La Resolana I

The Warm Multicentric Sun of La Resolana

I remember: I was sitting in the sun in Tiburon, California, a graduate student, excited that I was able to meet in the afternoon with the guest lecturer who spoke to our group earlier in the morning. As he began his presentation, I felt a pulse go through me. It was like a wave of recognition because I heard what he was saying and recognized the kind of talking he was doing. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was that made his talking familiar, but for some reason, it was as familiar to me as the sounds I heard growing up surrounding me before and after school when people talked or told stories while we went about doing various activities. These sounds were different than the sounds of talking and stories I heard in school or college, so I was startled to hear them coming through in the academic setting of our colloquium group earlier in the day…

Asian Maestro by Jose Cedillos

As I sat on the patio listening, I wrote notes of what he was saying as he responded to questions I had. While listening, I felt again that swirling of sound around me. Some things around me appeared to fade away. I couldn’t see the nearby tables on the patio. The people sitting at the tables grew indistinct. I looked directly at the speaker, sitting with his back to the covered walkway, facing me across the table. I couldn’t make out details of his face hanging in the air in front of me. I saw only the outline of head and shoulders that looked like a paper doll cut-out-space lined from a white piece of paper pasted in front of a wide black band – that used to be the walkway – extending on either side of the cutout. The outlines of things got sharper, brighter. Other things appeared to reflect the sharp pieces of brightness shattering forms of things everywhere I was looking and noticing as sounds of saying kept swirling around and seemed to go through and over and under and in-between where I was seeing until what I was hearing and seeing was bouncing off each other in quick turn-taking, showing up as seamless ribbons of rhythm patterns. I tried to blink away the wavy rhythms but they connected, expanding and banding through space between in and out. I felt myself outside myself physically inside some kind of illuminated place.

I left Tiburon for home in a different state than when I arrived. After all, I went to Tiburon to begin looking for a way to talk about my experience as an individual with multiple cultural frames of reference and to design curriculum based in that experience. But this was different. This was not an experience in which to continue by rote, academic instruction. I felt I had entered into a different space, like crossing over a threshold and it’s an experience I never experienced before. Things like this continue to happen since entering. The flashes lasted for months as if imprinted on my eyes. When the flashes softened into a kind of backdrop, things, seemed clearer, sharper, jumping out into the foreground or fading into the background and /or moving back and forth. During this period, whenever I tried reading the written words in a book, they seemed to squiggle on the white brightness on the page, as if they were moving in a swimming pool of light. I tried to talk about these experiences as they were occurring, but I couldn’t say what I was seeing because I did not know how to talk about them except to say that it was like the impression you get when a camera flash bulb goes off in your eyes, and the afterimage remains a long, long time.

Black Magic Woman by Jose Cedillos

RECAP for Human Understanding

“It’s time we began to understand the multicentric generation: those children of the world whose genetic inheritance is a mix of two or more distinct cultures, at war within them and feeling cast out by all. The Multicentric Institute is the place to start.”

Dr. Paul J. Avery
Former Vice-President / Dean
Northwest Indian College
Lummi Reservation

