On May 18, the Wisdom School of Graduate Studies will begin its new course: Neuroscience in a Hypercomplex World: Principles and Practice. Taught by Dr. Will Taegel (Dean of WSGS) and Jim Hickman (Chairman of Ubiquity University), this online course will meet twice a week over a seven-week period in a combined intellectual and personal practice learning experience that can make you more effective and comfortable in an increasingly complex and challenging world.
Over the past 30 years, we have learned more about the brain and its effect on our behavior (neuroscience) than in all the millennia of human history. At the same time, the last 100 years of development in science and society have given rise to an increasing emphasis on the nature of complex systems as essential to understanding our interior and exterior worlds.
In this course, we will explore how complexity has given rise to hypercomplexity. This, in turn, has given birth to new forms of knowledge and practice emerging alongside older forms. We will learn about the brain's primary operating system, a hypercomplex world in itself, that gives us a window into how our interior and exterior worlds collaborate and affect our physiology and experience. We will combine this intellectual component (Mondays) with a practice component (Fridays) to apply our learning to our daily lives.
For example, we now know that the brain is flexible and can change its shape and function throughout our entire lifetime. This "neuroplasticity" is reflected in the concept that the mind can change the brain, which changes the mind. Such a capacity for expansion or contraction influences our thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting in ways that either keep us habituated to certain behaviors or can set us free for new ways of expressing ourselves in the world.
This understanding informs our practice in which we will emphasize how a neuroscience informed set of interior exercises can assist us in dealing with an unpredictable future that accompanies increasing hypercomplexity. This will include the integration of older forms of wisdom and practice with new insights from neuroscience and quantum physics that reveal hidden capacities within each one of us; capacities that are needed to live successfully in a rapidly escalating complex social environment.
Will and Jim will be joined by several guest faculty throughout the course, including noted psychology professor Dr Stanley Krippner, and best-selling author in the fields of consciousness, mysticism, and energy medicine, Caroline Myss.
Next week, we will send you a video featuring Jim Hickman expanding on the Neuroscience course.
We hope to see you on May 18th when all of us dive into a new world of possibilities and practice that hold a promise for a more liveable future for all living beings.
