jack's autobiograph

7/31/2019 Jack's Autobiograph

1/5

1

Door God

Great Wall

A wall protects but also imprisons. A door permits escape but also admits the unwanted. A wall alone is a door fearing its freedom toopen. A door alone is a wall fearing itsresponsibility to protect. Only together canthey make being human a home rather than a prison or fortress. Then the question

grows: What are humans for?Exploring the YOUniverse and University of YOU

Each human being is a university containing a universe (bothwords come from the Latin words, uni one and versus turn and together mean, literally, turned into one). Iapproach each person as a YOUniversity built of walls anddoors two human creations that expand with the universeto express the Great Question for humans. If enabled, we canspend all of lives richly exploring and learning about what

we are for which I would claim is also who we are.

Wall of All. Door for More. The GreatWall as ordered into place by China tokeep out Foreigners; and the Great Dooras desperately knocked upon by many andstepped through by fewer. It seems to me

we all go back and forth between being more or less doors or wallsin our orientation to life. I call walls minds because they separate,divide, conquer, differentiate and remain stable. I define doors ashearts because they connect, join, co-operate, merge, and change. Ithink we all face the Great Wall of Knowledge-Responsibility and

we all seek the Great Door of Sympathy-Freedom. I peer into theflow of faces of those I pass by, meet,or love, and I look for which parts of Being they are standing before to

become. I attempt to discover what kind of dwelling each person is making out of her doors and walls in whatever proportion she may express and how she is living withinand out of it.

Education Consultant

Jack at the Great Wall


2/5

2

To tiptoe to a more playful metaphor, this autobiographical jigsaw puzzle I haveassembled here I am aware has many missing pieces. The person I am trying to puttogether and recognize, I have known all my life but Im still learning about him.And, it seems, the more I understand the less I know! American, Canadian, Australian

three citizenships, three lifetimes in each countryand now the fourth lifetime in

the fourth country, China, for the past five years. Always for me, home is where mymind and heart areand for now, that is the Middle Kingdom. If you are ready, I willtake you on a quick, bumpy, many-turns tour through my University of YOU.

Currently, among other roles, I play a university teacher, a consultant for personal andorganizational development, a researcher of the many things that interest me (andmost things do!), and a philosopher and a poet (see my poem here). I make my living

by teaching and learning (teaching is learning what, when, where, why, who and howyou know and dont know) you can say I learn a living as well as earn itI alsoyearn one when my poet displaces my philosopher. One of the reasons I came to teachand learn in China was my long-term interest in the Confucian philosophers, Kongzi,Mengzi, and Xunzi. From modern times, Lin Yutangs The Importance of Living was,and will always remain, a good friend to me. I often use his words: A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not knowwhere he came from. Also, I have always felt at home within the history of your

poets, such as Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei and Li Shangyin.

So I lean my right ear to the Self-Knowledge of Socrates and my left ear to the Self-Cultivation of Kongzi to glean a little of their wisdom of ignorance understood or withstood. I dont hear from them any easy answers to the Human Condition andtheir questions are even harder. One of my favorite modern classical music pieces is

by the American composer, Charles Ives. Its titled: The Unanswered Question. WhenI listen to it I think about the The Unquestioned Answer of which too many abound.I tend to turn away from anyone who claims to know the answers to life. Whether they want to charge you money or obedience or both I doubt their claims. Alas, toomany of us (and when younger this has included me), want to be Saved (with aCapital S!). And the Saviors prey on and pray for, this. How I, or anyone else, canclaim to teach when I know so little and help when I am at times so helpless, is one of the more interesting foibles of human nature that I am heir to. Still, I hope I mighthave some understandings to share of what being human means. And I hope enoughstudents and clients think my teaching and consulting activities make their lives moremeaningful and are willing to exchange their RMBs to make my life affordable!

Whether I consult for personal or organizational development I attempt to make thoseI work with more effective human beings. Thus, I try to enhance the followingessential human skills: Working Productively & Cooperatively, Learning Effectively,Playing Freely, Communicating Clearly, Acting Responsibly, Valuing Self Positively,and Thinking Critically & Creatively. When I teach or consult what I am really doingis asking the Great Question which is really a Great Quest, and that is: What arehumans for? I explore and evaluate this question and quest and attempt to obtaintentative answers through considering four virtues: freedom, responsibility, sympathyand knowledge all of which sum to the fifth foundational virtue of understandingthe necessity for love and work/play.


3/5

3

Some of the means I use to coax a few truer answers out of individuals are: variousPersonality Models (Temperament, Type and Traits); the study of human physiology(Left & Right Brains, Triune Brain, Autonomic Nervous System) applied to

biofeedback and brain change technology; cross-culture studies especially AsianEast and European West cognitive differences; male-female differences understood

through evolutionary psychology; meta-learning or learning about learning thatincludes Learning Styles and Brain-Based, Self-Directed, Action Learning; and thestudy of history from classical liberal and Austrian economics perspectives.

Now I invite you to further wander into this Jack-of-All-Trades (Master of, andmastered by, none!) and many different meanings. Here is a sampling of some of thetrades Jack made with the world to somewhat answer his Great Question.

