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20240202 Co-Creative Design Team – Session 4
📅 Co-Creative Design Team Session 4 Summary – February 2, 2024
👤 Spiritual Consultant/Facilitator:
Machiventa Melchizedek, through T/R Daniel Raphael
Sherille Raphael in attendance
Planetary Policies for Sustainable Families
👥 Design Team Members:
- Juan Vicente Ramirez
- David Hernandez
- Marthe Muller
- Bea Ngai
- Geoff Thomas
📑 Topics
⬇️ Download the Design Team Process
The thing that we have been missing, of course, is our training to participate in a team. We have simply begun by me assuming the role of facilitator, Marthe the role of recorder, and you the roles of inquiring members. What we are missing is the consultant, and that is a person who looks at the large overall progress of the team as it discusses its topic. That fits into the larger genre of planetary management. We haven’t had that training. I would recommend to you that you download the design team process from my Google website, which I call my Google Library. It has those rules, and they’re described, and you could copy and paste those sections and put them through Google Translate so that it can translate that material into your native language. I think this would be really helpful.
The learning process when we are in-person becomes much more intimate, meaning that you can more easily see nonverbal cues from people about their satisfaction, or their happiness, or their joy, as reflected in facial expressions. And also, those things that are upsetting or somehow doesn’t fit with your thoughts of what we’re doing, or you may disagree. I think we’re doing fairly good so far. One thing that I found in the design team, and I have conducted, probably not quite a dozen yet, design teams around the United States and Mexico: It requires a great deal of humility, and I call it assertive humility, because if you’re too humble and you’re too receding, then you are not participating to the degree that you make a contribution to the topic or to the discussion.
When you are humble, it means that you know you have something to say, and if it fits in, you will want to raise your hand and speak your piece, so that it fits in nicely with the rest of the conversation or discussion.
A point of procedure: If I am TR/ring Machiventa, then Sherille will touch me on the shoulder to let me know that someone has their hand raised and wants to speak. I would really like you to read what is pertinent and important to you in your role.
Inquiring members: when we are in a design team that is dedicated to one topic, then everything that was said contributes to that one topic. When we got into family last week, the topic of family just kind of exploded and we got that all over us, so to speak. And there are many topics that were covered and not covered very well. I’ve had a request from a couple of members during the week that they would like to finish up the topic on family.
🏠 Family as a Social Institution
Let me begin that process as your facilitator, meaning that, when we talk about the family, it is really the production engine for society. It produces new generations. It brings children into the world as adults. As you can examine in your own nations, a lot of the people, all citizens, are really poorly prepared for participating in the group process of the nation.
In fact, it basically does not exist very well in the United States. So the question would be, now that you are in the role of being a planetary manager, and we are actual planetary managers, we’re learning the role of planetary managers by doing this work.
And in doing this work as a planetary manager, we are looking at the spectrum of 50 to 250 years, as the time when we would measure some progress of the programs that we have instituted now.
The question is: If we want to improve the quality of citizens in the future, so that they are able to think in terms larger than just their community or neighborhood, and become effective citizens, we would have to design teams in every school district.
🛠️ The Design Team as a Tool for the Correcting Time
And the design team is really a learning environment, as the individual members learn how to participate in a team, and the team participates in the larger state, local, or state or federal national level by making their contributions. You have seen on American news and elsewhere where people gather together, and pretty soon it is a shouting match, name calling, and even, in some nations, in the Congress, it has gone to fisticuffs, meaning that they have physically fought it out, when they have encountered opinions that are different than theirs.
From a distance, that’s kind of humorous, but on the basis of civility and the conduct of nations, and the welfare of millions of people, that’s really barbaric.
What can we do to produce a generation in a local community, where the quality of that individual who is becoming an adult matches our expectations, or the quality specifications we want. Where would you begin? What would you teach? Who would you teach?
🏫 Family Learning Centers
Think in terms of an outcome, let us say, that we start a program in a local school district, to produce children who, in 20 years, would be socially capable, competent and responsive.
