An article by Douwe van der Zee

(This article is published here as a tribute to Douwe who was linked to HMP for many years but sadly died in a motor accident in 2016)

The path of Humanity

.I think it is fairly obvious now that humanity as a whole is set on a path of self-destruction. Something is very wrong. But what? Millions of ‘experts’, religious people, scientist and others all claim to have the answer. “Just follow my theory and things will come right”. “Just pray to my God and things will come right”. “Just follow my values and things will come right.”

But they don’t. In fact, our need to be ‘right’ may well be the very problem. For as long as seven billion people believe with absolute certainty that they are right and all others wrong, and try to convince others of their rightness, are conflict, war, emotional pain and destruction of the environment not inevitable? Is this not absolutely clear?

Despite many apparent contradictions, there is one thing that science, religions and all ideologies, such as Marxism, Capitalism, Liberalism and Atheism, have in common: they are mind-based. All of them claim to have the absolute truth in some way or other.  All of them are a collection of ideas about reality rather than the direct experience of reality. In fact, some of them explicitly denounce direct experience as not valid. Ideologies such as Nazism and Apartheid have shown us what can happen when we operate only from the mind. It can be very, very dangerous.

Since its inception a few centuries ago, education has always been an effort to inculcate in the youth the values of the prevailing ideology held by those in power.

Characteristic of all ideologies, religions and science is a deep-seated need to be right. The mind needs to judge and sees only right and wrong. In this way it attempts to retain the illusion of control. Just the idea of giving up this perceived control leaves many of us deeply fearful.

“Do not judge”

Do the words of Jesus, “Do not judge,” not make absolute sense in this context? I’m not asking anybody to ‘believe’ in Jesus, but I do believe that, before his teachings were adulterated by religion, there was a very deep wisdom in these words. To give up judgement is to let go of the mind’s need to be in control.

And then? Surely we need to believe something, do something, fight something?!

Do we? What have been the effects of millennia of belief, doing and fighting?

The only alternative to the control of the mind is faith. Faith has nothing to do with belief. We don’t have to believe in God to have faith. Faith is a deep trust in Life itself, and especially in ourselves and our children, and that trust comes from the heart. That, as far as I understand, is what Jesus tried to point out. The heart understands that, but the mind does not.

For me this is especially important in the light of what Maria Montessori had to say. Perhaps her insight was so radical that, although it attracted us at a deep level, we didn’t quite understand the depth of what she tried to say?

Maria Montessori pointed out that there is ‘something’ in all children that naturally guides them to independence. She adopted Percy Nunn’s term ‘horme’ for this ‘vital force’. Western culture tells us that children need to be ‘educated’, by which we generally mean that they should be taught to adopt the values of the culture. Montessori stated explicitly that children do not need teachers. They will absorb from their environment what they need. Hence her emphasis on the environment: the more enriching the environment, the more enriched the children become.

Montessori stated explicitly that children do not need teachers. They will absorb from their environment what they need. Hence her emphasis on the environment

What is Montessori’s approach other than faith? She learnt to trust with absolute certainty that children will find their own way. And which scientist has been able to explain this ‘vital force’, which is something that cannot be perceived with our senses or measured, yet we know exists? Montessori compares it to the development of the embryo. Thousands of books have been written about embryonic development, yet who can really explain the intelligence that directs this development so perfectly? It is something beyond our mind; something that only the heart can understand.

It is in this context that I would like to speak about nature as an environment.

Nature as an environment

In western culture we need to read and write, perform mechanical tasks, and so on. And so Montessori and many after her developed a series of materials and tasks that would help children develop these skills. I get the impression, however, that Montessori’s frequent utterances on the importance of children playing in nature somehow fell on deaf ears to a large extent. Although I have noticed changes, I still get the impression from a number of schools I have seen that the emphasis is on the environment of the classroom.

With his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv sounded the alarm call: our children are fast losing their connection with nature, and it has dire consequences. His book became a bestseller, and especially in the USA, it led directly to a large ‘back to nature’ movement. It is not restricted to children, of course. Adults need it as much. In the words of Bernie Siegel (Love, Medicine and Miracles), “A view of the outside world reminds us of our link to all life, helping us survive.”

