The desire to connect with the world, the basis of the desire to learn

"If I am not asked what it is, I know it. If I am asked, I no longer know."

St. Augustine

Of the urgency of a global vision

Feeling at one with the universe is probably an essential human need. It is at the root of many motivations for learning.

This feeling that some seek through spirituality or even constant questioning, is little mentioned in official circulars, study programs, school curricula, even though it speaks to us about the orientation of our existence. Training and educational programs are often seen under the utilitarian prism, learning a professional gesture, acquiring general knowledge or preparing for a profession.

The essential, the meaning of a life, is set aside, compressed into the private sphere even though what keeps us in tension toward a goal is to achieve something that lifts us beyond ourselves. Once education divests itself of any religious or secular spirituality, one should hardly be surprised that teaching is untethered from the whole and produces combinations of individualisms without elevation.

Without a transcendent perspective such as a religion or holistic philosophy provides, each person builds his or her own personal ontology to suit. To correct this observation it is not a question, of imposing a religion or a philosophical substitute for a thought of the whole that connects us, but, in the perspective of building educational values, it is appropriate to answer the question

"By what has been replaced the sense of the divine, of that which is beyond us, which we do not understand and which brings balances to the psychic world of all and everyone?".

This surpassing of oneself by something infinite that pulls us and that we recognize, allows us to live and therefore to learn with a tenfold intention, a persistence in the effort to be made. This part of ourselves, however small, calls for meaning. It goes beyond the traditional motives for learning from psychosociology.

The hypothesis posed is that a human feeling of connection to something greater than oneself is a force for learning. This feeling takes the form, depending on the culture and discipline, of the Hispanic duende, the oceanic feeling, that of melting like a drop of water in a moving immensity, the feeling of continuity of existence or communion with nature. In its most demonstrative forms, it passes through the state of trance.

The declination of feelings of communion with the world

The duende is an untranslatable word, specific to the Hispanic world that speaks to us of a grace and an encounter between beings, in a context and an atmosphere that reveals us to ourselves and to the world in a moment of grace. The flamenco dancer is possessed by his art, the bullfighter transcends death, time and space.

The Duende, is that kind of breath from the depths of the human that makes artists and works vibrate as they perform each other. Garcia Lorca speaks of the duende like this:

"the duende does not come if it does not see the possibility of death, if it is not sure that it will roam around its home, if it is not sure that it will shake those branches that we all carry and that we cannot, that we will never be able to console.

"By idea, by sound, or mimics, the duende likes to be at the edge of the well in a frank struggle with the one who creates. ".

By the duende, the individual experiences in a complete way his belonging to the world that he possesses entirely and by which he is entirely possessed for a moment. An almost magical presence as if revealing a fold of the universe.

The oceanic feeling was described by Romain Rolland. It is appreciated by Freud as "a feeling of indissoluble union with the Whole and of belonging to the universal". For Freud it is a state of loss of limit. This state would be linked for Freud to the moment of the childhood where a differentiation operates between oneself and the external world. This experience of fusion/defusion with the mother would be for Freud at the heart of this feeling. It is almost a nostalgia or a regression that is thus proposed. This search for the return to a past state, for the rediscovery of a completeness plays as a psychic force and leads to a movement.

Also in the psychoanalytic explanation, the feeling of continuity of existence is proposed by Donald Winnicott. This feeling stipulates of "anxiety associated with insecurity". Winnicott hypothesizes that "the most primitive anxiety is related to the insecurity of the infant who does not feel adequately held" (in English concept of holding). It is this moment of the existence which would influence the diffuse feeling of continuity of existence. The way in which the infant would be held by his parents would influence the way of holding himself in the world throughout his life. It is a key moment of learning of the dependence on the world of the desire to dominate it, to melt in it or to seek to avoid it. Awareness of this feeling allows for the projection of one's identity.

The feeling of communion with nature is identified in ecopsychology. Ecopsychology challenges the Freudian reading of the determinants of the self and stipulates other sources of foundation in one's being in the world. For Andy Fischer "The subjective matter of ecopsychology is neither the human nor the natural, but the lived experience of the interrelation between the two, whether the "nature" in question is human or non-human. It is thus a vision of an integral ecology that integrates human and ecological well-being within spirituality.

Trance is a well-known transcendent experience in many cultures, whirling dervishes, shamans, medicine men are able to connect to so-called supernatural forces or unseen entities to draw information about the world. They connect If physical or psychological science has often looked down on these practices that they did not understand by reducing them to magic, research on the brain in particular on altered states of consciousness reveals the areas of brain activation.

The palette of human feelings

Each human has subjective links and an apprehension of his inner world more or less communicable with others. Duende, feeling of continuity of existence, feeling of communion with nature and trance participate in the mental universe of humans. They feel at a specific moment as if overtaken by something that they do not dominate but in which they are engulfed and carries revelations about themselves and the sense of participating in the universe.

By dint of trying to control and understand everything mechanized societies have amputated humans from these ways of relating and feeling their place in the universe beyond rational thought. By agreeing to be divested of control, to evoke and welcome subjective feelings rather than the measurable attitudes of psychosociology, it is possible to enrich our understanding of human orientations to learning

Related to education and vocational training, the questions that arise are:

• When to question participants' feelings? Before entry into a program? During a presentation that triggers reactions or discrepancies with their personal feelings?
  
  
• How are these feelings a strength for learning? Can feelings of anger or injustice be mobilized to learn and get moving? If so, under what conditions?
  
  
• What methods that respect each person's inner world can be mobilized to deal with these interiorities? What forms of intimacy should be proposed? What forms of dialogue to install?
  
  
• Among the palette of human feelings, are those that blend us with the whole, beginning with our community to be worked with preferentially?

Working with inner worlds points us toward a branch of philosophy called phenomenology, which is interested in the present experience here and now and not just in the demonstration from elsewhere and by someone else of repetitive phenomena.

It may be appropriate to rebalance scientific thinking with sensitive thinking. This is probably the greatest human specificity relative to AIs and algorithms that do not question their interiority but can only refer to their database.

Illustration: DepositPhotos - SergeyNivens

Sources

Baldassarro, A. (2011). The "oceanic feeling" in the maternal negative. French Journal of Psychoanalysis, 75, 1675-1680. https://doi.org/10.3917/rfp.755.1675

The relationship to the living and self-induced cognitive trance https://savoir-animal.fr/la-relation-au-vivant-et-la-transe-cognitive-auto-induite/

Houzel, D. (2016). The sense of continuity of existence. Journal of child psychoanalysis, 6, 115-130. https://doi.org/10.3917/jpe.011.0115

Federico García Lorca, Jeu et théorie du Duende, Allia, 2009.

Garcia Lorca. Sobre el duende https://www.traces.es/2015/04/13/garcia-lorca-sobre-el-duende/

Wikipedia Duende https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende

The Human/Nature Relationship - Ecopsychology (eco-psychology.com) https://eco-psychologie.com/recherche/la-relation-hommenature/

Thot cursus - Altered States of Consciousness https://cursus.edu/fr/22531/etats-de-consciences-modifies

The World - Corine Sombrun, From Shamanic Trance to Science
https://www.lemonde.fr/le-monde-des-religions/article/2021/05/09/corine-sombrun-de-la-transe-chamanique-a-la-science_6079626_6038514.html