Michael will begin with an overview of the academy. Then...

Stuart Brown - Play Deprivation (failed attachment)

Definitions:

• We touch the future by the environment we embody, that we create, impose on and control for children.
• Touching the future is epigenetics in action, moment by moment, day by day.
• Children are compelled by nature to become who and what we are, not simply what we think. Understanding this, our focus is on ourselves, the people who care for and about children. We then realize that changing the future begins with ourselves.
• The self-discovery and transformation that Touch the Future invites begins with conception, pregnancy, birth and bonding.
• It continues, sequentially, through all the development stages, including parenting as a transformative developmental stage for adults. That age and stage is our focus.
• The child is the learning experience that compels this transformation. Children are the object. We are the subject.
• The optimum state for learning, development and performance, at any age or stage is authentic play, a state that is completely different from cultural competitions and comparisons.
• To fully understand ourselves, our society and how to optimize our life and capacity as human being we must first understand that we are not who or what we think, and therefore feel we are. Realizing that we are actually not our social-image opens the doors of perception to limitless opportunities for compassionate-creative insight and action – and this creates and models a completely different environment for children to grow and develop.

The Journey

My journey began with various teachers who explored the fundamental nature of being human; J. Krishnamurti and Ram Dass. These lead to various readings; Huxley ‘The Perennial Philosophy,’ Alan Watts, the first English book written by the Dalai Lama, the Opening the Wisdom Eye, and many others. This lead to meeting Krishnamurti and Ram Dass in the mid 1970’s. Then Joseph Chilton Pearce, David Chamberlain, Ashley Montagu, James Prescott, each enlarging the circle of inquiry, and later many original play researchers. Each in their own way were exploring how we become who we think we are and simultaneously revealing that our potential is infinitely more.

In the late 1970’s I began recording and directing a number of feature documentaries on the life and insights of Krishnamurti, one of the most original and influential teachers of the 20th century, a process that continues today and encompasses several hundred interviews and a number of travels around the globe. At that time David Bohm, Einstein’s protégée in theoretical physics, and Krishnamurti were engaged in what many feel was the deepest inquiry into fundamental questions and therefore challenges facing humanity. These dialogues centered on how primal human feelings, thought and imagination generate the images we call ‘self’ and how culture is the meta or collective composite of that image - the images we have of self and culture being two sides of the same coin. This is a critical insight.

It is well known that the source of these defining feeling-images point to the earliest stages of development, the environment created by parents, and culture defining how parents think and behave. This creates an epigenetic field that defines to a great extend how children develop. This focus and the primacy of this early formative period lead to David Chamberlain who was writing his first book, Babies Remember Birth and the early foundations for APPPAH, Pearce and his book Magical Child, James Prescott’s sensory deprivation research, Arms, Immaculate Deception, Leadoff, Continuum Concept, Montagu with his fifty books on being human, Odent, Verny, etc. Joseph Chilton Pearce read extensively the works of David Bohm. They met in London and Joe wrote his third book ‘The Bond of Power,’ on Bohm and Joe’s meditation teacher in India, merging eastern practices and western scientific methods. Being a filmmaker, I interviewed these and many others and continue to do so. Resulting in The Academy.

Touch the Future’s Academy

Inspired by the above, Touch the Future’s Academy is an archival collection of interviews and programs gathered over the past 35 years. (The term Academy traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 385 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and skill.)

New trends are often rooted in past insights. As Aldus Huxley, also a close friend of Krishnamurti notes; wisdom is perennial, timeless. For example, fifty years before epigenetics emerged Joseph Chilton coined the term ‘the model imperative.’ The model imperative states; no capacity unfolds without a model-environment serving as a catalyst.

We can define the classic term ‘bonding’ as this epigenetic field parents create and model for children, for better or worse. The more complex, whole and evolved the model, the greater the spontaneous development in children, spontaneous meaning unconscious, natural, automatic, as matters designed. The need to ‘teach,’ punish or reward children, in terms of behavior, is a failure of this natural epigenetic bonding process.

Joseph Chilton Pearce described bonding as an expanding field of shared meaning beginning with the mother’s body; physically, emotionally, psychology and intellectually. This sphere of shared meaning expands to include father, siblings, extended family, neighborhood, village or tribe, the physical environment, culture and the universe. The mystical experience is ones resonate identification with all life, the entire universe. Breaking the bond or failure to establish a reciprocal dynamic of shared meaning at any point isolates the developing child. Instead of ever-expanding realms of influence and modeling, the isolated individual serves as his or her own model, with its insecurity, self-centeredness, aggression and implicit violence. Rather than opening the higher, complex and more evolved brain centers with its exponential increase in capacity, as nature intends, development is bound and constrained to the older more primitive centers; reflexive, selfish and aggressive. Bonding with an evolved model is the key to both personal and collective evolution, not the intellect.

