This 6-pillar curriculum teaches the basic literacy we need to be personally and financially successful and to do so in a manner in which together we evolve a culture that supports the emergence of an advanced human civilization.
Former British diplomat and intelligence operator Alastair Crooke, founder of Conflicts Forum, shares lessons learned from a lifetime spent listening to and negotiating with people the West has decided it does not need to hear from.
I got to give it to you Catherine, you have a fine nose for wisdom and excellence. How you get those people to spill their beans, who knows, but I am glad you can. Many, many thanks to Mr. Crooke in allowing to share.
One does wonder what potential the EU + US has thrown away for their nefarious inhuman agenda. It is refreshing to hear such a deep subject from a different perspective then JP. Farrell’s. The more various insights the better.
Since the first interview with Alastair Crooke, I’ve become a fan. His approach to listening as reflecting the consciousness of the individual resonates deeply. Thank you so much, Catherine and Solari Team. Very grateful for this quality of information and soul.
What I found particularly thought-provoking in the lecture was the distinction between the Cartesian Western mind and other ways of experiencing reality. At the same time, it invited me to consider a deeper layer that may deserve much more attention.
When Mr. Crooke describes the Western mind as collecting empirical facts, rationalising them and moving towards conclusions, he is also describing a particular route of learning and information processing.
There is a history behind this question.
William James was already exploring more than a century ago how radically human experience can differ between individuals. In *The Varieties of Religious Experience* (1902), he acknowledged that certain forms of experience were almost inaccessible to his own constitution, while being profoundly real and knowledge-bearing to others. Later psychology and educational research increasingly investigated individual differences in cognition, perception and learning.
In the mid-twentieth century, Jerome Bruner distinguished between representing experience through action, imagery and symbolic language. In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder took a different but related direction. In developing Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), they explored how people internally represent experience through sensory modalities, particularly visual, auditory and kinaesthetic forms, and how differences in these patterns might become visible through language and communication. Although many of the broader claims subsequently associated with NLP remain scientifically contested, their work contributed historically to a growing interest in the question of how the form in which experience is internally represented may differ between individuals.
Around the same period, David Kolb developed his experiential learning model, published in its influential form in 1984, describing learning as a dynamic process involving concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation.
These approaches emerged from different intellectual traditions and explored different dimensions of human experience. None provides the complete picture. Yet, taken historically, they reveal a direction of inquiry that I believe we urgently need to pursue much further.
They suggest that human beings may differ not only in what they think, believe or conclude, but in how information and conscious experience become accessible to them in the first place — how experience is perceived, internally represented, processed, reflected upon and translated into understanding and action.
This is not a minor difference. If these individual routes remain largely invisible to us, we may continuously mistake our own way of accessing reality for the way reality is accessible to everyone else. We then risk interpreting differences in perception and understanding as failures of intelligence, reason, empathy or even goodwill, when part of what we are encountering may be a difference in access and processing.
This is where Mr. Crooke’s own story becomes particularly fascinating.
His mentor told him that his mind had become a “perfectly polished Cartesian retort” — and that the kindest thing anyone could do was smash it.
Perhaps what had become so extraordinarily polished was not only a philosophical worldview, but also a particular way of accessing, organising and processing information, strongly reinforced by Western academic education.
Seen from this perspective, Crooke’s later life is especially interesting. His work required him to listen to people whose cultural, religious and metaphysical understanding of reality could be radically different from his own. He had to learn not merely to collect more facts about them, but to listen differently: to perceive what was said and what remained unsaid, and to recognise forms of meaning that his original intellectual framework might not readily have admitted.
This makes his invitation to “see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being” even more profound.
But it also raises another question: How do we consciously learn to do this if we have never learned to recognise how we ourselves see, hear, represent, process and arrive at understanding?
Perhaps, before distinguishing between a “Western mind” and other cultural ways of knowing, we need to uncover this individual layer.
Culture undoubtedly shapes us. Education can reinforce particular modes enormously. Western education, for example, can reward abstraction, language, analysis, categorisation and rational argument until these cease to feel like ways of knowing and begin to feel like knowledge itself.