In love and pulled to completion with the opposite sex since 7 yearsold, Newspaper delivery boy at 8, Regular summer gardener for Masonic Old Folks home at 9, Altar boy at 10 and would be preacher who gave communion to friends in his attic bedroom, Teen car mechanic and builder of hot rods, Long distance runner of heroic

loneliness, High scoring guard on high school basketball team, Starter of high schoolcar and gun clubs, Farm hand and back-hoe operator and dump truck driver, Collegefreshman to become automobile engineer executive but instead graduated into afraternity party boy and fell for a 60s drop out, Shoe salesman and assistant manager for JCPenney that almost domesticated him, TV Route 66 follower who changed his name to Todd and wore dark glasses while drivingacross and up and down America too many times, Surfer seeking

perfect crisp waves at dawn and keener of Beachboy lost love songs,Lumberjack dancer with spikes on logs bobbing in ice cold brilliantB.C. waters, Tree planter on in-the-face slopes, Apprenticed carpenter and house

painter whose teachers kicked him in his butt to run his own businesses, Zen haiku poet in an leaky shack in the middle of the B.C. rain forest, Spiritual seeker onmountaintops, Short-lived and minor madman-guru, Monk in Catholic monastery,

Published writer of poetry and prose, General building contractor,Designer-builder of houses and an industrialized building system basedon hyperbolic paraboloids, Buckminster Fuller Green preacher out tosave the world, Brother to a sister, Father of 2 adopted children,Widower to 2 wives, Divorcee to 2 wives, Entrepreneur who wrote

business plans and obtained venture capital, Inventor of garden and household

gadgets with two patents, Owner-operator of women's clothing design andmanufacture, Adult education teacher, Owner-operator of male/female permanent partnership agency, Counsellor, Book seller and PR person for Borders Books,Palliative care advocate/teacher from the dying of two wives, Aged care teacher,Train-the-trainer and MBTI certification, Researcher in mental health, Educator creating and delivering relationships courses for government agency, Teacher inChinese universities through chance and change and love of Chinese wisdom and HanSuyins wonderful autobiographical novel A Many-SplendouredThing and its Hollywood movie Love Is A Many SplendoredThing, Consultant for Chinese organizations, Incredibly fortunateman to have found his Other Half KatharineAnd another dozen

or so sorties. Whew, this is a careen in place of a career!


4/5

4

Time to touch the Void in the middle of my life a Black Hole composed of loss,death and the separate self. As Paul Tillich put it, because we are apart from then wemust be a part of . My isolated self has spent too many years in learning how toresponsibly connect and be part of other lives. Since I am a material atheist and dont

believe in heaven or reincarnation, for me this single life is all we have and are

limited to. My life is filled with deaths. I am a cemetery on two legs. My mother diedwhen I was three, my father when I was fourteen and I have had two wives die in myarms from terminal cancer. The only response to this Void for me is love andwork/play (my work is play and my play is work I never think of retirement

because I dont separate work from living). For me love is an art that must be learned,valued and practiced. As Plato put it, the two sexes are only halves and they seek theWhole theymake whenthey cometogether. I amnot even half good withouta woman tocomplete me.I have beengreatly

blessed withwomen thatmade me

better than Icould have

been alone.Also, I foundmy Other Half and we created a Great Love. She died in my arms many years ago. What shegave me I point to in my epitaph: From the love of wisdom, through her, he came tothe wisdom of love.

Now, a tentative answer to my Great Question. And I believe that answer constantlyand positively feeds back to the question from which it emerges. We will never knowfinally what humans are for because the truer answers will continue enlarging thequestion for as long as forever is. The ancient Greeks called it Paideia and

the ancient Confucians Ren . These terms point to education but not the oneour Collective States force-feed us. They refer to the truly human education of learning what being human can most virtuously mean. E.B. Castles definition of Paideia suits me: The Greeks believed that the greatest work of art they had to createwas a person. They examined the principles governing human life, asking what a

person was, body, mind and spirit. They expressed the idea that education [Paideia] isthe making of a person, rather then the training of a person to make things. Arthur Waleys definition of Ren rings true: "in the earliest Chinese it meansfreemengood as kindness, gentleness, and humanity that ultimately distinguishesthe human as opposed to animal. Your Neo-Confucian text Reflections on Things atHand, adds to this answer: "The humane man, if he seeks to establish himself, willhelp others to succeed. To be able to judge others by what one knows of oneself isthe method of achieving humanity." My Paideia or Ren, in all my long shortcomings,

Katharines (my Other Half) Painting: 4 Rooms of Love


5/5

5

is what I have and who I am. Omnia mea mecum porto, All that is mine I carry withme. Thus, whatever I teach whether business courses such as marketing,organizational behavior or management; or humanities courses such as cross-culturalstudies or literature what I really try to teach is Paideia or Ren answers to theGreat Question and examples of the Great Wall and Great Door in Yang-Yin

togetherness creating a home for what is most human in and between us.

One of my favorite ancient Greek philosophers was Epicurus. He was known as theEasy Garden Philosopher because he taught in a garden that was behind his houseand in an informal manner. One of my occasional dreams, is to find in China, myGarden in which to teach. So if there are any patrons of philosophers-poets reading,let me show you that I can earn your Garden and make our human flowers bloom! Iconclude with this one line from Epicurus that shows how to turn the pain into praise,thinking of all the wonderful Chinese friends that have been bestowed on me since inChina: Friendship goes dancing around the world proclaiming to us all to awake tothe praises of a happy life.

Selah (Hebrew, Think about it), Scire Licit (Latin, Its permitted to know)(NOTE: all the visuals here were chosen by me to express who I am.)

Jacks last house in Canada he designed and built

jack's autobiograph

Documents