It is nice to have science confirm but science naturally excludes, and is often extremely limited. As Bohm and others describe, often science is many years or even centuries behind what insight has revealed to visionaries. Touch the Future represents a constellation of those visionaries.

Michael Mendizza

Notes from Michael on the videos:

Bonding as a Biological Process
Pregnancy, Birth and Bonding 2

Now if we look at the connection with the heart, we get into some very interesting research. I've talked about the intelligence of the heart, and of course everyone assumes that this is a metaphor, and it is a metaphor but it is also a fact. Years ago they discovered there is something unique about a heart cell. A heart cell contracts and expands. It is different from a neuron which operates on a kind of a vibratory basis. You could take a heart cell out of the heart and put it in the right kind of a fluid and keep it alive for a while. You can't do that with a neuron, if you disconnect a neuron from its connection with others neurons, generally it dies immediately. It has to be in its resonate field in order to operate. The interesting thing about the heart cell, disconnected from the heart, was that quickly it lost its rhythmic pulsation and began to fibrillate. It would just flop all around out of rhythm and soon destroy itself and die.

Put two heart cells together on the slide and they would both fibrillate in that fashion. The poor little creature can't stand to be cut off from its matrix, from its source. And neither can we. If we are cut off from our heart, we fibrillate, it just takes us a little longer to die. Now the interesting thing about these two heart cells is, if you bring them close enough together, at a certain point of proximity spatial proximity, they do not have to touch. There can be a physical barrier between them, but at a certain point of spatial proximity, the two heart cells somehow or other communicates with one another and immediately go back into the synchronous rhythm of each other which they experienced within the heart itself. Now we've never been able to explain that. I know why but this has to be hypothetical. And that is that the intelligence which functions thorough the heart, which is non-verbal, non-personal, transpersonal, universal simply moving for well-being and not individual or anything like that, this intelligence is non-localized and the two cells simply have to come into a certain proximity and then they are sharing the same non- localized field and they go back into their synchrony with each other.

Now if you take up the hundreds of billions of cells that go together to make up a heart all functioning at absolute synchrony with each other you can see that if one communicates one cell can communicate with another across a special or physical barrier then obviously two hearts have some form of communication as well. Now that has to be hypothetical but there is a lot of evidence to back it up.

Now let's look at some of the other evidence about the heart, this was years ago, then came along John and Beatrice Lacey, operating under a government grant, NIMH Grant, did years of research into the heart, and drew the conclusions that there was a direct and intimate dialogue within the heart and the brain. Between the heart and the limbic system of the brain. The limbic system being what? The emotional-cognitive structures of the brain that handle all relationship. Remember that, we talked about that earlier. This mammalian brain handles all emotions, handles all relationships and that has the Lacey's claim direct unmediated connections with the heart pumping away down in our chest. And that the brain was always informing the heart of its current experience in the world and the heart was always exhorting the brain to make an appropriate response to the world.

Now that was their claim years ago. Since then, they spoke of this as a dialogue between the mind and the heart, lots of other research has on the heart has taken place. The discovery that between the cells of the heart there are transmitters operating exactly as you have in the neuro-transmitters of the brain, which means a great deal of communication is taking place on an individual level, and on a collective level in this heart process.

So, with that as a preface, let's look at Whitestone’s claim that the heart has a profound effect on the embryo on the infant throughout the whole nine months and then at birth comes the greatest role of the heart. Researchers reading that the heart has an effect on the infant's brain and body went in back in the sixties and took recordings of the heart beat and played them over loud speakers in the nurseries of our hospitals where all of our newborns were isolated of course from their mothers. And it reduced crying from forty to fifty percent right across the board. Now a true scientific inquiry would have said "why?" And plumed it to the depths to find why that profound effect on behavior would take place from an artificial canned mother's heartbeat. Instead those researchers rushed quickly to patent and market a rock a bye teddy bear which had within it a recorded heart beat that could be placed in the nursery at home to reduce crying by forty to fifty percent. So the child's state of abandonment could be maintained. And yet reduce the crying the reason being at birth we do know that the biggest signal that natures agenda calls for at birth is immediate contact with the mother’s heart.

As the infant has been in contact with it throughout the nine months, and its single biggest imprinting. And the mother immediately in all preliterate societies there is a little thirty-thousand-year old figure that shows the newborn mother, she is still squatting and she just brought the infant up to her breast she has got a real big smile on her face and she puts it to the left breast. Our research people said that was because we are all right handed, but we find that left handed mothers put their infants to the left breast as well.

