here. Thank you anyway for your attention.

© 2024