Jacques: There are two options, you can teach or train the parents, but personally I will teach the children. Very early in their schooling, I will teach this generation and I will invite the parents too, but for me the target is the children first.
Daniel Raphael: In this program I’m going to fill in some blanks as we go along. I’ve been thinking about this design team and the family and this educational process for at least 15, if not 20 years. There would be a program in the school district, as a separate organization. It would be a Family Learning Center, and in this centre, it would teach all age groups/ OK. We would have 20 people who come on a Tuesday night to learn about parenting and child rearing. We would have something for everybody. Some children, of course, are too young to be in a classroom by themselves. They would be with their parents.
We would have a liaison with the school board and the school districts’ academic classes.
Bea Ngai: I see that we’re associating the training of children not only with the family at home, but also with a Family Learning Center, and now you’re wanting to associate that with the school district, which I think is a great idea. Now my question is. Who would there be outside? I mean, I think there should be outside experts that are outside of the school district that are leading the family center. I also believe that there should be involvement by local parents as well, or if one family has an older child, they can be a mentor for a family with a younger child, and you can pair these people together. I see it as being like didactic at one level, interactive at the second level and then mentorship, like interactive as in role-playing or exercises and stuff like that.
Daniel Raphael: You’re into program development right now, and that’s beyond us right now, as we’re looking at big generalities. Now when I say school district, I don’t mean operationally at all. Public education is way too political for us to engage in. We would have supplemental material for the school district, for the state school program that they could use, but we’re not going to be going getting our boots on the ground in any school building. And we will not integrate ourselves organizationally with them In this.
In this regard, and I’ll play the role of the consultant now. This is going to sound arrogant, but we know the way and we’re going to go that way. Public education has messed it up. They don’t produce a large percentage of children who graduate and are fully competent for entering into society. And so, if we know the way, we’re going to go our way, and if they want to pick some of that material up, we’ll give it to them or sell it to them.
📃 Agreement on a Curriculum
Stéphane Labonté: What came into my mind when we were discussing this, is we agreed there’s going to be some teaching, and we assume everybody involved agrees with the curriculum of that teacher, but when we see the disarray in the world, we can’t even agree on what to discuss. Well, right now, there are disagreements about even what’s important, what’s not important and what is best for society, or what’s best for people. There’s complete disagreement, towards the rebellious way of thinking, “We should be able to say whatever we want.” And there’s another, that is more level minded, that says, “OK, we should be doing what is best for society and for human beings.” So, when you say we’re going to be teaching this curriculum, how are you going to invite and attract people to this curriculum and have them all agree that this should be taught to their children, which is a huge point of contention in society right now? I’m just looking at this realistically, maybe we’re thinking 100 years down the road when there’s been an apocalyptic event. Everybody’s been brought down to their knees and have finally seen the light, right, and are willing to enrol?
Daniel Raphael: Yes, Stefan. You’re so right with the disagreement. The program as I see it at this point is about the ethics, and the morality of the seven values, and that we use that as the core program development within the Learning Center.
Stéphane Labonté: And people are attracted to this voluntarily. OK, got it. We don’t need to explain any further. I think we’re making that assumption, right?
Daniel Raphael: Yes, exactly, yes. Then we begin by hiring people who Want to participate. And so, it becomes easier at that point to install our program in Learning Centers. There will be people from the outside, of course. Everybody’s on the outside now because nobody’s on the inside except us. Seven people. We would hire people for their talents and for their expertise and for their genuine regard for children becoming adults. I have children now who are 53, 48 and 43.
And these children have children, so, I have 5 grandchildren. When I was raising my children back in 70s and 80s, they were what I call humane education. Materials were really beginning to bloom and be produced, and that the old didactic, a process that began with Doctor Spock and his idiocy of regimented child rearing carried over into the educational system, so, with regards to 50 years ago, this is revolutionary.
🎓 Educating Our Future Leaders
You know, strategically we want to have our children become the future leaders that we would look up to, and other people would look up to and would regard with respected appreciation. What we’re talking about here today is the putting of a bow around this family education process, so that we can move on. And of course, this is very important today because we are setting the standards for all the other programs.
