Ever since your schooling began you have been frustrated by its failure to inspire or demonstrate its importance. It did not tell you what was most important, and what it told you certainly was not. You heard about genocide, the assassination of JFK, the World Wars and others since. You have asked about these and other things, and you've been told what but not why. Every year you expected truth to be revealed... but it never was. The question of why is never answered.
Your classmates progressed from intimidated elementary school students--assaulted by teachers, tests, and the pledge of allegiance--to compliant high school students accepting insipid explanations, eroded self-confidence, and hostile competition. By the time you reached middle school, you were angry, numb, and indifferent. At this point, you started to search for wiser counsel and a deeper understanding of education, the world, and yourself.
For six decades I have been asking interesting people to answer the question of meaning, growth, and change. I have returned to my wisest mentors, classmates, partners, and their teachers, students, and children looking for answers to the question of what lies at the root of inspiration and opportunity. What improves our lives?
In The Learning Project, thirty-five artists, athletes, tradesmen, soldiers, scientists, and politicians--teenagers, adults, and elders--describe their passages of inner change. One struggled with adolescence in a broken, immigrant family. Another trained to be an astronaut. A third learned craftsmanship from a grandfather who lived during the Civil War. These rites of passage echo a mythology that goes back thousands of years. In them are the secrets to growing your humanity.
This is not the sanitized version, reduced to self-help aphorisms or buzzwords for business schools. These are not pigeonholed people or bedtime stories. They are fully textured, authentic rites of passage, unfiltered and unfolded by layers. Lives like yours: confusing, complex, uncertain, and in the process of finding root. This is the story of your own transcendence and the transformation of us all.
Author Biography:
Lincoln Stoller grew up around and was mentored by artists, engineers, scientists, athletes, and educators recognized as some of the greatest of the century--including three Nobel Laureates in physics and a handful of world-famous mountaineers--as well as by numerous visionaries, mystics, shamans, and madmen. He has published in the academic and the popular press as an astronomer, physicist, software architect, neurologist, anthropologist, psychotherapist, explorer, and educator. He is an assessing editor at the Journal of Mind and Behavior, has written three books, and has participated in the founding of three schools for young people. As a teenager, he traveled the world climbing mountains and, in the process, fell 1,000 feet off the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, swam across the arctic sea, crashed his airplane, collapsed his horse, stepped in quicksand, survived frostbite, starved, poisoned himself, survived a major earthquake, was buried in an avalanche, and became a cultural ambassador to families in Central America, Mongolia, and the Caribbean. During this time he attended seven colleges, got a doctorate in Quantum Mechanics, became certified as a hypnotherapist, glider pilot, and rescue diver, founded a software company specializing in business automation, designed and built two houses, and was awarded a patent in computer software. After moving from New York to British Columbia, Lincoln now works with clients in the areas of brain training, sleep, spiritual emergence, medical hypnosis, and entrepreneurship. Committed to supporting mental health, personal growth, and social evolution, he blogs and podcasts regularly. He can be reached through his web site at mindstrengthbalance.com.