Multicentriçism is the burgeoning ideology and term for the evolution and a moving away from multiculturalism.
Multicentriçism is a word that represents the description of individuals who come from split genetic, philosophical and cultural frames of reference, who think, communicate, and access information from more than one frame of reference at the same time without confusion. The multicentric individual utilizes multiple levels of sensitivity transmission in communicating with others and our environment.
The conception and formulation of multicentriçism rose from my experiences and the experiences of others close to me. As a multicentric individual, moving about in the ecology of disparate information is a daily reality for me. At one instant, I am my Japanese mother’s eldest daughter and in the next but overlapping instant, I am genetically a Native [African] American participant. Multicentric consciousness creates a medium in which all the centers of personal identity coalesce into a sense of self-unified by motion, a motion unified by the inclusivity principle applied to oneself. In truth, for the multicentric individual ‘charity begins at home‘, e.g., starting with your own self-worth and living with a sense of self-worth in the multicentric world¹.
The entomological roots of multicentriçism begin with “multi”, meaning many. “Centri” means center, and “cism” represents movement. The “ç” has a portion attached to the lower part of the “c” that is known as a cedilla, and is a soft sound as opposed to the hard “c” sound. Sound and symbol meet. When vocalization and verbalization merge, their sound brings layers from depths of aesthetic consciousness to merge with symbols of linguistic consciousness. These dynamics produce geometric yet organic images that are part of the multicentric individual².
This is how we live our multicentric lives, merging, balancing, and bringing together all those disparate parts of us with different centers, which at once make us separate yet whole. It must be remembered that multicentric is a derivative of multicentriçism.
History
The process of encounter, the fleshing out and recognition of Multicentriçism.
“At first I couldn’t describe my experience as organic and real. I looked for a way to talk about my experience as an individual with multiple cultural frames of reference. I was designing educational curricula based in that complex experience when I came across the concept of La Resolana³. La Resolana is a communal way of knowing reached by “a way of sitting” in the light of softness together. I recognized La Resolana as a model for self-transformation through the development of concepts and skills in a continuous process of self-education.
I traveled the four areas in the field of Education: Diversity; Power and Knowledge; Consciousness; and Spirituality by moving around on surfaces, sides, edges, and substances⁴, looking and finding information to do self–work. I discovered that Fragmentation and Impulse were foundations of the study, forming the basis of my work, which indicated that a dominant cognitive mode contraindicated the work I was doing. I had to then search for a method, which butted up against the research problem: looking for a multicentric approach for method development and description- in other words to develop a methodology and a description for living in our multicentric world.
I proceeded to build my program of studies to unpack and reconstruct the experience of multicentric understanding by using Intellectual Bricolage⁵, (“bricolage” means to take apart, put together). Bricolage is the operational basis of the “mythopoeic mind” as described by Claude Levi-Strauss, in The Savage Mind (1966)⁶. As an intellectual tool for weaving creative experiences with linguistic consciousness I had to learn to use the conceptual framework of Intellectual Bricolage as a decoder in understanding the information I pick up as I travel through the La Resolana field of experience. I decided to approach my education by using the neologism “Multicentricism”⁷ as an image⁸ arising spontaneously from bits and pieces of jostling word material, as if by “incidental magic”⁹ forming a conceptual Bricolage. I developed the critical concepts of subjective perception and environmental sensory arrays¹⁰ in Bricolage Intellectual methodology, which led me to understanding my multicentric experience as an organic experience in folk improvisational design ¹¹.”
In my work, I strive for clarity, and the modeling and demonstration of “self-work” exercises in perception. Only then can people start to practice ecologically, perceiving and understanding the multicentriçism in themselves and others.

Brownian Motion, is it Multicentric? click here

References
1.Shannon, 2001. Dissertation abstract.
2. Dawkins, 1989. Discussion of memes as units of cultural transmission.
3. Atencio, Tomas, 1988. La Resolana: A Chicano Pathway to Knowledge.
4. Gibson 1986. Discusses ecological approaches to “information pick up”.
5. Patton 2002, p 401. Quotes Jose Cedillos, bricoleur and interdisciplinary scholar and artist.
6. Levi-Strauss 1966. Observed the folk intellect of the mythopoeic (story making) mind.
7. Klee 1953. The neologism “multicentriçism” was generated through a process similar to the description “taking the line for a walk” demonstrated in Pedagocical Sketchbook.
8. Escher 1986. Escher images often appear (as if) in motion.
9. Shannon, 2001. “Resonance is two systems in symphony…Magic is a step before science. Magic is an explanation that has the same goals as science, but doesn’t have the experiments that science has. Probably there is a place for consciousness in the quantum vacuum, but we have to look for a place where information can be stored and retrieved in physical space.” (Dr. Rubén L. Martí, La Resolana Field Notes, 22 September, 1998.)
10. Pribram 1997. Pribram points out that misplaced concreteness in downward analysis from the faith in deductive reasoning affects conscious experience.
11. Cedillos, unpublished. Bricolage Boy presents the span of his bricolage experience originating in folk improvisational design, going from naïve bricolage to the economic, creative, and intellectual forms of bricolage.