All fathers when they pick up a new infant will automatically keep it to the left hand, left breast including left-handed fathers, now the reason being and this has to be hypothetical, I have nothing other than my own intuitive knowledge of this to back me up, but if you bring the infant's heart into proximity, spatial, physical proximity of the mother's heart something happens between these two levels of intelligence. There is an exchange between them as there were between the two heart cells themselves.

Remember the model imperative, no function is unfolded or awakened in us until we are in contact with an appropriate model of one who has developed that function. So the infant's heart picks up a tremendous signal from the mother's heart and that signal is everything is great, we are back with our matrix in this new wonderful kind of a world but right back home where we belong. And we do know that immediately shuts off the production of adrenal steroids, there will be no shock in that infant and instead that infant is smiling and opening up to this new world to embrace what it contains immediately.

Breaking the Bond
Amazing capacities 8

Interference of the mother and her own infant starts practically from conception. For one thing, even the abortion issue, which certainly is a nasty issue all the way around, but there the real issue is the woman’s right to play the role of the mother, the mother’s right to make decisions concerning the reproductive process which she has done throughout human history, and we started interfering with that right from the very beginning. That she is no longer, that’s to be taken out of her hands and put into the hands of a group of experts or legalistic processes. So, from the very beginning the capacity for mothering is cripples right from the beginning.

The next thing is our interferences that run throughout the uterine experience itself. We are turning our women more and more over to what we call prenatal care and all the great concerns over prenatal care and all sorts of interference devices, our ultrasound, attempts to, actually they’re now you know taking infants out of the womb and making operations and putting them back in. Now they’re doing this on experimental levels and so on, in the attempt to predict and control every tiny facet of the birth process. Women are being interfered with by being frightened and terrified by a whole raft of supposed disasters which can befall them unless they go through all these medical processes, unless they got all these prenatal testing they might come up with a child who is this or that or the other and in the process of this, of course, you set up a whole raft of interventions. These are interventions in the natural system. Now people don’t realize the overall effect of this.

M: What does it do to the, I’m going to say her confidence, her innate feeling of being able to be in love? How does this interfere with her own self-perception impact her ability to be a mother?

J: Of course she begins to feel that only the professional here is capable of handling this infant. It’s obviously complete and out of her hands. But far more is playing on this fear of abnormality or an irregularity, there’s something going wrong with the birth process and so on and leading to 30% cesarean sections and so on.

First of all, the irony of it is that we’re ending up with more and more dysfunctional children, higher and higher mortality rates. Twenty other nations are way ahead of us in actual death of mothers and infants and the 600 percent higher rate of hospital deaths than in natural home births and so on. So it’s extremely ironic and paradoxical that the more we attempt to predict and control, the greater the casualty rate. And no one will pay any attention to that because by now the woman is terrified of all the consequences that can happen outside the medical umbrella. So I’m saying, in the very uterine stage of the game, the interventions, whether they be conceptual, actual physical interventions, or what they might be, are already playing a deadly role. And then of course, that all leads up to the woman’s willingness to subject herself to the monstrous mutilations that have gone on in hospitals for fifty years at the birth practice itself.

M: Monstrous mutilations, can you help me justify that?

J: Well there again you’re talking about a massive amount of research that’s been done over a long period of time. Again the interventions, the use of all sorts of monitoring devices, the use of obstetrical drugs, the fact that the majority of women are induced into labor, and it’s looked upon by the whole medical profession as a magnificent and great achievement. The induction of labor which of course will stop any time there’s an intervention. Nature’s natural rhythm is to stop all labor process, stop the whole birth process, if there’s any intervention because that’s threatening to the ancient structures that handle all this. And so with all these interventions then the whole character and nature of birth is dramatically changed and require then further intervention. The first intervention requires more intervention. The solution that we achieve creating far more problems in each case and it cascades into a proliferation of intervention processes. So the finally, every natural bonding structure between the mother and infant is broken. There are specific mutilations that go on, that have gone on for a long time and only by people like me and a lot of others hollering have there been some minor changes in the past few years, causing the medical establishment to slightly alter its approach to protect it financial investment. They are making some concessions but not many.

M. There seems to be a general impression that the system is responding, the new birthing rooms and centers.

J. The disasters of this have been remarkable. Here we have these children who have been engineered and the whole birth process is organized around the convenience of the doctor and the hospital staff, and so on. But then, they whisk that little infant out, they will chop the umbilical cord. They put it on the mother’s belly for a minute, then up to the mother for a few moments of hugging, everyone was bonded, the father was there, then they whisk it off. This is the equivalent of agreeing quickly with your advisory on the part of the medical profession. So there is this token gestor and everyone is relieved, bonding has taken place. Of course this is a travesty of major proportions. No bonding has taken place.

