Reincarnating experience in education: A pedagogy of the twice-born

Abstract

This book presents authentic educational experience as the actualization of a potential within a phenomenological field whose axes consist of the somatic, the psychic, and the symbolic, thereby rejecting the one-dimensionality of contemporary education that is primarily mind-oriented. The author insists on the nature of experiencing as coming to be in a living tension between the intuition and the intellect, or the inner and the outer, and calls this a pedagogy of the twice-born. Within this pedagogy, the truly educated must be born twice: in the first instance, involuntarily thrust into a commonsensical world, and in the second, taking a deliberate step toward a qualitative principle. The latter gives us ontological hope or a sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency.