Point of Entry

At this moment, you are a mind reading and interpreting this text. Other activities have been set aside, and your complete attention is focused on the work of experiencing this text. You are “expanding your mind” by reading this—engaging different ideas and a different mind that has engaged other minds and brought them to bear in this moment of interaction. We expand our minds in many ways, many of them highly pleasurable—at least in the long run. We learn to play a musical instrument, despite the initial struggles. We play a team sport and join in the effort of a team to create winning conditions. We join our coworkers to develop a project or presentation and experience the satisfaction of overcoming frictions in order to create something memorable. We create art, or poetry, or a personal journal, or an email to a friend. We read novels, and listen to people, and watch movies. In every case, we are expanding our own range of experiences, our own awareness of our own—and human—possibilities. So “expanding the mind” is second nature to us all.

Why, then, is “expanding the mind” often treated as a hippie term, or a mystical term, or, in the elegant words of John Sperling, the CEO of the Apollo Group, which owns the gigantic educational factory called the University of Phoenix, “bullshit”? Because learning, and asking questions, and relating to others, makes people less likely to spend all their time buying goods and services. People who love to learn, who love to relate to the world and to other people, are rarely good “consumers.” And western culture has attempted to convince us that we are all consumers—buyers—users—first and foremost.

This text center will explore the idea of “expanding our minds,” expose the falsehood of the criticisms of the idea, and offer some strategies for working on the criticisms, and around them, in order to improve the quality of our lives.

I hope you’ll join me.