Ashley Montagu 4

As I was a professor in medical school I had an abundant opportunity to speak to mothers in the obstetrical department whose babies in those days in the early 30’s and 40’s were taken away into a so-called nursery which was so-called because there was no nursing was done in it. And the baby was literally abandoned to the prison into which it was put with perpendicular bars on each side, a white bed to lie on, white tiles covered with staph-infections, and that was the way to deal with newborn babies. Now if those babies had been completely abandoned it could not have been much worse because when those babies came back, and I saw after fourth eight hours, or even twenty-four hours, the mothers would use the same phrase, hello little stranger. And when I spoke with them, they all told me the same thing; if the baby had not been brought back they would not have noticed it.

Bonding is a word. But what does it mean? What it means is to bond with the first language of communication between the mother and her infant, which of course develops into eye contact, when you see the baby beginning to follow the mothers eye movement, reading her face expressions like a map, absolutely interpreting every expression. And the human face, it has been said, I don’t know, is capable of about 250,000 different expressions with sixteen muscles of expression on each side of the face. But the tactile experience, you see it is eye contact is the technical phrase by people who don’t know much about this, the touch of the eyes is very expressive, because it really means that you are doing what you are doing when you are actually touching the other body. And the expression of the eyes into our adult lives is very important. It tells the difference between indifference, between dislike, between love, friendship, and so on. And all this is connected to the word bonding.

Well the most important thing of course is the communication of love, the communication to the other that they have entered a safe harbor where he will be welcomed by everyone, nursed, nurtured and given every encouragement to grow and develop into a healthy human being. By healthy human being I mean the ability to love, the ability to work, the ability to play and the ability to use you mind critically.

Amazing Capacities #7

I think of Michel Odent, MD, the medical doctor from Pithiviers hospital (France), and I think rather over-statement, he said that that the immune system seemed to lock into an immutable pattern very quickly at birth of a child by their experience, their birth experience and their first experience with the outer world. That that had such a profound effect on them that the immune system reflected it after the rest of their life. And I think we’re more flexible than that by far but this does point out the fact that when the child comes into the world the reception of that child determines how they respond to that world. And this is hormonal. This is cellular. It’s biological. It doesn’t have anything to do with the child’s feeling good or self-esteem or anything else. This is a biological organism and the reception to it as it enters into the world. And in fact we find now that the effect on the child in the womb is profound, it’s enormous, that the emotional state of the mother profoundly affects the emotional state of the child because it’s transmitted hormonally. And again we’re talking about hardcore biology. We’re not talking about sweet sentiments.

If a mother knew this, if a father knew this, if the nation knew the full impact of that, then the protection of a mother to give her the most powerful nurturing ambient, nurturing ambient, in order that there might be no anxiety, no anx, no fear. We might then have a completely different ballgame from that one simple little addition.

James Prescott Video Interviews
Essential Overview Part One - What Is Sensory Deprivation

Gabor Mate, MD
Lifelong Implications of Attachment

Well it’s interesting to look at what happens when, I for example, speak to professional audiences and I speak to thousands of people every month and the most difficult audiences are the medical ones who deal with the manifestations of early childhood loss but they don’t know that that’s what they’re dealing with. They think they’re looking at diseases, symptoms, mental illness, dysfunctions, psychosis, behaviors that are categorized under one diagnosis or another. They don’t realize that the commonality is the early childhood loss in trauma. Present them with that information and you present it to them in detail with all the research perimeters being covered so that it’s not just impressionistic or antidotal but actually research based and they sit there stunned. They don’t know what to do with it. If that was only my own failure to communicate I could say okay well if somebody else presented it then maybe they would listen. But no.

Dr. Bruce Perry who’s the head of the Houston Child Trauma Academy, leading research on childhood trauma and brain development, he tells me the same thing. And Dr. Vincent Falliti who’s the lead investigator of the Adler’s Childhood Experience Studies in California has shown again the exponential impact of childhood loss. The more losses that accrue the greater risk of addiction, the greater risk for cancer, greater risk of auto immune disease, mental illness, dysfunction, criminality, relationship problems, personality disorders, etc., etc. He tells me the same thing. So when you’re dealing with a professional audience particularly who are intellectually trained, they sit there wrapped in their intellectual armor and they literally are petrified by this material.

