Good morning Homo resurrectus

One of my favorite cartoons is an evolution lineup from the caveman to the homo modernicus with the last turned back facing sapiens, erectus and habilis, saying, “Let’s go back, we f***ed up!” A rear-view mirror perspective.

The fact is, there is no turning back, in spite of what some want us to do to return to an imagined “golden age,” or to attempt to redo it all over again, by gum! Thus journeys are often riddled with guilt and despair given the impossibility of both enterprises. That, or sit around nursing wounds and caressing scars, waiting for a Messiah to deliver us from our situation. In spite of having since democratized the messianic role, converting it to a facilitative function rather than an up-front gung-ho Kristo Rai general, we still have a slew of pretenders.

Perhaps, it is time to banish the messianic role from human consciousness.

Much inventory of human consciousness, particularly its role in education, points not on revelatory external intrusion as it is on the richness of internal awareness. But we do not pay much attention to our internal states of being. On the other hand, the externalities of the lingering messianic role has been co-opted as autocratic teachers at the front of the podium, high priced experts in corporate boardrooms, stuffy mega-church haranguers, and huffy politicians on the public budget.

Committed pedagogues continue to comb the depths of uncharted mystery to elucidate on consciousness. One format I follow is the O-R-I-D mindscape, an Objective-Reflective-Interpretive-Decisional perspective used by the Institute of Cultural Affairs. Borrowed from the museum observation that classical (sensual), impressionistic (emotive), abstract (cognitive), and social (active) arts are varied layers of consciousness, the method is used extensively in shifting paradigms in local communities around the world.

The human factor is our ability to relate, a true occurrence in every clime and culture, experiencing objective reality and creating images of sense objects from it, reflecting on the data and responding with gradations of preferences, interpreting objective data and reflected feelings into social symbols of words and numbers in dialogue with other symbol-making creatures, and finally deciding on a course of action in consensus with those who decide to share similar directions, if not ethics.

Our use began in an inner-city sociological construct, the Fifth City on the Westside of Chicago, to a limestone rock outcropping in Sudtonggan, Mactan, Philippines, a metis village in Vogar, Manitoba, Canada, on the shades of a Raj in Maliwada, Maharashtra, India, the Hakka nouveau riche of Sai Kung, Kowloon, Hong Kong, a Blue Mountain Jamaican parish of Woburn Lawn, a vino tinto drenched Basque settlement of Sol de Septiembre in Chile, a cocoa forest barrio Caño Negro in Venezuela, interrupted by a malaria-hepatitis bout by tropical Lagos lagoon, Nigeria, then continuing with coral reef folks of Majuro in the Marshall Islands, and finally, the rambutan gathering sarongs of Sungai Lui, Malaysia in ’82, to name a few places.

We used the same methodology to orient U.S. Peace Corp volunteers, business seminars and strategies in the Philippines and Washington, D.C., in the workforce development premises of WorkHawaii, and most recently, in PSS-SVES classroom pedagogy. We now use it as an overlay to map the English language while we stretch the Zhongguoren familiarity with oral forms in Dong Bei, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.

A school professor confesses that he can read and write, passes English standard tests after 20 years of study, but could not speak English, a deficiency in hearing skill and speaking practice. We edited his scholarly article for journal publication and it was obvious that he mastered the translated technical English terms of his discipline but is challenged to communicate tense and sense, let alone, meaning.

A mentor, Gene Marshall of the Institute of Realistic Living, a guru of no insignificant reputation, in a work-in-progress, tackles human awareness iteration with five layers of consciousness: (1) cell-based, (2) image-using, (3) emotion-based, (4) symbol-using, and (5) wonder-based.

We assume that each of us move from the sense-filled cell-based consciousness of existence itself, proceed to accommodate the animal kingdom as capable image-users, acknowledge social psychology of emotion-based personae, activate symbol-making Science, Arts and Humanities, and finally, create the wonder metaphors of covenanted communities.

To put flesh to what we constantly refer to as the new human, its transcendent agility, immanent inescapability, and transparent ability, we temporarily coined for the season Homo resurrectus (we lay it to rest as quickly as we gave it birth), but s/he is nothing more than Homo sapiens owning up to human consciousness, acknowledging its limits but firing up the dragon fireworks of its possibilities!

Wonder what would happen if Capital Hill expands its layers of consciousness a bit!

We continue to write our reflections toward defining the new human, demonstrating what we mean through our own historical grounding in the humanum novo of the new world.

Care to join us?