We want to create a coherence among all the social sciences.
And of course, the social sciences come to rest in the family and in the early learning, so we’re changing, and that includes the family, to become more humane in preparation for that child becoming an adult, to live productively in the adult society. These people will become our policemen and women, our police commissioners, our county commissioners, our chief accountants, our Treasury executives and on and on and on. We want to instil in them a regard for the lives of others on an empathic basis. We want to have an empathy for those children who will then become the adults who will care for us old people.
How do we get this started? This is really a difficult topic, as we’re designing a program that doesn’t have any funding. We want to design a Family Learning Center that some benefactor would want to invest in or gift. I’m not talking about a highly professional group where everybody makes, you know $100,000 a year, but that would have some volunteers. Everybody would meet qualifications for their participation. Yes, they would have to provide their criminal reports and their background checks and so on. We don’t want any sexual predators with our children.
📚 Producing Books and Educational Materials
David Hernández Nafarrate: David noted that one could bring out amazing books and extraordinary films. We could work on the development of a book on Family Learning Centers for Sustainable Nations.
📏 Standards to Achieve
Daniel Raphael: Well, these things I’ve written are just the beginning of much larger works. You know me as being a social architect, and I have dropped into your lap the basic foundations of these programs. After I’m gone, and during the time I have remaining, these projects hopefully will be taken up by others who want to begin to begin to expand them into those volumes.
For instance, in pages 15 through 24 of the Family Learning Centers, it speaks about the standards that we want to achieve in the children who complete the program with their parents and enter society. We want to have these children with a good self-image.
How do we do that? How do you teach children how to develop a good self-image? I didn’t include that in the book. I’m just saying that a healthy, positive, constructive self-image is very important for the child who becomes an adult.
Geoff Thomas: OK. We’re talking about self-identity, self-worth, self-image, purpose and meaning.
Daniel Raphael: On each one of those you could write a book, Geoff.
Geoff Thomas: So, having established that we need these Family Learning Centers, as has been stated many times in the past, we have to decide about what sort of curricula we’re going to include in those Learning Centers, which involves finding out what are the best practices of child rearing worldwide. Really, so that we can see what we all have in common. We can see what has worked and what hasn’t worked. So, I think we have to do that work of doing that research. Otherwise, we don’t really know what we’re talking about.
Daniel Raphael: Yes, that’s correct. We know, just by looking at you wonderful people, that you’re fairly well civilized, that you have you have a conscience. Where did you get that conscience? How was that instilled in you?
When you came into the world as a day-old infant, you brought with you some basic estimations of right and wrong that became more expressive as you got older.
And those were reinforced by your parents, hopefully and by others, and grandparents hopefully, so that you became able to have relationships with others.
⚖️ Ethics and Etiquette in Family Education
And this is the source of ethics. Ethics has to do with the right and wrong of our relationships with others and with ourselves. Now, if you want to take that further, ethics is more refined in etiquette, social etiquette, the rights and wrongs of social interaction. There have been books written about etiquette.
This is to give us an advantage in relationships so that we can be develop them into friendships. And yes, even in romantic, intimate relationships, there is an etiquette. There are the things you do and the things you don’t do. And refinement of etiquette is manners. Manners is a subsection of etiquette. When you’re sitting at a dining room table and you’re a guest. What do you do? Do you just reach over everybody and grab a bowl and start scooping food into your plate?
Probably not. You would wait for the host to guide the conduct of the passing of the food. Does it go to the left or does it go to the right? Doesn’t make any difference, but the host sets the standard. That’s manners, right?
So, etiquette and ethics. They allow us to have relationships, productive relationships without ego, without self-entitlement without being an authority or being a bully.
I am giving you a very broad picture of social conduct, and this is what we want children to learn. We would perhaps have our children, when they are able to sit at a table, a small table with other children, to learn etiquette and to learn manners. And this gets down to the fine-tuning of ethics.
Ethics are those rules that help us conduct our social relationships with others. In fact, this is so important that they call it diplomacy, at international levels, and diplomacy in management, and employee relationships, and in labor unions, and so on.