But within every culture there are still individual human beings who perceive, represent, reflect, abstract, feel and act in different proportions and combinations.
There are already relatively simple ways of exploring such tendencies. Used carefully, these should never become labels or fixed categories. Their value is precisely the opposite: making previously invisible tendencies available to self-awareness.
And here, I believe, the question begins to move beyond learning theory and towards consciousness itself.
If I can recognise my own dominant routes to information — not as the universal way human beings think, but simply as “my” familiar routes — something changes in my relationship with another person.
Their difference no longer has to be an obstacle. It can become a resource. One person may perceive relationships another overlooks. Another may translate experience into imagery, language, bodily knowing, abstraction, reflection or action. Something that is difficult for one person to access may be immediately available to another.
This becomes even more interesting at the level of a group. When different ways of accessing and processing information are made visible, it can become possible to recognise not only how individuals think, but how a group functions: who initiates, who reflects, who synthesises, who questions, who translates between perspectives, who seeks coherence and who notices what others overlook.
Instead of forcing everyone towards the same mode of thinking, we can begin to ask a very different question: What becomes accessible to us together that was not accessible to any of us alone?
Then cross-cultural understanding may be preceded by something even more fundamental: cross-perceptual understanding between individual human beings. And perhaps this is where the implications become much larger.
If approached freely, transparently and with integrity, understanding these differences could contribute to cooperation and peace — not because everyone would perceive the world in the same way, but precisely because we would stop requiring them to.
Different ways of accessing experience can begin to complement one another.
The result is not merely better communication. Our collective capacity to perceive, understand and create can become richer than any single perspective permits.
Expanding consciousness may therefore begin not by telling humanity what greater consciousness should look like, but by becoming aware of how consciousness becomes accessible to us individually.
How does consciousness become accessible to me — and how does it become accessible to you?
When we learn to recognise and bring these different forms of access together, we expand not only what we can understand, but also what we can perceive, imagine and create together.
New possibilities can become visible that were inaccessible from any single perspective — opening the way to new forms of cooperation, new ways of living together, and realities that can be not only imagined, but created and lived.
Exactly – once we shift into a spatial conciousness in a universe that is alive and intelligent the possibilities for invention and collaboration are remarkable and inspiring.
So well put by Monique, and brilliantly summed up by Catherine.
Indeed. The call to “see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being” touches on something I consider fundamental.
If we are to make fuller use of our capacities, we also need to understand how our individual perceptual preferences interact with the ways we learn and process information — how we experience, reflect, conceptualise and act. Together these shape what becomes readily accessible in conscious experience.
This brings me back to the “perfectly polished Cartesian retort.” What if education, culture and habit have become so effective at reinforcing particular combinations of perceiving, learning and processing that we no longer recognise them as preferences at all? They become the mould through which we assume knowledge and understanding should be formed.
Without awareness of these differences, people can easily find themselves in learning, working or social environments that do not fit the way they naturally access and process information. This creates unnecessary friction and misunderstanding — while also leaving us less conscious of how information from outside directs our attention, interpretation and judgement.
The question then becomes larger: what becomes possible when people learn to recognise both their own perceptual and learning preferences and the mould in which these have been shaped?
Seen in that light, the invitation to “see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being” grows even more interesting, because it raises a much larger question: what could become accessible to consciousness if we learned to recognise and use a fuller range of our own capacities?
Why is the sound so muffled on the Solari’s site? The excerpt from You Tube is so clear, can the Solari team just released the whole discourse on your You Tube’s site for everybody to see and hear. Thank you.
Sound problems resolve at around 30 mins
There was a problem on the first section. After posting, they did a special fix and reposted. Sounds like it is still not all the way there. Thanks!
I am listening to it on Solari and it is quite clear. Is there a particular section or the whole recording? Is anyone else getting muffled?
Wish I heard this in my 20s.
You and me both. A day with Crooke is like a day with Yoda.
Thank you, the Q&A answers were very wide ranging. Especially the hint to look for context.