With adults there may be a problem, however. While at a deep level we crave the connection, some of us never had it as children, and may consequently believe that we don’t want it. We see it in a related phenomenon: Little children have natural inborn expectations to be breastfed, held a lot during the first year or so and receive regular touch and affection. When they don’t get that, they grow up as adults in whom the craving for such touch and affection has not diminished at all, but whose behaviour directly rejects the very touch and affection they crave. It can be a painful process getting in touch with that.

A school friend of mine could never understand my love of nature. “It’s just grass and trees!” he used to say. When his son came on a wilderness trail in iMfolozi with me, mainly because his mother was keen for him to experience the trail, he left the trail after the first night. He was sick, and it was not difficulty to see where the sickness came from.

Critical for children to play in natural environments without constant adult supervision, guidance and control.

At the same time, the ‘back to play’ and ‘risky play’ movements are growing. In fact, all of them basically state that it is critical for children to play in natural environments without constant adult supervision, guidance and control. Why?

It was Viktor Schauberger who gave me a clue that I had always sensed intuitively. He was an interesting man who developed a very different way of looking at nature than that held by science, and consequently experienced a lot of rejection from scientists, even though some of his theories were actually proven to work. He pointed out that the features of Euclidian geometry on which our technology is based – points, straight lines, square corners and perfect circles – are never found in nature. He also pointed out that, whereas in nature the exchange of energy is always quiet, effective and without waste products, the same exchange in our technology is always associated with noise, inefficiency and pollution. Nature is alive; our technology is dead.  What is this aliveness? What is Life? Neither science nor religion really knows, as Life cannot be known intellectually. It can, however, be known through the heart.

I think Maria Montessori intuitively saw a similar relationship between our obsession with Euclidean geometry and the development of the human mind: “Children become prismatically-minded if forced to grow in rectangular ‘prisms’” (The House of Children. Kadaikanai lecture 1944, reproduced in the NAMTA Journal 38(1) Winter 2013)

Some of us have noticed that the rapid advances in technology in modern society seem to be directly paralleled by an equally rapid destruction of the natural environment, increase in wastes and a drastic decline in human happiness. Even though many of these destructive effects, particularly on children, have been well-documented in the last few decades, they are generally ignored.

Nature and technology

Why this difference and contrast between nature and our technology?

Our technology is the product of the mind. It is the result of models we have constructed and imposed on nature, rather than of a direct experience of nature. Several scientists have admitted this: “Science has nothing to do with nature,” said Max Planck, the ‘father’ of quantum physics. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning,” said Werner Heisenberg, another quantum physicist. In other words, rather than putting us in touch with the essence of nature, science gives us concepts about nature, and it is on these concepts and models that our technology is based.

Both Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg were, of course, speaking from their perspective as quantum physicists. Nobody has seen an atom, a quark or a lepton. The ‘knowledge’ we have about these takes the form of theoretical models based on the result of experiments designed by scientists. These experiments were (and are), in turn, directly related to the kind of questions the scientists ask. Apart from that, it has been shown in the same quantum physics that the kind of questions that are asked and the kind of experiments performed actually influence the kind of results. This led to the important realisation (by some) that the ‘objectivity’ of science is actually a myth.

Now let us look at observation in the context of Maria Montessori. Observation is a critical part of the Montessori approach. Does the same apply here?

Yes and no. all psychologists know that there is a link between what we believe and what we perceive. There is the famous story about a tribe on a remote island who simply did not see a ship entering a natural harbour for the first time because it did not fit their belief system. I don’t know how true it is, but there is certainly truth in the principle.

Mind and heart

We could write a whole treatise on this, but in short, it boils down to the mind and the heart. The heart tends to see things as they are. The mind tends to ‘adjust’ these observations to fit our particular belief system. I certainly have found that, as I got older and became more in touch with my heart, I started seeing things differently. Nature, for one, came much more alive as I relinquished my need to classify and analyse and just let nature be.