🚫 Aggressiveness Sucks – Promoting Respectful Interaction
Hey, you see, when we begin to think of ethics in relationships and etiquette and so on, we know it comes down to humility. You got to take the ego out.” I’m more important than you are.” “You’re more important than I am.” Neither one of those positions works. It absolutely does not work.
And so, when you begin to think of this in international terms, you can see why people of other countries, nationalities, nations, have a hard time with the United States. In some ways, we in the United States are benevolent bullies. It’s just kind of the way it is. It’s really unfortunate. It is passive aggressive. Aggressiveness sucks. It just doesn’t work.
What is the operational definition of good relationships? What is the operational definition of being polite? Oh, there must be 100 examples.
So, there would be some families who would be interested in that. You see, the nuances of coherence at a societal level begins in the family. Where there’s a smoothness, there’s certainty, and that is given to children, and they learn the smoothness. It’s not to be used as manipulation, but it really helps relationships.
And amenability works too. It needs to be healed, so there are ways of doing that, and we must learn that too. Bullies have the domain, by their strength and their aggressiveness, and to hurt others, to bend them to their will. This doesn’t work, whether you’re a national leader, or a kid in the playground.
And how to be? The height of humility is to be a big person and kind. That’s impressive, and Jesus had that. I don’t know what stature he was, but anyhow he was recognized as a powerful person who loved people. He was always curious about the other person.
And so, when we develop these programs, we are curious to see who these children become? You know what makes a difference in their life, so that they become powerful kind leaders.
We have some financial giants in the world, who are just. *** heads. They are not kind. They are not nice.
🔍 Looking for Best Practices
Geoff Thomas: I just wanted to put forward a suggestion. Coming to understand these best practices, which is basically what you’re talking about within the family. Should we begin where we are and find people that seem to have well-adjusted lives?
Daniel Raphael: Yes, and interview them as to how that came about.
Geoff Thomas: I think if we all do that within our own nations, or within our own communities, that would be a start at least. To start to get some information that we could input into this team.
Daniel Raphael: I love where Martha lives. have met some really, really beautiful people down there first hand. They’re very kind people, and of course there are very mean and very bad people, so it doesn’t make any difference where you find these people, but you’re looking for good examples of humanitarian, socialized individuals. Socialized, they know how to get along with themselves and with others. So, you’re exactly right, that would be the beginning point. I wish I could pay all of you enough to make you independent of your employment, so you could go into your neighborhoods and interview people. If you interviewed 200 people, that would be a chore. To find those talents, what made them great? What made them socialized and so on?
Bea Ngai: Most of my friends have children that are much older than mine. They’re entering adulthood and I spoke to one of them, who is very, very mature for his age, and really, what I got from him was that his upbringing was very influenced by his parents and specifically, how they raised him, and the example that they provided. Children, especially younger ones, are sponges, who pick up on things in the family dynamic, including how the parents are interacting with another child. You would be surprised how much they pick up. So good parenting has to start with a good example from the parents and also the right amount of support. You know, they talk about authoritarian parents and authoritative parents, you know, and the difference is how you approach the child or how you’re trying to make them feel. Are you trying to control their behavior without regard for how they feel, or are you trying to, you know, mold their behavior with discipline, but with the idea that you want them to know that you are doing it for their own good, that during the entire process they are valued and respected, that they feel respected and valued by their parents and loved. You know, these are very, very important things when raising a child, within any family.
Daniel Raphael: Thank you. Yes, you’re exactly right. Having been a child and remembering my childhood very, very clearly and distinctly, I did a lot of observations of others, parents, grandparents. My father was a farmer and he interacted with other farmers who came by and talked about whatever.
You know, some smoked and some didn’t. One of them looked at me and I was the little guy and not in school yet. Four or five, I guess, and I looked at this guy and he was smoking, and he says, “You want a puff of this?” and he looked at my dad and my dad says, “Yeah, go ahead.” So, I took a puff from his cigarette, coughed myself to death, never smoke since. OK, so there’s lessons to be learned from positive influences and negative ones and you alluded to a number of influences in a person’s life that we want to tap into. And so, our fundamental question, that I would begin, with an adult, or a young adult, at least someone in their teens, I would ask them, what were the major influences in your life and how did you learn them?
