Imaginal Education 1981

Imaginal Education 1981

A. TRAINING STYLE

Training is more than teaching designated sessions. The team will look at the trainer not only for effectivity but for the ability to continue to relate to all situations with creative confidence. The trainer is always on stage, wearing the environment of intentionality. As soon as the trainer goes off stage the team assumes that learning is something you only have to know about or memorize rather than the style of facing whatever comes. This means this working environment of the trainer reinforces the images that are helpful to learning: intentional design, missional decor, and practical care. This style reflects the corporate methods which the trainer uses, not as a gimmick, but in order to always include the group as part of the consensus building. No one in our times can hold the complexity of the world without reducing values and priorities down until they can operate as a corporate team building new relationships as the occasions arise.

B. OPERATING MODES

It is easier to talk about corporateness in a single event than it is to create an environment or atmosphere of corporate activity. AI1 the organizational forms have to be about the formation of the team. This involves assignment rotation to have everyone have a working knowledge of the different fields of activities. It involves different groups of people in specialized task forces and PSU's. This not only releases creativity to find yourself with fresh blood and new ideas, it is a practical demonstration that a team works together because of their task and not by personality or long familiarity. The Guild dynamic, on the other hand, is the deliberate focusing of your team's specialty into a professional pattern. Every member of the team sees itself as part of a guild who keeps up its own standards (intentionality), protects its members (corporate care) and is proud of its products (celebrations). The guild i8 not for the purpose of making achievement its goal but of forming the team around its decisions to intensely (with quality) and intentionally do its assigned task.

C. IMAGINAL INTERCHANGE

To maintain this environment of corporateness, a system of interchange within the department is necessary. People who are not "in power" feel left out of the information pool of the "executive" level. Interchange thus becomes necessary for the whole team to see how they participate in consensus. This involves reporting methods and an exchange system. To bring intentionality into the interchange, it is also helpful to have an intentional study life where each member of the team kee ~ updated professionally, culturally, and contextually.

D. RADICAL COMMITTMENT

Finally, no team is formed or learning attained without the commitment of each individual. Without an understanding of the engagement as significant and longer lasting than the individual task, the team cannot sustain the vision. This is not something that has to be talked about frequently but there has to be a

consistent effort to coordinate the symbols, style, and decor to remind everyone of the fulfillment of this task. Finally, it is the one who decides to take this role of the Imaginal Educator who will determine if the team is to be formed as a cor9prate entity, if the task is to be seen as meaningful, if the working conditions are conducive to creativity. This is done primarily as the educators demonstrated style ­­ that she or he is broadcasting images that encourage the team to continue to see that it is not the withdrawing but the expenditure of your total being that brings you fulfillment.

Imaginal Education 1981

"Why are you doing all this for me, Don Juan?" I asked.

He took off his hat and scratched his temples in feigned bafflement. "I'm having a gesture with you," he said softly. "Other people have had a similar gesture with you; someday you yourself will have the same gesture with others. Let's say that it is my turn. One day I found out that if I wanted to be a hunter worthy of self­respect I had to change my way­of life. I used to whine and complain a great deal. I had good reasons to feel shortchanged. I am an Indian and Indians are treated like dogs. There was nothing I could do to remedy that, so all I was left with was my sorrow. But then my good fortune spared me and someone taught me to hunt. And I realized that the way I lived was not worth living...so I changed it."

"But I am happy with my life, Don Juan. Why should I have to change it?"

He began to sing a Mexican song, very softly, and then hummed the tune. His head bobbed up and down as he followed the beat of the song.

"Do you think that you and I are equals?" he asked in a sharp voice.

His question caught me off guard. I experienced a peculiar buzzing in my ears as though he actually shouted his words, which he had not done; however, there had been a metallic sound in his voice that was reverberating in my ears.

I scratched the inside of my left ear with the small finger of my left hand. My ears itched all the time and I had developed a rhythmical nervous way of rubbing the inside of them with the small finger of either hand. The movement was more properly a shake of my whole arm.

Don Juan watched my movements with apparent fascination. "Well...are we equals?" he asked.

"Of course we're equals," I said.

I was, naturally, being condescending. I felt very warm towards him even though at times I did not know what to do with him; yet I still held in the back of my mind, although I would never voice it, the belief that I, being a university student, a man of the sophisticated Western world, was superior to an Indian.

"No," he said calmly, "we are not."

"Why, certainly we are," I protested.

"No," he said in a soft voice. "We are not equals, I am a hunter and a warrior, and you are a pimp."

My mouth fell open. I could not believe that don Juan had actually said that. I dropped my notebook and stared at him dumbfoundedly and then, of course, I became furious.

He looked at me with calm and collected eyes. I avoided his gaze. And then he began to talk. He enunciated his words clearly. They poured out smoothly and deadly. He said that I was pimping for someone else. That I was not fighting my own battles but the battles of some unknown people. That I did not want to learn about plants or about hunting or about anything. And that his world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was infinitely more effective than the blundering idiocy I called "my life."

After he finished talking I was numb. He had spoken without:beIligerence or conceit but with such power, and yet such calmness, that I was not even angry any more.

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4~ Journey to Ixtlan ­ pg. 2

We remained silent. I felt embarrassed and could not think of anything appropriate to say. I waited for him to break the silence. Hours went by. Don Juan became motionless by degrees, until his body had acquired a strange, "almost frightening rigidity; his silhouette became difficult to make out as it got; dark, and finally when it was pitch black around us he seemed to have merged into the blackness of the stones. His state of motionlessness was so total that it was as if he did not exist any longer.

It was midnight when I finally realized that he could and would stay motionless there in that wilderness, in those rocks, perhaps forever if he had to. His world of precise acts and feelings and decisions was indeed superior.

I quietly touched his arm and tears flooded me.

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Imaginal Education 1981

Imaginal Education 1981

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