We still think that, if we understand something intellectually, whether medicine or plants or animals or humans or children or the ‘laws of nature’, or Montessori education, we can become good practitioners in our field. I find it ridiculous, for example, that a 25-year old can become a practitioner of the human psyche after a couple of years of intellectual study, but very little experience of life. I think a similar thing applies to Montessori teachers and, in fact, all preschool teachers. There is no need to exclude younger teachers, but I think there is a serious lack of the wisdom of older people.

Many would probably challenge what I am trying to say. “Of course the mind does all these things,” they would say, “because we are our mind!”

A consistent thread through all eastern teachings, but also through many western teachings, is that this fallacy is the basis of all our unhappiness. People such as Eckhart Tolle, Thich Nhat Hanh and the like have recently condensed these teachings and made them much more generally accessible. “Living in the now” has become quite a popular phrase. Of course, Jesus said exactly the same two millennia ago, but then we weren’t quite ready.

What all these teachings say is that we are NOT our mind, and that it is our very identification with our mind that causes our unhappiness.

Yet if we are not our mind, who are we?

Ah, the big question. Let me not try to answer that. Yet one thing seems sure: we cannot intellectually understand who we are; we can only experience it. The mind cannot understand the mind, nor can it understand a reality that extends far beyond the mind.

There is a convenient alternative term that has been in use for millennia: the ‘heart’. Although most of us know what it means, it would be very difficult to define. That is exactly because the ‘heart’ is not subject to the ‘mind’. We are, of course, not speaking about the physical structure that pumps our blood, even though we often experience our spiritual heart in more or less the same place, and although science has shown us that there is a much greater intelligence in the physical heart than previously suspected.

The ”heart” is that part that is authentic, real and experiences directly

. We could also call it our soul. A rose by any other name … The heart seeks only to be true to itself, and does not mind being wrong.

It is from this centre of our being which we call the ‘heart’ that we feel and that our intuition arises. We all know that, although science cannot, and never will be, able to explain this state of being, it is as real as, or even more real than our physical being. Some of us temporarily prefer to deny this knowledge, which is a very different kind of knowledge from the kind of knowledge seated in the mind. To open ourselves up to the knowledge of the heart can be very scary, and requires faith.

Perhaps the most important aspect: when we are authentic and truly speak from the heart, there is no conflict or competition. Even though we may express ‘negative’ emotions, the heart sees the deeper love that underlies them. Although calling himself an ‘agnostic humanist’, Carl Rogers, the most successful psychologist ever, played a vital role in promoting communication from the heart. Virtually everybody involved with counselling today uses his principles in one way or another.

Yet why all this ‘esoteric’ talk?

It may sound ‘esoteric’, but it is of grave practical importance. Our future literally depends on it. By now it should be clear that no new technology or ideology or religion or science can save us from our own self-sabotage. The mind can be a useful tool, but as long as we are identified with, and therefore controlled by the mind, our problems will continue.

The only alternative is a return to the heart.

It has always fascinated me that Jesus advised us to become like little children, and that the ‘kingdom of heaven’ belongs to them. What on earth (or in heaven) did he mean by that?!

Bernie Siegel wrote in Love, Medicine and Miracles, “I gave one of my patients, a young woman named Adrienne, a copy of Gerald Jampolsky’s book Love is Letting Go of Fear. After she’d read it, she told me, “I was like this book. I was a ‘flower child,’ in love with the world, and my parents said, ‘Grow up’. So I grew up and got cancer, and you walk in and say, ‘Become a child’. Adrienne went back to her authentic loving self and is well today. Loving doesn’t mean one hasn’t grown up. Being childlike is not childish.”

Is it coincidence that the part of the brain that accommodates rational and logical thinking – the mind – only develops in children at the age of about six years? Before that, children live from the heart. They are whole, authentic, innocent and non-judgemental. All these attributes together could be summarised by the word ‘integrity’. Children have integrity.