That’s actually two questions. We want to find the source, the most powerful influence, and what did they learn? These become the universal models eventually of how all people learn. There will be cultural differences between Hispanics and the Inuit. We may find a difference between all the white cultures, whether it’s in Australia or New Zealand and the Nordic countries, for instance. We want to find the universals of life and learning, and the modes in which people learn at early ages that will help them model their lives, and that’s what we’re looking for. Models in our society that we will interview and where did they get their models?
Was it a grandfather? Was it an uncle? Was it a neighbor? Was it someone else? You never can tell.
Gender differences in parenting
Marthe: Thank you very much, Daniel. This goes back to the idea of models. There’s a beautiful comment I once heard that spoke about children being exposed to the “adjustment of antagonisms” between their parents, and because we know that it’s so, and the Urantia book says that men and women are almost from different species and so we know that is the primary model that children will be exposed to. People trying to have a good relationship with all the social etiquette and the social manners that they’ve acquired, but finding it difficult. If you could also just speak about that. The differences between masculinities and femininities in those modeling relationships that children need to be exposed to, because on top of all the millions of different examples of different cultures that children will be exposed to, they have that primary relationship of two people who often don’t understand each other.
Daniel Raphael: Yes, what I’m trying to do here is trying to get you acquainted, as interviewers, as cultural anthropologists, to think in these terms about learning what is of influence, and of course we talked about the negative ones last time and I don’t want to go there at all this time. I’ll just address this that way, if a child has been exposed to predation, whether it’s sexual, social, whatever it may be, then they will most likely express that in their adulthood, particularly the more powerful the identification is.
And that’s why we used sexual predation as being the most powerful because it just, once it is imprinted, it’s like ducklings. They just don’t change, and they express that in their lives, and it would take great effort not to.
So yes, there are definite differences, and these have been written about extensively. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, yadda yadda yadda. If you read that book for what we are looking for, you could find those differences in those tactics very, very quickly and very useful, so when we do this work, we will have interviewers such as yourselves going into your communities and interviewing best examples of adults and of young adults, because in our learning centers, we will be addressing the social needs of children through elder years.
And then we will have a team looking at all of the historic literary research that has been done in libraries and there has been, you know, there’s 10s of thousands, not just thousands but 10s of thousands of books written about human development. And each era has been examined in great detail, and what we’re doing here is for each Learning Center, we want boots on the ground, culturally specific ways that people can identify with in their cultural learning.
We want to make it easy to teach people ethical social conduct and you know, you know, and I know and Canadians know, the Irish know, the Americans know, the tremendous religious violations of white man, who think they know best for other people, that’s just . It’s hostile. It’s unfriendly. And it is just disgusting. It is immoral to the greatest degree. We want to make it easy for people to identify with positive ways of living. We want these children to grow up to be models for other people.
Modeling positive ways of living
Jacques: Yeah, on trying to be a model for children. I have two grandchildren, eight and ten. I try myself to teach them, to look at science, to be curious about science articles, or experiences, and also about religion, but for religion, I found it quite difficult. I just teach them that they have an inner guide, this kind of thing. On the other hand, they also have grandparents who are not religious at all, who also compete against this idea.
This to them, to design this, is also a difficulty, you see. Because I wait for them to ask me more questions. And they will ask, but because on the other side there is quite a reluctance, you know, at this age of 8 to 10, they have to decide where to go. And even in the 50 years to come, or 250, we have to take into account that there is a rebellion. And we are not so open to, I would say, religious things, conscious contact with our Thought Adjuster. This is a difficulty, I see.