Bibliography
Atencio, Tomas. La Resolana: A Chicano Pathway to Knowledge. Ernesto Galarza Commemorative Lecture. Stanford Center for Chicano Research, Stanford University, 1988. Third Annual Lecture presented by Tomas Atencio, Associate Director of the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, University of New Mexico. http://ccsre.stanford.edu/PUBL_galarza.htm
Cedillos, Jose H. Bricolage Boy: Stories From A Creative Underdog . Unpublished. http://www.authorsden.com and http://www.thebricolageworks.us
Ibid. The Bricolage Works – Artwork by Jose Cedillos. http://www.thebricolageworks
Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Escher, M.C. Escher on Escher, Exploring the Infinite. New York: Harry N. Abrams Incorporated, 1986.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum accosiates, Inc., 1986. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Gibson
Klee, Paul. Pedagogical Sketchbook. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1953.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Translated from the French,La pensée sauvage by Libraire Plon, 8, rue Garanciere, Paris-6e, 1962. English translation by George Weidenfield and Nicolson LTD. Julian Pitt-Rivers and Ernest Gellner, eds., The Nature of Human Society Series. Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1966.
Martí, Rubén L., Ph.D. Chain of Command: A Psychological Game Played Within an Organization. Trans. An. J., 5:4, October, 1975. Trans. Cadena de Comanado: Un Joyo Practicado Numa Organizacao, Analise Transactional NAS ORGANIZACOES. Coordenadores Marco Antonio G. Oliviera, Roberto T. Shinyashiki. 1985 Livraria Nobel S.A. Sao Paulo traducao: Marco Antonio G. Oliviera.
Patton, Michael Quinn. Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods. Sage Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320, 2002.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.Michael_Patton
Pribram, Karl H. Brain and the Composition of Conscious Experience: Of Deep and Surface Structure ; Frames of Reference; Episode and Executive; Models and Monitors. Research paper. 8 July, 1997.
Shannon, Chiyuki. Stalking The Multicentric Ego: A Bricolage of Folk Improvisational Self-Work. Unpublished Dissertation The Union Institute, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2001.

Early Beginnings on the Journey

My father always called himself “colored” or “negro”.

My mother’s ancestry is Japanese from Okinawa. I was their first child, born in 1948, then came my sister Chiaki in 1949, next my brother Walter Daniel Shannon Jr., in 1951. We were born in Naha, Okinawa. My father returned from the United States, married my mother, adopted us, and brought us all to the United States near the end of 1951.

We lived in Fort Ord, California, then moved to Hanau, Germany. While waiting for army quarters, we lived in the town of Hanau. During this time, I started school and I remember my first day of school: I was excited to be going to school. My mother prepared me very well – she taught me the ABC’s, she taught me how to count, she showed me how to read from left to right.

Multicultural, relationships, ethnicity

She dressed me up in a pink dress starched with ruffles, put Dixie Peach hair pomade and water on my wavy black hair, braided it into two mitsami (braids), and curled my bangs, using her finger as a roller. She handed me my lunch, put a white handkerchief in her hand that had three fingers left over from the war, and we walked through the hall in the big, eighteen-room house with the upstairs closed off that Giesla, a neighbor said the Nazi occupied during the war – and out the front door.

We walked through the front garden, opened the gate and stood outside the tall black wrought iron fence. I stood next to my mother, on her right side, in front of the hand holding the handkerchief. We waited for the Army bus to come take me to the American army school for American army dependent children.

The dark green army bus rolled up the cobble stone street from the left and stopped in front of me, I got on the bus, my mother handed me my lunch, telling me to sit next to sensei (teacher), “Everything be dijobu, everything be OK.” At school, I still don’t understand what the other children are saying, but that’s OK, they didn’t understand me either, and we all wore circles with names on them. Happy sounds all around.

Lunch time comes and I do what my mother says, I sit next to sensei, who sat at the head/end of the long cafeteria table on my right. I take out my lunch from the shoebox turned obento turned lunchbox: I take out my lunch, my omosobi / my rice ball. I take out my mayonnaise jar of ocha / tea, and start to eat my lunch. All of a sudden, it gets quiet in the room. I look around for the source of the disturbance and noticed that everyone had a square thing to eat – and I had a round one. After that, everything looked dark, and I don’t remember the rest of the school day.