The mind is an expert at deception. It believes itself to be in control. Yet often (mostly?) our mind merely rationalises our denied emotions. The heart, however, cannot deceive. When we live from the heart, as young children do before they become ‘adulterated’, we cannot be other than innocent and authentic. Is this not why we as adults are so attracted to little children? Only when the mind works in harmony with the heart do we live with integrity. The state of the world is the result of a lack of integrity, or wholeness. This is not evil. It is merely a mistake.

Jesus spoke from the heart. Because the mind cannot understand forgiveness, Jesus had to speak in parables, which the heart can understand. Although religion has intellectualised it into ‘belief’, Jesus spoke about faith as a deep, direct trust in Life itself. Faith and belief are miles apart: the difference between the heart and the mind.

Was there not a great similarity between what Jesus said and what Maria Montessori said?

Back to nature.

With our intellectualisation of nature, we have alienated ourselves from nature. As a biologist, I used to think that I understood nature. I understood nothing. I only learnt to understand more of nature when I started letting go of my fixed ideas about nature.

Thousands of documentaries, beautiful as they are, subtly transform the beauty of nature into intellectual concepts and clichés and, rather than bringing us closer to nature, may actually distance us even more. Much has been written about the alienating effect that screen-based media have in and of themselves.

I have no specific need to promote hunting, but I see the worldwide reaction against hunting, for example, as an emotion-based reaction to a completely idealised concept of nature devoid of all direct experience. This may have more to do with our own emotional pain of alienation than with the realities of nature. We are happy to eat meat bought in the supermarket, though, because we have no clue, and certainly no direct experience of how that meat gets there.

What then, is ‘nature’?

Nature is That Which Is. Not as we see or interpret it, in other words judge it, but as it actually is. We can only accept and understand that which is to the extent that we ourselves are, in other words to the extent that we are authentic, or natural. This may sound easy, but it is not. We have all been indoctrinated by our various cultures to such an extent that we experience ourselves as something other than what our heart knows to be true.

As somebody once said, the journey from the head to the heart is the longest journey on earth.

Concepts and ideas about nature are not nature. The map is not the territory. For decades now ‘environmental education’ has focused on the transfer of ideas about nature coupled with subtle or not-so-subtle moralising about what we should do to ‘save’ nature. This is in principle exactly the same as coercing our children into being who they are not, which goes directly against their own ‘vital force’. It has had no effect.

There are two aspects to ‘nature’, although ultimately they are the same: nature outside us, and our inner nature. Our mind has alienated us from nature, but the heart knows that we are one with nature.

Both religion and science have led us to believe that these are two separate things and that, as a consequence, we are separate from nature. According to the Bible we were given dominion over nature, while science simply took it without asking. Because of this disconnection, the history of western civilisation has been one of the rejection and abject hatred towards both nature outside us and our inner nature. Hence the still prevalent religious concept that we are inherently evil, and the very closely related idea that sexuality is bad. If this is what we believe, how could we act otherwise, or prevent the tremendous amount of pain and aggression centred around sexuality?

Why are we so attracted to nature? If nature was an object to be studied and dissected and defined, it could not have that effect on us. The real attraction is the pull of the heart, which knows that nature calls us back to who we really are.

I took some staff and parents of the Hatfield Montessori preschool on a wilderness trail in the Pilanesberg Game Reserve once. It was the only trail in about 30 years of trailing in which we had an encounter with lions at night that could be described as decidedly aggressive. While I was busy with one lioness, another charged the other guide, who was standing in front of the ladies. Some of the trailists were highly traumatised.

Often when I told the story I said that even the black lady was white. Yet this very black lady keeps telling Shan that she wants to go on trail again!

The same applies to children. I believe that children who have no meaningful contact with nature and live only in the world of technology lose the connection with the heart.

Play

The way in which children connect with reality, both outside and inside them, is authentic play (as opposed to cultural play). Because of the presence of Life in nature, the quality of play in nature is vastly different from the quality of play with technological objects. This same Life is, of course, in us. That is why children enjoy playing with adults who are in touch with their heart.

