Lucidity

So here's a long overdue update:

Looking back at my post of Oct. 21, a metaphor of being in a dream and lacking lucidity has come to mind.

The first few two months in Xi'an were a vivid, happy dream. I was falling in love with Wáng Nán. Falling in love is like a dream in that we go with the flow of it's joyous thrill. I was also making a new friend, Charles, and seeing many new things.

In my teaching, I was busy enough just gaining confidence and seeing what worked in the application of what I'd been trained in, and what didn't, in an actual classroom with unique, individual students. So I didn't have to put much effort into finding sources for the development of my teaching.

Then, when I moved to the Da Yan Ta (Big Wild Goose Pagoda) neighborhood, south of where I'd been downtown, and began the next term of teaching at my permanent location, Aston 2, the dream began to dull. I disliked the feel of my new neighborhood. I had to begin seeing Wáng Nán once a week, as she went back to school, and couldn't hang out with Charles very often at all. The limitations of what I knew in being able to really help my students learn to use English for real communication became more apparent and therefore the need to do something different began to feel more urgent.

When Astons 1 and 2 were closed down for 3 weeks due to H1N1, I was given a chance to rest and gather some resources that feed my spirit, such as a copy of the Yi Jing, which I've began to explore in practice through tossing coins and drawing the hexagrams. But because I then had no structure of work to my weekly life, it was in some ways just postponing my having to deal with with the changes mentioned above. I do think though that my explorations with the Book of Changes helped me get out of the depressed funk that these changes and being sick had gotten me in. "Viewing (Hexagram 20)" represents my attempt to gain more lucidity through mapping the intersection of these spiritual ideas, Chinese poetry, and my lament over the changes happening in my life and their connection to Xi'an's geography of north and south and the fading of Summer into Autumn.

When I returned to teaching, I was at first enthusiastic and energetic. Starting work can do that I suppose. But the stress of the job, in part increased by my over-conscious feeling of the urgency to improve, soon sent me into the worst manifestation of this feeling of being in a dream of which I had no lucid control. I was completely unable to focus on anything for almost a week. It was to the point of psychosomatic symptoms; I felt like I had a headache or light-headed.

This strange-feeling week pushed me to do something different. I hadn't talked much to my friends and family back home in a long while. So made time to talk to them. I'd been putting off taking a formal Chinese class and finding a place to learn taiji, thinking I should get my work load under control first. As this didn't seem to be working, I just got involved. I found that I could focus and be more efficient when planning my lessons now that I was doing other fulfilling things doing the week. Also, I had fortunately gotten some suggestions from the guy who does class observations of books to read on second language acquisition, and professional development in second language teachers. It put me in touch with sources that validated my sense of unease with our teaching method and gave me paths for changing it and improving.

I think the concept of lucidity is quite good in explaining the features of my experience.

lucid:

1. expressed clearly; easy to understand : a lucid account | write in a clear and lucid style. See note at sensible .
• showing ability to think clearly, esp. in the intervals between periods of confusion or insanity : he has a few lucid moments every now and then.
• Psychology (of a dream) experienced with the dreamer feeling awake, aware of dreaming, and able to control events consciously.

Lucidity has to with a level of consciousness. Leo van Lier, a theorist of language learning drawing on cognitive science, whose idea I've come into contact with through "Persuing Professional Development: the Self as Source" - which I reproduce below - outlines four levels of consciousness:

Level 1: Global (intransitive) consciousness is "just being alive and awake".
Level 2: Awareness (or transitive consciousness) is consciousness of something. It involves "perceptual activity of objects and events in the environment, including attention, focusing, and vigilance."
Level 3: Metaconsciousness is one's "awareness of the activity of the mind..."
Level 4: Voluntary action, reflective processes,and mindfulness are "deliberate and purposeful engagement in actions."

The book goes on to say, "In discussing consciousness and language, van Lier says that 'as consciousness develops and becomes more richly layered, it becomes more intertwined with language'."

This offers an explanation for my feeling of being 'out of' words before and that writing's confused, rusty use of the English language. Living in a foreign country, and even falling in love, are confusing and make you a bit insane. Being in a foreign country, your ability to focus on what's happening around you is impeded by the fact that you lack the cultural framework to really understand much of it. In my experience, levels of consciousness are interconnected in that if you weaken in one level there is a tendency to backslide into lower levels; you maintain consciousness in one level by stretching yourself into another. So, my own metaconsciousness and awareness were handicapped by being in China. (I'm aware that it is probably also true that this experience heightens your consciousness in some areas.) This sent me gradually into Level 1 consciousness, which I think I felt acutely during my 'adrift week'. This level involves very little language, thus explaining my 'out of' words feeling. It also seems possible that being a language environment where I could only understand lower level utterances when I was out and about put me into this level; that the stripping down of language caused a change in my level of consciousness rather than vice versa.

Anyway, I want to talk more about this and my plans to keep stretching into the higher levels, but I have to get to work now, so hopefully I will soon.