The peaceful teacher of non violent communication Marshall Rosenberg seemed to combine modesty with strength as well.
These conversations resonate in ways that I can’t put into words. Thank you for expanding our world, Catherine.
I got to give it to you Catherine, you have a fine nose for wisdom and excellence. How you get those people to spill their beans, who knows, but I am glad you can. Many, many thanks to Mr. Crooke in allowing to share.
One does wonder what potential the EU + US has thrown away for their nefarious inhuman agenda. It is refreshing to hear such a deep subject from a different perspective then JP. Farrell’s. The more various insights the better.
Since the first interview with Alastair Crooke, I’ve become a fan. His approach to listening as reflecting the consciousness of the individual resonates deeply. Thank you so much, Catherine and Solari Team. Very grateful for this quality of information and soul.
What I found particularly thought-provoking in the lecture was the distinction between the Cartesian Western mind and other ways of experiencing reality. At the same time, it invited me to consider a deeper layer that may deserve much more attention.
When Mr. Crooke describes the Western mind as collecting empirical facts, rationalising them and moving towards conclusions, he is also describing a particular route of learning and information processing.
There is a history behind this question.
William James was already exploring more than a century ago how radically human experience can differ between individuals. In *The Varieties of Religious Experience* (1902), he acknowledged that certain forms of experience were almost inaccessible to his own constitution, while being profoundly real and knowledge-bearing to others. Later psychology and educational research increasingly investigated individual differences in cognition, perception and learning.
In the mid-twentieth century, Jerome Bruner distinguished between representing experience through action, imagery and symbolic language. In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder took a different but related direction. In developing Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), they explored how people internally represent experience through sensory modalities, particularly visual, auditory and kinaesthetic forms, and how differences in these patterns might become visible through language and communication. Although many of the broader claims subsequently associated with NLP remain scientifically contested, their work contributed historically to a growing interest in the question of how the form in which experience is internally represented may differ between individuals.
Around the same period, David Kolb developed his experiential learning model, published in its influential form in 1984, describing learning as a dynamic process involving concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation.
These approaches emerged from different intellectual traditions and explored different dimensions of human experience. None provides the complete picture. Yet, taken historically, they reveal a direction of inquiry that I believe we urgently need to pursue much further.
They suggest that human beings may differ not only in what they think, believe or conclude, but in how information and conscious experience become accessible to them in the first place — how experience is perceived, internally represented, processed, reflected upon and translated into understanding and action.
This is not a minor difference. If these individual routes remain largely invisible to us, we may continuously mistake our own way of accessing reality for the way reality is accessible to everyone else. We then risk interpreting differences in perception and understanding as failures of intelligence, reason, empathy or even goodwill, when part of what we are encountering may be a difference in access and processing.
This is where Mr. Crooke’s own story becomes particularly fascinating.
His mentor told him that his mind had become a “perfectly polished Cartesian retort” — and that the kindest thing anyone could do was smash it.
Perhaps what had become so extraordinarily polished was not only a philosophical worldview, but also a particular way of accessing, organising and processing information, strongly reinforced by Western academic education.
Seen from this perspective, Crooke’s later life is especially interesting. His work required him to listen to people whose cultural, religious and metaphysical understanding of reality could be radically different from his own. He had to learn not merely to collect more facts about them, but to listen differently: to perceive what was said and what remained unsaid, and to recognise forms of meaning that his original intellectual framework might not readily have admitted.
This makes his invitation to “see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being” even more profound.
But it also raises another question: How do we consciously learn to do this if we have never learned to recognise how we ourselves see, hear, represent, process and arrive at understanding?
Perhaps, before distinguishing between a “Western mind” and other cultural ways of knowing, we need to uncover this individual layer.
Culture undoubtedly shapes us. Education can reinforce particular modes enormously. Western education, for example, can reward abstraction, language, analysis, categorisation and rational argument until these cease to feel like ways of knowing and begin to feel like knowledge itself.
But within every culture there are still individual human beings who perceive, represent, reflect, abstract, feel and act in different proportions and combinations.