When I got home, I was upset and told my mother what happened. When my father came home, he found us both upset, and my mother told him something about everybody had square things, but Chiyuki had a round one. My father listened, then he laughed, then he went to the commissary and bought a loaf of bread. After that, I took square things to school, just like everybody else. They tasted good too. But sometimes I wanted to take round things. I knew I couldn’t eat my round foods comfortably at school and I wondered why couldn’t I mix round things and square things at school…

Understanding that the world just wasn’t skin colors.

It was strange to think that I had brought a different reality to the classroom. I had introduced a “Round” food a distinct difference from the Square shaped foods that my classmates had always experienced.
From this experience, though I couldn’t yet name it, the idea of “Multicentriçism” began to sprout into my mind and spirit. I translated my experience into stories that drew the attention of my cohorts. I felt and feel a need to be able to share Multicentriçism in ways other than race, ethnicity, culture, or philosophy, which means I need to learn to articulate the meaning of a practical Multicentriçism from its application and to develop a multicentric curriculum as steps to its practice in our world.

A new reality.

I know that Multicentriçism expressed the reality of all people everywhere and it would be helpful in the work of social understanding because it is another way of perceiving reality in a world of diverse people who are interacting and becoming newly conscious of their interconnectedness.

This takes us away from the concept of “multicultural” which in the end becomes a term of divisiveness. If you’re not “multiculturally oriented” then you are not respecting of another’s ethnicity. This concept in our everyday world is becoming extinct as the dinosaur. Why, you ask? Because we have become humans combined will all types of backgrounds and the backgrounds exhibit more than just skin color.

The trouble with a multicultural perspective is it presents a static view of culture and the human experience of being part of many cultures, diverse backgrounds and combination of ethnicity. These relationships can’t be understood from a static view without losing the ability to communicate and live effectively and wholly with one another.

Next Week: More stories on the path…

Welcome to the Journey at the Multicentric Institute

Multicentriçism describes the worldview of individuals who come from split genetic, philosophical, and cultural frames of reference who think, communicate, and access information from more than one frame, at the same time, without confusion, utilizing multiple levels of sensitivity transmission.

If you think, oh, another blog. Think again.

If you think, oh another place promoting a set of ideas, etc… Sure, that’s what blogs do. Here though is someplace where you can take your questions, your insecurities in living and being in today’s world where we are no longer isolated by geography. We are connected not only through technology, we have the ability to travel in person almost anywhere.  We meet people, we fall in friendship or love or find ourselves in professional relationships or in school with people we never imagined being with.  So what are we doing in this new world?  Take a moment, read and if you like, click on the About tab, read about us and send us a question. We’d be happy to answer you, yes for free.

Moving from Multicultural to Multicentriçism

We are …

Beginning to move away from an economic model of multicultural diversity that actively restricts individual creativity and productivity.

Becoming aware that multicultural concepts such as race are out-moded and are socially divisive and scientifically wrong.

Needing to communicate effectively in workplace environments with increasing numbers of people who self-identify with individual diversity, mixed ancestry.

Realizing that switching from information in one cultural frame of reference in multiculturalism to others and going back and forth is fragmenting and frustrating.

Searching for ways to stop operating in the framework of multiculturalism, which causes consciously applying psychological stresses to one’s own neurological system.

What are we going to do in this new world? We’re …

going to …

Begin moving to a different model that changes the politics of identity from a scarcity model to an abundance model of productivity.

Look at a room full of people from different backgrounds, and select information through an inclusive process.

Move to a sensory-based model of identity for processing perceptual layers, social contexts, and changing identities in the workplace environment.

Get perceptual exercises by going through the layers and building a database of information. This perceptual field becomes a steady state.

Go into a realm where you’re not overlooking any information, and you see the interdependence that was hidden because you are seeing ecologically.

But how are we going to get there…?

get there using …

Multicentric Training for relating to diversity within environmental situations for the planning and implementation of a productive workplace.

Demonstration to see how diversity arises from an ecologically perceived , connected environment.

Learning methods for doing perceptual exercises and getting practice seeing layered visual ecologies for generating workplace creativity and productivity.

Recognition that although they may not have the terms, people respond in sustaining ways to lay the groundwork for a shift in perspective.

Practice using new tools and skills for effective communication, creativity and productivity required for today’s successful workplace community.

So…

If you’re interested in the journey, and you know it’s time, make a comment, ask a question, we’ll be happy to be your guide.