From my point of view, unconscious adherence to an expert-driven, empirical bias is the source of nearly all psychological, social, racial, political, economic, and ecological problems facing the world today.

The spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti put it in gentler terms when he warned us never to trust the teachers. He was not trying to promote paranoia and distrust. Rather, like all lineage practitioners, he was pushing us to develop our own wisdom, to see beyond the capabilities of our teachers so that we can make our own contributions to the

Key to the progress of the nation, behaviorists believed, was the conversion of public education from a means for individual self-fulfillment to a system for channeling the energies of children toward societal goals. Rather than adapting the environment to the needs of individuals, behaviorist education would change human nature to better fit its

Most of the institutions that you or I interact with have deeply internalized the belief that, to be legitimate, knowledge must be gathered empirically and verified by an expert. We have become collectively dependent on third-party, professional expertise, and in the process, our basic human capacities for self-reflection, creative intuition, and

Why did so many people accept (or reject) the things I said without subjecting them to rigorous examination? I was beginning to be seen as a source of solutions and best practices, and this disturbed me deeply. I was contributing to the collective illness, whereby we never learn to think for ourselves, and I knew that something had to change.

You could say that I was shut down by the built-in biases of an accreditation infrastructure based wholly on the positivist idea that truth about ourselves can be verified only in what can be observed by those outside of us.

The dominant contemporary theory of thinking in the United States assumes that it is possible to build knowledge over time, along with the answers and certainty that it provides. From this point of view, everything about the world can be known, and our job is to acquire enough of this information to establish a working relationship with things as

Over time, when people are not allowed to make meaningful choices or are given meaningless choices to make, their ability to choose well atrophies, along with their ability to think for themselves and to discern what is best to do in a situation. They may even lose the ability to distinguish for themselves what is true or false.

The guiding principle for all of this was the activation, development, and nourishment of personal agency, informed by deep caring about and commitment to the effects this agency would have on the lives of other people.