ZPD

Dear Friends,

A Happy New Year to all!  Let's make it so.

The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) invented a concept he called the Zone of Proximal Development or ZPD.  It is the learning space between what a learner can already do for themselves, unaided, and what they cannot do even if aided.  That is, it is the space in which, with help from another, the learner is able to achieve.  

ZPD can be seen as the zone of fruitful challenge.  Think of language learning by a small child.  If we only talked to a child at their initial language level, they would continue forever to babble -- glorious in its way, but not perhaps what a loving parent would do.  If we address a child too far beyond their current capacities, they will also not learn.  But there is a level of speaking to a small child that successively, successfully invites them deeper into their mother tongue.

Last week we started to work with the concept of the ideal human and the ideal earth.*  We are developing ways to move beyond our current take on ourselves and on our planet, allowing the ideal image of the human and the ideal image of the earth to draw us along.  We want to be imprinted by them, re-arranged by them, and even become them.

These ideals may be so august we cannot quite take them in -- they are beyond our ZPD.  But we can allow ourselves to be irradiated by their proximal forms, and that is our meditative undertaking for today.  To do so, we will first call on all kinds of aid: the aid of our past, our relationships with nature, the man-made world, the various unseen worlds we may have experienced, and our own biographies.  We will particularly call on those allies who may wish to help us and who can speak to us of the ideal human and the ideal earth.  I mean for instance our personal dead, our spiritual connections, and our own knowing souls. 

with love,

Michael