There are already relatively simple ways of exploring such tendencies. Used carefully, these should never become labels or fixed categories. Their value is precisely the opposite: making previously invisible tendencies available to self-awareness.
And here, I believe, the question begins to move beyond learning theory and towards consciousness itself.
If I can recognise my own dominant routes to information — not as the universal way human beings think, but simply as “my” familiar routes — something changes in my relationship with another person.
Their difference no longer has to be an obstacle. It can become a resource. One person may perceive relationships another overlooks. Another may translate experience into imagery, language, bodily knowing, abstraction, reflection or action. Something that is difficult for one person to access may be immediately available to another.
This becomes even more interesting at the level of a group. When different ways of accessing and processing information are made visible, it can become possible to recognise not only how individuals think, but how a group functions: who initiates, who reflects, who synthesises, who questions, who translates between perspectives, who seeks coherence and who notices what others overlook.
Instead of forcing everyone towards the same mode of thinking, we can begin to ask a very different question: What becomes accessible to us together that was not accessible to any of us alone?
Then cross-cultural understanding may be preceded by something even more fundamental: cross-perceptual understanding between individual human beings. And perhaps this is where the implications become much larger.
If approached freely, transparently and with integrity, understanding these differences could contribute to cooperation and peace — not because everyone would perceive the world in the same way, but precisely because we would stop requiring them to.
Different ways of accessing experience can begin to complement one another.
The result is not merely better communication. Our collective capacity to perceive, understand and create can become richer than any single perspective permits.
Expanding consciousness may therefore begin not by telling humanity what greater consciousness should look like, but by becoming aware of how consciousness becomes accessible to us individually.
How does consciousness become accessible to me — and how does it become accessible to you?
When we learn to recognise and bring these different forms of access together, we expand not only what we can understand, but also what we can perceive, imagine and create together.
New possibilities can become visible that were inaccessible from any single perspective — opening the way to new forms of cooperation, new ways of living together, and realities that can be not only imagined, but created and lived.
Exactly – once we shift into a spatial conciousness in a universe that is alive and intelligent the possibilities for invention and collaboration are remarkable and inspiring.
So well put by Monique, and brilliantly summed up by Catherine.
Indeed. The call to “see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being” touches on something I consider fundamental.
If we are to make fuller use of our capacities, we also need to understand how our individual perceptual preferences interact with the ways we learn and process information — how we experience, reflect, conceptualise and act. Together these shape what becomes readily accessible in conscious experience.
This brings me back to the “perfectly polished Cartesian retort.” What if education, culture and habit have become so effective at reinforcing particular combinations of perceiving, learning and processing that we no longer recognise them as preferences at all? They become the mould through which we assume knowledge and understanding should be formed.
Without awareness of these differences, people can easily find themselves in learning, working or social environments that do not fit the way they naturally access and process information. This creates unnecessary friction and misunderstanding — while also leaving us less conscious of how information from outside directs our attention, interpretation and judgement.
The question then becomes larger: what becomes possible when people learn to recognise both their own perceptual and learning preferences and the mould in which these have been shaped?
Seen in that light, the invitation to “see with both eyes, hear with both ears, and understand with our whole being” grows even more interesting, because it raises a much larger question: what could become accessible to consciousness if we learned to recognise and use a fuller range of our own capacities?
Why is the sound so muffled on the Solari’s site? The excerpt from You Tube is so clear, can the Solari team just released the whole discourse on your You Tube’s site for everybody to see and hear. Thank you.
Sound problems resolve at around 30 mins
There was a problem on the first section. After posting, they did a special fix and reposted. Sounds like it is still not all the way there. Thanks!
I am listening to it on Solari and it is quite clear. Is there a particular section or the whole recording? Is anyone else getting muffled?
Wish I heard this in my 20s.
You and me both. A day with Crooke is like a day with Yoda.
Thank you, the Q&A answers were very wide ranging. Especially the hint to look for context.
The peaceful teacher of non violent communication Marshall Rosenberg seemed to combine modesty with strength as well.
These conversations resonate in ways that I can’t put into words. Thank you for expanding our world, Catherine.
🙂