In what ways do you experience Love, Cosmogenesis-Cosmic Education, and Observation as the cornerstones of the Montessori approach?
In what ways do you experience Love, Cosmogenesis-Cosmic Education, and Observation as the cornerstones of the Montessori approach?
My current query: Is an understanding of cosmogenesis a supplemental enhancement to direct experience, or is direct experience an enhancement of an understanding of cosmogenesis?
My observations in the past two dialogues, at my school, in wider Montessori schools, and in society in general I suppose, have lead me to consider that there is far too much emphasis on mastery and competence in understanding and using mental frameworks, academic structures, and theoretical systems, such as cosmogenesis. It seems to become more about how many authors you can quote, or who can pull up the most esoteric reference, rather than a deeper commitment towards honoring direct experience and spontaneous activity.
What is the value in direct experience itself? Does it need to be quantified in terms of a value system? Does direct experience only serve as a launching point for some greater academic agenda? In what ways do our furtherance of Montessori philosophy into jargon and dogma end up further distancing ourselves from direct experience and inserting ourselves as obstacles in the direct experience of a child?
I think this course has opened my mind to re-examining my understanding of basic Montessori principles such as guiding student work, use of materials and appropriate bringing materials to students awareness, and maybe especially the readiness and mindset of the Montessori guide. The sessions have encouraged me to look at these things with new awareness and questions. I think these questions can reach us all as educators not just Montessori guides which also intrigues me as I work with student teachers in public education as well. I am eager to think about exploring the concepts of the cosmic connection with all students and staff, in our educational journeys and how we can see our own professional practice and path on the guide to increased awareness of our place in the universe. I loved the example of the balloon expanding as a reflection of our educational understanding and the impact of our experiences increasing our own limits of understanding and opportunity for new growth and understanding. There are the suggestions of so many provocative questions that have just exposed to look into. We will be eager to hear others thoughts too!
Cathy, what you are sharing is a growing awareness/presencing that was already in your life. Going through the Syntropy modules might just allow you the opportunity to live into what is underneath your underneath.
The truth is that being in that Zoom together and re-reading the transcribed text has had a way of deepening my own journey.
I experience love as a cornerstone of the Montessori practice when I can offer empathy to a child, parent or staff member I work with. In my role as an administrator I often am brought into situations, dialogues and observations when tension or conflict or angst is felt or experienced. As I open my heart to someone I feel and sometimes visibly see the person soften and open up and make room for peace, new ways of seeing, and connection.
I am reflecting on how observation in a Montessori classroom can be a meditation practice
Huck, I am standing next to you in your query. For those who originally coined or use the word, cosmogenesis, my sense is that it was not an academic exploration because it predated the science of it. In my own work with children, we did not use terms like “cosmic education” or cosmogenesis. The story of the universe reveals itself to itself without needing citations or academia. Our school is near the beach, so one of our activities is to meet at sunrise on the winter solstice and “experience” Earth roll, while lying on the sand looking out over the ocean, to feel the Earth roll towards the sun.. Another activity when camping with older children was to observe the sky well after the sun had set and look “out” at the stars, while experiencing a lack of gravity holding you to the ground.
In our graduate programs, I do not recall any instances of talking about cosmogenesis. The word is not used in Berry’s Great Work or Swimme’s Journey of the Universe. They do mention it in their 1992 book, The Universe Story, but it is not on our reading list.
Even in Swimme’s tater book with the title Cosmogenesis, it is told as his own story connecting with Berry..
I would like to hear more about where you are seeing <>
I would hope that for most of us it is a felt-experience.
Also, Huck, I am thinking of the lyrics from Dark Star. One of them…
Dark star crashes
pouring its light into ashes…”
Shall we go, you and I while we can
Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?””
For me, your sharing represents the underneath of the underneath of why we collectively created this series on Syntropy… an attempt to keep going back to source.
And, Catherine, I totally get that role. Sometimes I would sit together with a child’s parents and the teacher to try and de-escalate the tension. It seemed like there were always assumption issues on both sides. Helping them into dialogue was my goal.
“All I know is something like a bird within her sang. All I know she sang a little song and then flew off.”
Culture and society replaces direct experience with words and symbols. A young child, lying on the floor watches a bird fly through an open window. An incredible flurry of color and activity flashes into this child’s world. Their senses are firing on all cylinders as the bird is imprinting on the child’s consciousness. The child’s mother enters the room as the bird flies back out of the window. She sees the wonder and joy in her child’s face and declares, “Bird. That is a bird.” Suddenly all of the feeling, sensorial perception, and direct experience between the child and bird is collapsed into a four letter word. By the time we are six, twelve, 24, 40, 60, 80, how much of the mystery of life and reality has been paved over by words and symbols. Direct experience is constantly being bullied into submission by our cultural and individual mental models. It’s no wonder we are so disconnected from and end up fearing direct experience.
So…how do I as an educators empower and foster awareness and trust in direct experience for children and adolescents.
Huck, your point is well taken. Marsha began shifting nouns into verbs, which made me begin thinking in that way. We changed many… like all the tendencies of humans that Mario wrote about. Observation became observing; perfection became perfecting, etc. I think there are some First Peoples’ languages that are verb-based. Western languages, with a noun-structure, as you already know, are object-based, which objectifies the material world into thingness.
I have invited Steven to pop in and share his thoughts, as he has been working with adolescents for nearly 25 years.