Through contact with the technological environment, children learn to master technology. They are brilliant at doing so. An IT company dropped a whole lot of user-friendly computers in Ethiopia and just left them. There were programs on them that users could use to learn English. Children found them, figured out how to work them and even started learning English from them without any adult assistance! So yes, technology has its uses. We can’t survive without technology anymore. There is nothing wrong with technology. As there is nothing wrong with the mind.

The problem comes when we are controlled by the mind or by technology. A hammer can be very useful, but if it were to control your life, it wouldn’t be very useful anymore!

To find that balance between the mind and the heart, children need exposure to the reality of the heart.

At a previous conference I spoke about ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ play, which I practised for a number of years and found extremely rewarding. So did the children. This is because authentic play engages the heart. To play authentically, we have to let go of all need to control and all ideas about how things should be. Real or authentic people are critical for the natural development of children.

Of course, today it is very rare to find children that still play in this way, because even at the age of three years most children have been exposed to a society that displays exactly the opposite. Yet it has been shown and it has been our experience that ‘original play’ can have dramatic healing effects.

Bernie Siegel again: “exercise, laughter and play are closely related. All three need to be approached in much the same spirit, all three produce similar effects on body and mind. We may cry, but we also laugh. We work with people to help them release the child within, for we find that rigid persons who can’t let themselves play are the ones who have the hardest time healing or changing their lives to deal with illness. … Not only does play make you feel good; it’s also a disinhibitor that opens the door to creativity, an essential element of the inner changes we’ll be talking about.” And is not creativity in children and adults more important today than ever?

Authenticity has become very rare. Perhaps it always was. And so children are left with only one other source of authenticity: nature. Through their innate curiosity, their willingness to explore and to risk, through climbing trees and rocks and hills, and rolling in the grass, and picking flowers and the like children connect with nature in a way that the mind does not understand. I used to spend hours being with children, occasionally offering some support when they wanted it, while they were overcoming their fear of climbing trees. The kind of interaction between nature and the children that happened there can never be understood scientifically, yet I believe it to be critical.

If we consider people such as Wolfgang von Goethe, Jan Christiaan Smuts, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Lord Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ian Player and countless others, they have all been deeply influenced by nature. The poets among these were able to express through poetry what otherwise would be inexpressible. All religions speak of the importance of wilderness

What does this mean in practice?

I would like to venture that, because of our identification with the mind, most of us adults cannot give our children the connection to the heart they need so desperately. We can contribute to a greater or lesser extent, but that is all.

 All children need the space and time to be in a natural environment where they can feel absolutely safe and free from judgement. That means NO interference from adults.

Viktor Schauberger tells the story of a little ‘wild’ girl who came to use a swing she wasn’t supposed to use. After suspiciously making sure nobody was watching (she could not see him), she jumped on and started swinging ever more wildly, Suddenly she intuitively made a wild, complicated movement that put the swing on a different course. I don’t quite understand what the movement was, but for Viktor it solved a complex engineering problem that led him inter alia to an explanation for the movement of millipedes and snails.

Can you imagine a child doing that in a school playground? I think Montessori may have allowed children to do that.

When children take risks in nature, they intuitively know how far they can go. Most of the time they succeed. Occasionally they will fall or otherwise get hurt, but seldom seriously. Through this risk-taking, they gain a deep experiential understanding of what they are capable of doing and of what not. With this comes a deep level of self-confidence that no adult-supervised activity could give them.

At the Hatfield Montessori Preschool in Pretoria the directress, Shan Ellis, has quietly and subtly been changing her approach according to what she intuitively believed to be the best for the children. This is the school where I practiced most of my authentic play.

I recall the early days when I started playing at HMP on a regular basis about a decade ago. At that stage the children could play outside until 11h00, and then had to go in. Shan commented how their concentration, or ‘flow’, was much better after they had played. They ‘worked’ much more effectively. In other words, the ‘technological’ component became more effective as a result of the ‘heart’ component.

After a few years, a special day was allocated to play. The teachers called it ‘play-day’. The kids called it ‘Douwe-day’. Then, despite severe duress from Shan, Douwe disappeared to the Cape.

