Introduction to the STA project

'''What is the inherent nature of human beings? Is it to be servile, powerless, violent, abusive, exploitative, driven by unbidden desires and moods? Or is it more fundamentally to be zestful, in charge of our relationships, cooperative, loving and dynamic?'''

If we feel any doubt or confusion surely it makes sense to assume the viewpoint which gives us hope and leads to more interesting possibilities? I would suggest that the first description is not inherent but a legacy of history that we can choose to extricate ourselves from. To do this we need to get a clearer picture of our inherent nature. What are we? There exist very few clear maps of our basic faculties.

The elements of our mind and body that together make us who we are. It is from these basic faculties that our more complex abilities arise and yet their development tends to be haphazard, unbalanced and unconsidered. Lack of ability was often attributed to some kind of inferior inheritance, but this is now a discredited idea. And it is widely recognised that all human beings have a potential which far outstrips current appearances.

To take full control of our abilities it is helpful to be able to picture them in an organised manner. This text provides a clearly structured and comprehensive presentation of our basic elemental abilities and ways to experience them. These elements of our power actually make us who we are. They underly more complex abilities and tasks - like rearing children or making art. Such a conscious approach to human ability would signal the end of our development as a victim of the largely irrational and barbarous process of History and the emergence of a mature period of Conscious Evolution in which We decide what we want to become rather than passively accepting our fate.

Mythology has provided us with many stories of witches and wizards who could change their shape at will often taking on the shape of animals with supra human qualities. This vision of metamorphosis was an imaginative insight into the nature of our being. Existing religions and systems of self improvement do address, stimulate and improve our abilities to some degree. However they all share an important failing. All deny the power of the individual to take charge of their own development. The function of religious practices is often not made clear. We are not invited to make an assessment of their usefulness and discard them if they serve no purpose. It is all a bit of a mish mash which we are usually asked to take as a whole as an act of faith. A clear comprehensive model of our functioning, which we can tinker with, is never provided.

I aim to suggest a system which is broken down into basic component abilities, represented by separate exercises. Any exercise that was not working for a group or individual could always be replaced or improved on. The system is open to criticism and change and growth in response to what we learn in practice and as conditions change. Although these exercises may be amalgamated and otherwise built into cultural rituals and practices they will always refer back to concrete human faculties. They need not become vacuous rituals whose origin and purpose is lost in the mists of the past. As they lose their function they can be replaced. Culture, education and religion will be continually under review and will be reinvented in response to changing needs.

This wiki is structured so that your faculties may be developed in a pattern that is appropriate to your personal requirements. It can be adapted to peoples needs rather than people struggling to fit into fixed utopian or idealist systems. On a mundane level most people will be too tied up with received ideas to make such radical eclectic departures, however such a map is still useful as a relatively objective reference point against which the rationality of aspects of our culture may be measured.

Literary book knowledges beat down the lower class oral-visual knowledges in the early Enlightenment period in Europe. See particularly the work of Barbara Stafford. This led to a demotion of these skills and information from the realm of 'serious' knowledge.
 * "The mind-shaping powers of the ocular, tactile, kinaesthetic, and auditory skills remain scarcely articulated in the tale of Western civilisations turn to the cultivation of the interior."


 * Stafford, Barbara Maria. 'Artful Science: englightenment entertainment and the eclipse of visual education' MIT 1994 pXXII

An education system built up from these basic principles of pleasure would result in a much less culturally predetermined person. The goal of education would be the person rather than a systemic role. Culture would become more clearly a matter of heritage, choice and play rather than an obligation or straightjacket.


 * "The important thing is that the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics be raised at this level, the level of the sensible delimitation of what is common to the community, the forms of its visibility and its organisation" Jacque Ranciere The Politics of Aesthetics, continuum 2004 (orig 2000) p 18

A world culture created from such a conscious view of ourselves would be one that was aware of our local needs and individual channels of expression. It would be richer, multifaceted, flexible. It would tend towards a globally + rationally defined human being rather than being a set product of particular traditional cultures. Although traditional cultures would be a rich source of inspiration and choice. Its drive would be to make evolution a conscious process. We would take charge of evolution and who we are to become.

The idea for this body of information arose from research into basic human life support under the headings of Shelter, Food and Energy. Whilst researching the book on energy I came across a detailed description of an ideal way of standing in Iyengar's book on yoga. I then thought of Francis Bacon's Idols of the Mind as similarly basic thinking about another area of human abilities. I wondered if a collection could be made which covered all the basic human abilites. I kept this information in a loose leaf ring binder. After a couple of years a structure emerged that seemed a good compromise between simplicity and catholicity. This was the dynamic triad;

SENSE

THINK ACT

The senses pick up information in various media from outside and inside the body. They monitor what is happening. This sensory information then travels along nerve pathways to the brain where it is compared with past experience and analysed. The result of this processing is a decision to do or not do. Doing something inevitably requires movement and muscle action; whether it be writing a poem, taking evasive action in the face of attack or chewing the top of your pencil.

This sequence provides a model for the organisation of the information that seeds this wiki. In reality it should be borne in mind that senses, mind and muscle are a interdependent and closely integrated unity. In particular we can only experience the senses through their mental effects, or our perception. However it still seems useful to distinguish between direct sense perception and mental processes that have a more distant relation to the senses.

Anomalies

Provenance

critiques of the STA model applied to human ability

The knowledge we gain through experience is in some ways the most potent type of knowledge. It is the experience of doing that impresses us most deeply. You can read a book about driving, but until you get behind the wheel and switch on the ignition you don't really begin to know about driving. This information is about the faculties through which all our knowledge flows. The key knowledge that preceeds all other knowing. To look to learn how to see. To think about thinking. To flick through index cards to find an exercise on dexterity. I wanted at the end of the day to provide a catalyst to our fundamental functioning rather than prescribe what other people should be doing.

The whole draft set was going to be a book but the publisher went bust, and just as it did the internet came along. I then had to wait for wikis to be developed.

Seed data author: Stefan Szczelkun (researched between 1976 - 2004)

MediaWiki Webmaster: Gordo

Support: Martin at SPC.ORG

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Schematic diagram alternative

link to CRITERIA for choosing exercises to add to this site