Daniel Raphael: Yes, children at a young age make major decisions about the rest of their life. The age of separation is about 8 or 9. If you look at the psychology of that era, you will read where the child is becoming aware that they are separate from their parents, and so they begin to see that and they feel a separation, an isolationism of the individual from the parental couple, and that they’re no longer intimate to that couple relationship. And so, you know, the little guys, girls and boys, they begin to think about what will I become, the astronauts that we wanted to become when we were two and three and four, we realized that if you’re wearing really thick glasses, you’re never going to be an astronaut or a jet fighter plane pilot. (My eyesight was so bad I couldn’t even qualify as being a navigator for the Navy.) So that age is very tender, and that’s when they’re very open to grandparenting, and that these are pivotal sources of wisdom, and hopefully the grandparent is compassionate, humane, kind, and loving, and accepting and recognizing the potential in the child and that the child is worthy and deserving of the very best that that grandparent can give them, and of course, that applies to parents too, and older siblings.
You know, I’m really pleased with how our session today is going along, it is really positive. We haven’t dived into the negative bucket of stuff that we did last week, but we are really aspiring to climb the ladder of spirituality, beginning at an early age.
I’m just really thrilled with you today. It’s not that you should depend on my being thrilled or disappointed for your life or in these sessions, but we have tons of good work here today, OK? And so, if you are, see yourself as a planetary manager or the facilitator of a Family Learning Center, then you really have gotten your role cut out for you. You can begin to see what you want to teach your neighbor’s kids, and who your neighbor’s kids become.
Now I’m going to turn the page a little bit here, and when we think of the strategic planning for a community, we want to increase the positive influences upon the children and families and parents, and decrease the negative influences in the neighborhood and the community and in the families.
A societal code of moral decision making.
Again, you’re going to hear this over and over again from me, that we do not have a societal code of moral decision making. We don’t have a societal code of ethical decision-making. We do have some amorphous ethical guidelines that roll around in our societies, but we do not have a solid agreed upon foundation of ethical behavior that we can sell to everyone.
Geoff Thomas: Just to get back to Marthe’s point. It all starts with the family, or it all starts with individuals within the family, so surely the most important thing is that we get general recognition of the fact that the masculine side of things has dominated for far too long.
And that, you know, we’re all equal as human beings, and that should be the basis on which we operate from. You have to overcome hundreds of years of patriarchy, and various tribal habits and so on, which have been becoming ingrained. So, we have to start with one man and one woman recognizing each other as of equal importance, not the same, but of equal importance.
Daniel Raphael: I’ve written, oh, I don’t know, five to seven books on ethics and morality and these seven values as the basis for ethics, and moral codes of decision making. And I have since then come down to two values that occur to all of us humans, and our existence in societies and in civilization. And it is life and equality, just these two. Life, you come away with a moral code of decision-making. With equality, you come away with a highly evolved code of ethical decision-making, which includes the aspect of human compassion. And this is a much-refined view of equality, which is as legitimate as anything else.
So, when we think about the curricula for these family learning centers, we’re really talking about life. Your life is as important as my life. And that’s equality. When you come down to life and equality, they can’t be separated. These are just one dualism, like men and women. They have equal value. They’re as important as each other.
The limits of individual sovereignty
Bea Ngai: What you just said about life and equality kind of goes back to our first session where we talked about the sovereignty of the individual and how you know you are sovereign. So, in terms of life, say for an individual, obviously their lives are very important, right? The first thing you do as an individual is you look after yourself, correct? And that’s what most people do. And it’s natural. But due to equality or the limits of sovereignty, you have to think about other people, so what you want for yourself should also apply to other people. Whatever you want for yourself, you have to assume other people want the same thing, which means you can’t want something that is going to interfere with somebody else’s right to want the same thing.
Daniel Raphael: Yeah. That’s the truth, you know, truth with all capital letters. And that’s why we want to reflect on that. We want to have those people who understand the sovereignty of each individual to be our leaders, to be our most influential people, and we want those kinds of people to care for our children. And we want them to respect our children. Boy, your parenting will change, when you begin to treat your children as grown adults, as equal to yourselves. Your child rearing will change. You become then more intimately responsible for the adult that they will become. And you’re teaching them to become that adult that you want to have as a neighbor.
