THE GREAT WALL THE GREAT DOOR THE GREAT QUESTION

Education Consultant Jack Carney A wall protects but also imprisons. A door permits escape but also admits the unwanted. A wall alone is a door fearing its freedom to open. A door alone is a wall fearing its Jack at the Great Wall responsibility to protect. Only together can they 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 (both words come from the Latin words, uni one and versus turn and together mean, literally, turned into one). I approach each person as a YOUniversity built of walls and doors two human creations that expand with the universe to express the Great Question for humans. If enabled, we can spend 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 Great Wall as ordered into place by China to keep out Foreigners; and the Great Door as desperately knocked upon by many and Great Wall stepped through by fewer. It seems to me we all go back and forth between being more or less doors or walls in our orientation to life. I call walls minds because they separate, divide, conquer, differentiate and remain stable. I define doors as hearts because they connect, join, co-operate, merge, and change. I think we all face the Great Wall of Knowledge-Responsibility and we all seek the Great Door of Sympathy-Freedom. I peer into the flow of faces of those I pass by, meet, Door God 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 within and out of it.

To tiptoe to a more playful metaphor, this autobiographical jigsaw puzzle I have assembled here I am aware has many missing pieces. The person I am trying to put together 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 my mind and heart areand for now, that is the Middle Kingdom. If you are ready, I will take 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 and organizational development, a researcher of the many things that interest me (and most 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 how you know and dont know) you can say I learn a living as well as earn itI also yearn one when my poet displaces my philosopher. One of the reasons I came to teach and 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 know where 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 SelfCultivation 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 and their questions are even harder. One of my favorite modern classical music pieces is by the American composer, Charles Ives. Its titled: The Unanswered Question. When I 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, too many of us (and when younger this has included me), want to be Saved (with a Capital S!). And the Saviors prey on and pray for, this. How I, or anyone else, can claim 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 might have some understandings to share of what being human means. And I hope enough students and clients think my teaching and consulting activities make their lives more meaningful and are willing to exchange their RMBs to make my life affordable! Whether I consult for personal or organizational development I attempt to make those I work with more effective human beings. Thus, I try to enhance the following essential 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 doing is asking the Great Question which is really a Great Quest, and that is: What are humans for? I explore and evaluate this question and quest and attempt to obtain tentative answers through considering four virtues: freedom, responsibility, sympathy and knowledge all of which sum to the fifth foundational virtue of understanding the necessity for love and work/play.

Some of the means I use to coax a few truer answers out of individuals are: various Personality 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 Asian East and European West cognitive differences; male-female differences understood through evolutionary psychology; meta-learning or learning about learning that includes Learning Styles and Brain-Based, Self-Directed, Action Learning; and the study of history from classical liberal and Austrian economics perspectives. Now I invite you to further wander into this Jack-of-All-Trades (Master of, and mastered by, none!) and many different meanings. Here is a sampling of some of the trades Jack made with the world to somewhat answer his Great Question. In love and pulled to completion with the opposite sex since 7 years old, 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 school car and gun clubs, Farm hand and back-hoe operator and dump truck driver, College freshman to become automobile engineer executive but instead graduated into a fraternity 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 driving across 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 brilliant B.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 on mountaintops, 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 based on hyperbolic paraboloids, Buckminster Fuller Green preacher out to save 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 and manufacture, 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 in Chinese universities through chance and change and love of Chinese wisdom and Han Suyins wonderful autobiographical novel A Many-Splendoured Thing and its Hollywood movie Love Is A Many Splendored Thing, Consultant for Chinese organizations, Incredibly fortunate man to have found his Other Half KatharineAnd another dozen or so sorties. Whew, this is a careen in place of a career!

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 we must be a part of. My isolated self has spent too many years in learning how to responsibly 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 died when I was three, my father when I was fourteen and I have had two wives die in my arms from terminal cancer. The only response to this Void for me is love and work/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 the Whole they make when they come together. I am not even half good without a woman to complete me. I have been greatly blessed with women that made me better than I could have been alone. Also, I found Katharines (my Other Half) Painting: 4 Rooms of Love my Other Half and we created a Great Love. She died in my arms many years ago. What she gave me I point to in my epitaph: From the love of wisdom, through her, he came to the wisdom of love. Now, a tentative answer to my Great Question. And I believe that answer constantly and positively feeds back to the question from which it emerges. We will never know finally what humans are for because the truer answers will continue enlarging the question 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 one our 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 create was 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] is the 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 means freemengood as kindness, gentleness, and humanity that ultimately distinguishes the human as opposed to animal. Your Neo-Confucian text Reflections on Things at Hand, adds to this answer: "The humane man, if he seeks to establish himself, will help others to succeed. To be able to judge others by what one knows of oneself is the method of achieving humanity." My Paideia or Ren, in all my long shortcomings, 4

is what I have and who I am. Omnia mea mecum porto, All that is mine I carry with me. Thus, whatever I teach whether business courses such as marketing, organizational behavior or management; or humanities courses such as cross-cultural studies or literature what I really try to teach is Paideia or Ren answers to the Great 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 the Easy Garden Philosopher because he taught in a garden that was behind his house and in an informal manner. One of my occasional dreams, is to find in China, my Garden 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! I conclude 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 in China: Friendship goes dancing around the world proclaiming to us all to awake to the 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