Hi team,
re HUCK’s query, to explore “Is an understanding of cosmogenesis a supplemental enhancement to direct experience, or is direct experience an enhancement of an understanding of cosmogenesis?” is to explore the conduit between the worlds of experience, and abstraction.
This we call Story.
Experience leads to immediate and visceral responses, the responses resonate and fade after a while.
An abstraction is a collective and generalised interpretation of the experience.
The story unites the two. It makes sense of the visceral, and unites the individual with the collective, while framing the sensations within a body of shared knowledge.
The story teller provides an opportunity to unite the unique and the universal, the immediate with the mediated, and the subject with the object. The bird, our metaphor of sensation, has a story to tell. The child as wonderer has a story to hear. The story is co-constructed within their relationship, and provides a triangulated meta point of learning, similar in resonance to the whispers of both cultural knowledge transferred through the ages, and the visceral, experiential and sensorial impulse.
Perhaps cosmogenesis can be represented as the ongoing forming of the universe in as much as protons bashing into each other in a heated stellar cauldron, as it with ideas colliding and colluding in the crucible of imagination.
I would suggest story is both the weft and warp, the cloth and the image, the rug and the tapestry – deep understanding and direct experience.
The educator’s role, it might be, is to ensure a two way path from experience to knowledge, and back again. Any reliance on a one way dynamic may be potentially limiting. The child experiences colour and movement, the mother provides language bird. The language generates colour and movement, the child incarnates bird.
Listen to the voice of the teenagers, their unprocessed, and un-text book experience adds significantly to our dry old repetition of facts, that were fed to us. Learning has a currency, it must move and change as a current, for it to be useful. The teacher learns. The child teaches.
The soil is held strong by the roots of the tree. The tree is held strong by the soil.
Wow. Meaningful questions and responses. I’ve been trying to grapple with “abstraction” within another online study group of another past, renowned educator. I’m experiencing “understanding” which is always nice.
To the question, “how do I as an educator empower and foster awareness and trust in direct experience for children and adolescents?” Maybe, ask and enjoy those kind of questions to which we have few direct answers, “Why are there so many number patterns in nature?” “Why does nature enjoy working with Fibonacci numbers? Thank you, all.
About questioning. Although not always applicable, I love what R. M. Rilke wrote:
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and … try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Are we still using this platform?
I am here and have a suggestion for you. In 1987, I had a conversation with Ron Miller about bringing all the holistic organizations together to create a common vision. That is how GATE and Education 2000: A Holistic Perspective was born. By 1995, it disbanded. My impression was that each organization wanted to pursue its own ends.
Why don’t you take the initiative now -especially with Zoom capability- to invite holistic organizations to meet and dialogue now and again?
September 11, 2025
I’m just now seeing this, Phil. (No message alert. ?) I had and still have hope that is what will happen with the Holistic Education Discussion group with Andrea and Camden and Paul.
Yes. There is that famous quote by Ron M.—“Nearly everyone is off in their own cozy little worlds… . As a holistic thinker, I am convinced that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and that if these various movements and communities would come together, learn from each other, and appreciate each other’s contributions to a movement for educational rights, we would have a political and cultural force that could seriously contest the reign of the educational empire.”—Ron Miller.
Do you know the book, “Steiner and Kindred Spirits”? By Robert McDermott who I understand was a friend/colleague of Thomas Berry, too. He believes that had Thomas Berry been presented with Steiner’s work with ecology he/T. Berry would have studied Steiner more or as much as he studied Pierre Teihard de Chardin given they were both Christian mystics of a similar time pre-Montessori. I enjoyed the book as other “kindred spirits” are mentioned: Mary E. Tucker, Brian Swimme. Peace to you and yours.
McDemott was President of CIIS while I was there. We had a long talk at Ralph Metzner’s 80th birthday … that was nearly 10 years ago. I told him about the story I was uncovering about Montessori… he told me to send me the manuscripts because he was very interested. Such a sweet man.
What can we do to boost Andrea and Camden’s group?
I would like to see more cross participation between Andrea and Camden’s group and Syntropy/TIES.
Earlier this morning I sent an email to Andrea to encourage her/them to join the Syntropy Webinar.
Things are bubbling and “foaming.” Though I can’t retain it all at once.
I am in deep reading of “Changing Consciousness” by Bohm and Edwards, watching and rewatching “Infinite Potential” and listening to series of Brian Thomas Swimme videos “The Powers of the Universe.” Just WOW. Thank you for the suggestion Dr. Gang.
And Talk on Morphic Resonance from the Science of Consciousness Conference in Barcelona (July 2025)—Rupert Sheldrake. What else?
Last we spoke about ‘observation’ I recalled it being the first step in Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication. Come to find out Rosenberg was a fan of and referenced David Bohm! (Finding connections are great.) *Must reread what dialogue is and isn’t. Peace.
I’ve been curious about the title; this is what Google/AI says:
“Giving Montessori back to Montessori” refers to the practice of returning to the core principles of the Montessori method, either in a home environment or by re-evaluating a school’s implementation. For parents, it involves creating a prepared environment at home with organized spaces, fostering independence, and encouraging a love of learning through self-directed activities. For schools, it can mean re-evaluating whether they are truly adhering to the philosophy of individual progress and holistic development, rather than becoming overly rigid or performative.” Is this the meaning? When I first heard it I thought perhaps that Montessorians (some) were upset that others out-away-from-under the Montessori umbrella were using her materials and/or practices and not giving her credit.