There are some children I’ve seen in families who are disgusting, and the parents don’t want them in their house. Don’t want them around. These were children who were raised inappropriately, incorrectly. So, we need to begin to raise our children as ourselves, wanting the very best for our children as we would want for ourselves, And what are the things that we missed receiving, as a child? Equal emotional worth. Shouting at children is just not really a good thing to do.
And beating them out of your own frustration and your lack of parenting skill? It just does not work. And it’s true sometimes there is a need for pain, but it should be appropriate pain. It shouldn’t be a pain that is assault. It shouldn’t be pain as an expression of your own frustration of parenting.
I’ve been there, kids. I had my oldest child. When he was, boy, 20 months, he just went. “No, you can’t hold me.” He went through the terrible twos for three years. I’m telling you when that’s you, it’s humiliating to raise a child, when he doesn’t want to have a relationship with you, and how do you relate to them, how do you bring out the best in them? And I found that when they became teenagers, the best thing I could do was to give them as much responsibility as I could.
Whether they’re smoking pot or dropping LSD, or they’re dating or whatever, using the car I just gave them, the parameters of what will get them back home safely and in good balance, and what doesn’t.
You know, having worked in criminal corrections, I could tell these kids what it would be like for them to have to end up in jail, juvenile jail, and what happens after that?
So, when we give them responsibility, they need the parameters of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. And as parents, we need to balance our love with responsibility, not permissiveness. Love is not permissive.
Jacques: Myself, it is my grandsons. I try to teach them to have fun in life. I think it’s very important. I let them drive my small tractor. They like that, because all people say “No, they’re too young.” But they have fun. They take responsibility, you see. And I really try to have fun with them. Really. It’s important to me.
Stéphane Labonté: I have to run, I’m sorry. I have to attend to other matters, but thank you very much and we’ll look forward to reading the transcript.
[Kona arrives.]
The nuts and bolts of running a Family Learning Center.
Daniel Raphael: We did a hundred and eighty turn from our session from last week. We are very positive, very loving, very contributing, very kind and positive and constructive and we have gotten into the intimate nuts and bolts of running a Family Learning Center. We’ve talked about the learning programs, the curriculum.
We have said that there should be one Family Learning Center in every school district. Organizationally, they’re not combined at all, and that they are separate, distinctly separate organizationally and physically. I had to make it clear to the team that we weren’t going to be organizationally intimate with the educational system, but that we would be connected with them in learning programs and missing elements in public education, for example.
Of course, we will get into education and next week or the week after, but education is in many ways an adjunct to the family.
And that has never been very well sorted out in American education. The parenting and childcare of children, of students and pupils. needs to be sorted out.
As far as the facilitator/consultant is concerned, myself, I’m pleased with our discussion of the program, the curricula and that we will begin with the community, to learn about best practices of parenting and child rearing. And how children learn best.
Examples and models and wisdoms and things like that and that we have also discussed our role as center facilitators. I wouldn’t, I don’t call this person a manager, because they facilitate, but the emphasis is in the wrong place. Facilitate the work of others in the Family Learning Center, for the best results of the child and the parents.
Jacques: Yeah, as best practices maybe I’ll try to find, to dig out the example of Finland. You know, the northern Europe or European people, are very good at, I would say changing the rules. And Finland is quite good at testing different type of learning in their school so that people became good adults. They are close to our idea. They want to bring every child to their potential, that’s good. So, I will try to find something in English and that it will be in our archive as best practices from Finland.
Daniel Raphael: As I’ve envisioned learning centers, they’re part of a larger organization, and this larger organization would have a library, a digital library of human wisdom. A sustainable human system and this would become a resource, a collection of global resources for learning and child rearing and parenting and family dynamics, and so on. And that the references that you find, would become a part of that digital library.
It may not. Where there’s a conflict with copyrights, we would simply have that book, that source, with an abstract, so that when people have the reference, they can go toa library or bookstore or Google or Amazon and buy the book.