Jaak Pansksepp, PhD
The first motivation in a child’s mind is let’s play

There have to be joy molecules that haven’t been discovered yet. The brain is a vast ocean of complexity and we are still sailing on the surface. The farther down into the ocean you go the more strange species and molecules and networks you find. And now the power of biological techniques allows us to collect more data than we can understand. It will take many lifetimes to get all these candidates of these emotional processes modifying genes epigenetically. A gene gets myelinated, coated and all the sudden it becomes stronger for a lifetime. So one of our big questions is can we make a nervous system happier early on in life that will have lifelong benefits as a prophylaxis for depression, as perhaps reducing the likelihood of ADHD in childhood because many children cannot use these powerful energies and they’re so powerful that if in a classroom you’re among playmates and you can’t play, the first motivation in this child’s mind is let’s play. If one child begins that activity in a classroom they will be seen as disruptive, not following rules, and they will be given medications that reduce play. Every one of these medications for ADHD is a play reducing drug and we know these drugs permanently modify the brain in animals and we don’t know whether those consequences are good or bad but you can make a very ugly story that they are not bad, namely they sensitize the systems that are more likely to lead to drug addiction in the child. The animal data is clear that many studies indicate that when you give these drugs the animal is more likely to become drug addicted later in life. Now there’s human studies that you know this does not operate in human children but if we read those studies carefully the reason they might be getting a reduction in drug abuse is because there is a larger pressure on them. There’s a benign characteristic, they’re getting more attention and it’s not the medication but it’s all the social pressure that’s reducing that. So it’s a wide open question. It changes the brain in many ways and we are doing a great cultural experiment without having even the results in animals. We’ve given very young animals lots of play and they’re much better regulated early in adult life. Had positive affects for self-regulation.

Stuart Brown, MD the Intelligence of Play 13:00-26:00 Whitman. 1968.

Darcia Narvaez, PhD
Bonding, Neurobiology and Morality 1

Neurobiology in the Development of Human Morality, Evolution, Culture and Wisdom is about trying to shift our imagination to remind us that our human nature is different from what we see today and the way we raise children can be different also and they’re linked to what we think is human nature and what we think of as normal human adult behavior is not normal. We are very abnormal. But unfortunately the people who are abnormal are the ones that are spreading their view of the world all over the world as if that’s normal, to be selfish and always thinking about what you can gain for yourself. That’s a very primitive morality. Traditionally in that last few hundred years anyway in the Western world morality has been considered a matter of, a matter of cognitive conscious decision making and if you don’t do what your mind and your intellect tell you to do than it’s a matter of “weakness of the will” and that kind of thing. And we realize now with the neuroscience and the research on animals and human beings and the neurobiology elements that morality in my view is reliant on well-functioning physiology. And that is revolutionary because people like don’t like to think about themselves as animals. We are animals. We’re social mammals. And if we don’t pay attention to our social mammalian nature we can miss-develop it. And so the point of my book is how you’ve gone in the wrong direction and we’ve kind of undermined our human essence. The morality of our ancestors, you can see it in small band hunter/gatherers who represent 99% of our history as human genus, they show high intelligence, perception, caring, generosity and sharing and happiness and joy. All the things we consider to be wise ways to be in the Western wisdom traditions. They do it though not from an adult trying to flagellate themselves into feeling submissive and good and all that kind of extreme self-development measures that Western traditions have advocated in the Christian world for example, but instead they reach the same point of wisdom from the bottom up because of the way they raise their kids and their children and how they provide what I call an evolved developmental niche or nest.

The early nest for human development is one that we’ve started to, and for now quite a while and especially in the 20thCentury, undermine. And so we now think that’s normal. That it is normal to have adults and children who are aggressive and selfish and not self-motivated, get out of control easily because our sense of what’s normal has shifted. And I call that a shifting baseline. Shifting baselines is an idea from Oceanography because they notice that Oceanographers, those who study the ocean, would assume that the ocean that they grew up with was the normal ocean and that was the baseline they used for determining whether something was normal or not. But they missed that over generations of time the oceans have deteriorated drastically and you don’t see that unless you move your vision out and see across generations of time. So I’m saying also applying idea to child rearing practices and to what we think of as human nature, to what we think of as adult normal behavior and optimal behavior and to culture. So all of these four areas which inter-relate and kind of spiral together we have shifted our baselines for what we think is normal, for what we think is good, for what we think our potential is.

We are not looking at the big picture which I think has to include the hunter/gatherer societies which means we have to move beyond the last ten thousand years or so, since agriculture where we have diminished our support for children over time. But especially in the 20th Century in the USA we’ve done it drastically by putting kids, birth and mothers in hospitals for birth after World War II, formula feeding, decreasing play, decreasing self-autonomy, self-development, decreasing the extended family support system and just the positive climate for child development.