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"The Wake Call That Began My Quest for a New, More Cosmic Curriculum." I received a major wake-up call which enlightened me about my true will, on one fateful day in the late 1970’s while teaching P.E. on the roof of a public school in San Francisco’s Chinatown. I always enjoyed letting my fourth graders have “free play” just before lunch, up on the school’s roof, because it was the perfect place for admiring the city’s magnificent skyline. The famous new Transamerica Pyramid stood proudly just blocks away, and the Bay Bridge glistened like silver in the noonday sun. The bright waters of San Francisco Bay surrounded the city on all sides, gracing the scene with an incredible beauty that always made me think of that song phrase, “from sea to shining sea”. My kids played happily on the roof of the school building, and all seemed right with the world until something happened to the city’s skyline that sent shivers through me. All the American flags on all the tallest flagpoles atop the highest buildings of the financial district, were suddenly being lowered to half-mast. I knew right away that something tragic had just occurred. I immediately took my kids downstairs to lunch and was told that Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had been assassinated, so the Citywas entering a period of mourning. I’ll never forget how I dropped all my kids’ cafeteria cards on the floor as I shook with panic and disbelief. Our most courageous leaders, two great San Franciscans—two free thinkers highly respected for standing up for liberty and equality for all—had been murdered in cold blood, on a beautiful sunny day. Their violent deaths seemed completely impossible and unexplainable on such a gorgeous day in America’s most free-thinking city! And yet, we teachers and students were forced to continue school the rest of the day, and the rest of the week as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. We were told to carry on as usual; and to behave as normally as possible. We were totally unprepared to talk about the deep significance of the events from any kind of spiritual, philosophical or metaphysical vantage point. We were just supposed to “keep on keeping on”—like the cultural clones, we were being paid to be. Thank God the principal, Virginia Wales and the faculty were such good and kind people, or I don’t know how I would have made it through that horrible week. From that day forth, I began questioning our culture’s apparent inability to really help support kids during times of great change, social turmoil, catastrophic events, violence, and terror. The system’s materialistic paradigm wasn’t serving our kids very well at all. In fact, it was confusing them, blinding them, and deadening their sense of Cosmic Connectedness to the Super Power within them, right when they needed that connection the most. No explanations were offered at all, except that “bad things happen”. The subliminal message was that we were supposed to accept murder and mayhem as normal—as a logical part of history—and go on with the regular curriculum, even in a society that was going insane. This was something I could not do! I have always had high expectations for my fellow man, and I have never succumbed to the temptation to believe that we could not do better—a LOT better in creating a workable, happy and safe society—if we could just wake up. Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for From that day on, I was on a mission. I realized clearly that I had to discover why brutality and insanity were able to drag down a whole city even as enlightened and liberated as San Francisco was supposed to be. I knew that I had to find out why such things could happen, and also, how to develop real teaching strategies that would help my students understand and cope with events of such horrific dimensions. I wanted to develop a new kind of curriculum that would be based on a far broader, more empowering, more multidimensional perspective, than the one that was imprisoning us all—teachers and students alike—inside a narrow-minded, fear based paradigm of powerlessness . I wanted to find a way to connect back to who I really was, and help my kids do the same! We have it in our power to begin the world again.
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