Health Actuzlization As A Primary Responsibility

Recently, I've been working with some "recovered" stroke patients, to help them expand their capabilities -- and at first, I wasn't sure about this, but my feeling grew that their "recovery" was actually a dysfunctional one -- to where they used to be, rather than what is fully possible for them, and not just getting back to where they used to be, but now disabled and handicapped.

It is not unlike the adjustment of healthy people who go on to compensate for their disabilities by developing extraordinary abilities -- that seem at first bizarre but really may be the most logical adaptation -- of painting with one's feet or mouth. People get good at what they want to or need to -- and won't, if others are too willing to help them in every little matter, even if they could do it for themselves.

Such people have a need to be needed and so vastly complicate the maladjustments, dependencies and arrested development. As I was teaching computer skills or determining if there was any movement possible at an extremity or limb, I kept encountering the question of whether the limits were actual physical limits, or merely conditioned and expected responses.

My question often was, if you cannot move that hand or feet individually, can you use all the other functioning muscles of your body to move relative to that part that you cannot move otherwise -- because I've long-noted that if one can produce a change, in the end, it doesn't matter what changed, or how it changed.

What matters is that one can consistently produce that effect -- which is why there is no "cheating" if one can reliably come up with the answers. That is very disturbing to the traditional mind that thinks that one should only be able to come up with one's answer without the use of calculators -- and then others, might be more insistent that it should also not be calculated on a scratch paper -- or the answer should even be just the answer regurgitated back from memory/instruction, and not induced by logic or independence of thought. All those are arbitrary handicaps on learning -- and doing anything.

A major precondition for learning and conditioning still popular to this day, is the belief that learning anything should be made hard and difficult, and as a reward, should be made harder and more difficult still -- until, at the highest levels of achievement, nobody could know what it is that is actually going on in one's mind. At that point, one was pronounced "brilliant," and the next day, hospitalized and confined, for bizarre and antisocial behavior.

So when one does suffer one of these calamities that set one back in life, is recovery going back to where one used to be although greatly impaired and forgiven for that lack of proficiency and competence, or would recovery be actually an improvement from the limitations of their past? -- because as I increasingly noticed, that the limitations to progress were not so much a lack of functioning and present capacity -- but an erroneous learning style that actually limited (re)learning anything at all.

That is the difference between learning by rote (memory, knowledge, thought) -- and learning directly from one's actual experiences and choices. Computer students know this difference as the difference between the previous sequential data processing model and the current random accessing of information (virtual reality) -- even if one has not encountered such an experience or learning previously, yet succeeding nevertheless.

Up to twenty-five years ago, to the appropriate landmark date of "1984," most of the learning done and conducted, was with this sequential accessing of information (memory) -- to previously learned knowledge, and if it wasn't learned prior, it could not effectively be encountered (processed) -- since the answer could only be that which was previously known, and could just not be discovered by anyone -- who was not properly and appropriately recognized to conduct that inquiry.

So it was a landmark in quite a different way than was widely anticipated and thought about -- because the change was much more profound -- in the ending of time, as a precondition to learning -- which is a difficult concept for those educated largely prior to that paradigm shift. Prophetically enough, the most memorable image and commercial of that time, was broadcast during the halftime of the SuperBowl in that year -- in which a woman warrior, threw a sledgehammer through the projected image of Big Brother representing centralized (sequential) information processing and the control of IBM mainframe dominance (hierarchy) of data processing departments.

In my concurring many years of meeting some fairly extraordinary people, discovering their own realities and potentials guided their ultimate development rather than merely conformance to predetermined charts of expectancies and outcomes -- that allowed for no deviations even if it represented a better possibility (adaptations). So it has been quite a liberation in the thinking that any condition one presently is in -- has a greater possibility for actualization than has been thought possible, if one can in fact, discover this new reality himself -- without a preconceived notion of what he has to go back to.

"Can you go and do what you haven't done before -- as easily as what you have only known before?"