However, Shan continued. Eventually she came to the stage where no children were required to go inside anymore if they didn’t want to. Shan intuitively recognized that some children needed the play outside more than the ‘work’ inside. She works on the basic Montessori concept that for children there is no difference between ‘work’ and ‘play’, and her school quietly acquired a distinct bias towards the outdoor environment.

HMP is situated in an old Boy Scout hall. It doesn’t look as fancy and modern and neat and well-organised as many other Montessori schools. I have even heard it rumored by some that Shan’s school is not a ‘real’ Montessori school. From my interaction with many parents I gathered that what really attracted them to the school was not the Montessori philosophy as such so much as the fact that the school has heart. It is a place where children can learn to trust themselves. But then, was that not exactly what Montessori was about?

A huge advantage of the school is that, in comparison with the norm, it has a large back yard. I used to spend many hours with the children in and around the trees. Some of these have gone already, but there are more. There is a veggie garden and a lot of unstructured natural places to play.

Perhaps the next feature will be a water feature? Studies by Robin Moore have shown that water features have an important peace-enhancing effect on children. The philosophies of people like Viktor Schauberger would certainly support this.

I think Shan has quietly been doing considerable pioneer work. Although my talks on authentic play were generally well-received, Shan had such a deep faith in it that she was willing to go against the norm and make play in a natural environment an integral part of the school. I recall once mentioning this at a talk. The directress of the particular school said, “Shan is more of a role-model for us than many realise.”

The problem, of course, is that it will be very difficult to measure the effects of her approach. As a result, many will remain unconvinced. Many others, however, will recognise the value of what she does from the heart.

The world’s problems are not caused by a lack of knowledge. Nor are they caused by a lack of food. They are caused by inappropriate use of knowledge, usually for the benefit of a few at the cost of the many, political interference with food distribution, and so on. The reason for this has nothing to do with knowledge, but everything with the authenticity and integrity (wholeness) of the people using it. It has everything to do with love, which is letting go of fear.

Do we want to produce children who fit well into the very ‘system’ that is causing our demise, or do we want children who will have the inner strength to trust their own ‘vital force’; their own authenticity, and from that authenticity lead a life of integrity in which they are not afraid to challenge the norms and values of an insane society? Children who are not afraid to ignore current concepts and dogmas of how things are in order to discover and create an entirely new approach to life?

Just about every great scientist or religious leader in history who has gone against traditional dogma to pursue new possibilities has been marginalised, ridiculed, ostracised, burnt on the stake and even crucified. It requires great courage and integrity to keep your faith while standing alone. This is exactly what is NOT being taught at school. In fact, it cannot be taught. We can only provide the conditions, lack of judgement and acceptance necessary for children to develop their integrity from inside. Allowing them to play in a natural environment is, I believe more and more strongly, a critical aspect of this.

“The children are the future,” sang Whitney Houston. “Show them all the beauty they possess inside and let them lead the way.” When we stop trying to control them, at least at times, by ceasing all guidance, instruction and judgement, we send a powerful metamessages: I trust that you have your own internal wisdom. They will not disappoint us.

How long will we insist that our children should conform to ‘school readiness’ and norms and standards devised by the ‘experts’ in order to fit into culturally defined normality? The same normality that is leading to our demise? Some studies have shown that children who learn to read at eight or nine at age ten read as well as, and often better than children who learnt at age five or six. My cousin had endless problems at school, and was eventually referred to a school for the mentally handicapped. When he got to university, he flourished. He received all his degrees cum laude and became a successful businessman. There are thousands of stories like this.

It takes nothing less than faith from us. Faith in our children and faith in ourselves. Children receive much better direction from their intrinsic ‘vital force’ or ‘horme’ than they can ever receive from any adult. In a natural environment they receive the kind of support which no human-designed environment can give. All we need to give them is our love, which is acceptance and lack of judgement. Nature can generally give much more of this than we can. We also had our ‘vital force’, and we still have it. In our case, however, it has mostly been overridden by fear. Fear leads to chaos.

“Become like little children,” Jesus said. Through faith in our children we may develop faith in ourselves and become whole. The world needs people who are whole.