I’ve been a conscious, conscientious, intentional wisdom collector since I was age 27 and there are very few collections of wisdom of the do’s and don’ts, whether it is as parents, or whether it is as nations, and whether as presidents and premiers or others, ministers of government. The thinking of the 20,000 years of learning that our species has gone through, as an organized organizational humanity, as a civilization, and we have not been collecting these wisdoms. You know, you could end up with a list of thousands, I suppose.
Bea Ngai: What you just said reminded me of the need for statesmanship courses in our society, and I remember in the Urantia book, they do talk about another planet, where it is in rebellion, I think, or maybe I’m getting confused, but where there are statesmanship classes, where people go to an institution to learn how to become a good leader and how to interact with other politicians. If we need a Family Learning Center, we need a Statesmanship Learning Center as well.
Daniel Raphael: Well, they u sed to have them when I was a teenager, I was selected by the local American Legion, go to Boise State in Iowa. And so I went with several other hundred boys from around the country, around Iowa to boy state. And we learned statesmanship and we had to play different roles in, in court and as Commissioners and so on. Yes, it’s valuable. I’d probably want to sponsor something like that if I was a multimillionaire.
Bea Ngai: Well, it would have to be in tandem or in conjunction with a family center so that the people who are brought up in an appropriate environment and go to this family center and already have this background , so it would just be a sort of an extension of that program.
[Daniel indicated that that there were other people who had raised their hands, and for the speaker to allow others to ask their questions.]
Geoff Thomas: We have to realize that everything starts from individuals in the family. You know that having statesmanship classes would be completely pointless if that hadn’t started in family earlier on. So, we’re just trying to concentrate on the basics. You could go on and on developing this after (the basics)…
Marthe Muller: I was also getting back to what Bea said. Isn’t the planetary management course exactly that statesmanship course? So, you do have a Family Learning Center and you do have a Planetary Management Course.
Daniel Raphael: Yes, Family Learning Centers are the beginning of planetary management. We start with the earliest places where we can be of influence, to the individual who become the managers, the Presidents, the legislative leaders, ethics, poets, humanitarians, philosophers, and philanthropists. They begin in the family. Everybody comes from the family. You’re beginning to grasp the holism of, of societal management. We begin in the family, and then we begin in the community. And that’s the design team process.
Bea Ngai: I just have to say I have to go right now. I really enjoyed the session, and I will see all of you next week. Thank you very much.
Learning the basics of planetary management
Daniel Raphael: We’re getting to a place where this is starting to gel. Some of you have got it already. You’ve seen it in your head already where all these pieces gel together as planetary management, and that we are learning the very basics of planetary management in our weekly sessions here.
We’re going to cover them all if we possibly can, except for the post office. Most of you rolled your eyes and rolled your heads when I mentioned post office, you know, but whether you live in France or Britain, the UK or the United States or Canada, everybody has a post office problem. What we want to do in these sessions is to pick up the pieces of all aspects of societal living, so that you’re not moving forward unawares, because eventually, before, during or after the collapse, or whatever you want to think in those terms, you will have an idea about how to broach these subjects, how you could open up these subject topics and initiate discussions.
You may not have all the information. You’re not required to just become acquainted with them so that you can talk about them, and they don’t frighten you. Our first session where we discussed the human relationships intimately and otherwise was an eye-opener for you, opening, giving you the ability and permission to talk about all sorts of things in rational ways and in unemotional ways.
I’m going to do Machiventa’s closing now.
Before I start, I just want to say that I was visited this morning by Shahdnah, who is the name of the presiding officer of the Most Highs, and He works with the Most Highs in Edentia, works intimately with Machiventa, that’s our planetary manager.
And they’re very pleased about the Correcting Time and what it means because we are an experimental planet that has been in rebellion. Nothing has worked heretofore, from the initiation of spirit from Christ Michael’s bestowal on down, and so this experimental, experiential process of planetary management is extremely thrilling to them. They’re observing what we’re doing with rapt attention.
And they’re particularly interested in observing and noting and recording what we are doing from the individual up through the other group and through the Family Learning Centers that we hope to establish, and so on.
They are as this as the correcting time is an experiential process of plant, of discovering planetary manage with the Co-creative participants of the planet. It’s pretty gutsy in my book for them to do that.