Unique Self in Parenting & Education - Center for World Philosophy and Religion

Dr. Zachary Stein: Idea Seed Banks, the “Nous Arc,” and the “Great Library”

What do we need to give “our children” so they can prosper and grow into their highest potential—even though we don’t know what kind of challenges they will face in their lives?

That’s the real question underlying this beautiful talk by our Academic Director Zak Stein.

Watch and listen to this fascinating thought experiment:

What would be a “seed bank” of ideas that—if preserved—would allow us to recreate civilization from the ground up, in case humanity survived some sort of an apocalypse?

Playing off of Noah’s Arc, Zak calls it the “Nous Arc.”

Engaging in this thought experiment a bunch of questions arise:

Who gets to decide what should be in there?
What should be the content of this “Great Library?” or in other words:
How can we assure that we give the next generation everything they need?

The Need for Meta-Theories

In order to engage these questions, we need Meta-Theories. What are Meta-Theories?

While theories take the world as data, Meta-Theories take theories as data. Meta-Theories norm the norms of discourse.

Listen to this exciting 20-minute talk and learn:

What a new legitimate model of teacherly authority and intergenerational transmission could be
How our image of the ideal human looks like that we can teach into
Why we need a theory of Cosmos and Self
Which educational environments we need to create—in contrast to the informational environments that are stressful for most nervous systems

Enjoy the talk:

More on Nous Arc

Wisdom for your Week: A Conversation with John Mackey and Marc Gafni – Topic 2: Unique Self · Thank You for Signing Up for Our Great Library Card · Dr. Marc Gafni

Dr. Zachary Stein: Idea Seed Banks, the “Nous Arc,” and the “Great Library”The Editors2023-06-21T12:16:12-07:00

In the Media: The Unique Self in a Contemplative School

In the Media: The Unique Self in a Contemplative SchoolThe Editors2026-06-10T04:03:14-07:00

From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: Marc Gafni and the ‘Unique Self’ – A White Paper by Kathy Brownback

In her recent white paper from January 2014 Kathy Brownback, Instructor in Religion and Philosophy at the highly respected Phillips Exeter Academy, discusses how the Unique Self teaching goes to the heart of the deepest questions that students have asked her throughout the years. In her words:

Most likely you’ve asked yourself some of the same questions I’ve been asked by […] students:

“People keep telling me to be myself, but I don’t really know who that is. I feel pulled in so many directions.”

Do we have free will, at all? Or are we totally determined by our genes, and conditioned by our environment?”

“Why, in the midst of all they have, are so many people angry and dissatisfied? Can I hope to avoid this? Why is there so much addiction? Why depression, among people who have so much to offer?”

“I haven’t found any kind of God I can believe in, yet I somehow feel there is something more to life. Your thoughts?”

“Are science and religion looking at the same world? They seem so contradictory. Your husband is a physicist. Do you argue about this?”

“Is there such a thing as truth? Is there anything I can be certain of?”

“Do you think life has some kind of point, or meaning? Or is it, as Shakespeare said, ‘a tale told by an idiot’? It really feels that way. Then all of sudden, even though I have no real answers, the feeling goes away.”

She also asks what role contemplative practices should play in education and academic life and what they might have to do with the study of science, or the humanities and the arts. Should they have a place in the curriculum?

Contemplative practice can encourage the ability to focus and enter into a subject with minimal distraction and interruption. It can help a great deal with stress reduction.

Moving more deeply, it can foster the capacity to hold apparent contradictions in tension with each other without immediate dismissal of one side. It can encourage you to listen to and help develop the ideas of others from a less egoic perspective—and to see connections between disciplines that infuse their understanding of each other. It helps provide the space for deeper creativity and inspiration.

At its most profound level, contemplative practice has the potential to help you reconnect with a deeper sense of purpose, meaning, and value in your life.

This spring term Kathy Brownback taught a class in Mysticism for uppers and seniors.

From the course description:

It has been said that all religions converge in the contemplative tradition—the great world illuminated by the swamis and yogis of Hinduism, the core meditation practices of the Buddha, the Kabbalist teachers of Judaism, the Sufis of Islam, and the Christian mystics. What can we learn by reflecting on their teachings and their practices? How do they connect with current research on the mind-body connection? How do these make possible a deeper sense of self, or what we might call the “unique self”? What does it mean to speak of wisdom as a kind of knowledge? We will consider selections from all the major faiths, from the ancient texts of the Upanishads to the poets Rumi and Meister Eckhart to modern writers such as Marc Gafni and Pema Chodron.

Read the White Paper HERE

More on Unique Self

The Cosmo-Erotic Universe: Excerpt from A Return to Eros · Psychology Today Interviewed Dr. Marc Gafni on Evolutionary Love · Dr. Marc Gafni

From Deconstruction to Reconstruction: Marc Gafni and the ‘Unique Self’ – A White Paper by Kathy BrownbackThe Editors2026-06-10T03:54:03-07:00

Marc Gafni’s Visit to Exeter Report by Kathy Brownback

Marc Gafni’s Visit to Exeter Report by Kathy BrownbackKathy2026-06-10T03:37:15-07:00

Teaching Marc Gafni’s “Unique Self” Enlightenment in the classroom – by Kathy Brownback

By Kathleen Brownback

Note: This blog post is adapted from “Teaching Marc Gafni’s ‘Unique Self’ Enlightenment in the Classroom: Reflections from a Phillips Exeter Class in Mysticism (for the annual conference of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education, November 2011, Amherst College).”

A new course introduced at Phillips Exeter Academy in the spring of 2011 began with these words on the syllabus:

What we are about to explore has many names. It has been called the mystical tradition, the perennial tradition, the direct path, the path of the heart, the journey to (and with) the beloved, the practice of yoga, and the contemplative tradition. Aldous Huxley called it “the science, not of the personal ego, but of that eternal Self in the depth of particular, individualized selves, and identical with, or at least akin to, the divine Ground.” What these traditions share is the understanding that there is the possibility of union between the self and whatever we might call Ultimate Reality or God or Spirit, and that this union is primarily realized through a path of spiritual practice.

There is no possible way to make a comprehensive study of all these traditions in one term, and no need for us to do so. The main goal here is to locate various paths within the religious traditions, and to begin to understand what is meant by “spiritual practice.”

As the first teacher of this class, my main goal was to engage the students in a deeper understanding of ego development and the way in which the contemplative or mystical dimension of religion could help them both intellectually and practically as they move into their adult lives.

Phillips Exeter is a secular independent secondary school in New Hampshire, an hour north of Boston, with a 200-year history as an academic powerhouse for boys. It became coeducational in 1972 and has retained its high academic distinction, with all students headed for college and many to the top schools in the country.

The students are bright and lively and curious. But as anywhere, they struggle at times with nonacademic life circumstances that have the capacity to affect their intellectual engagement””a superficial and highly commercialized teenage (and often adult) culture, a pervasive unease about the future of their society in an era of environmental and economic challenge, and for some, personal or family histories of addiction or depression. For this reason I sought out texts and readings that were inclined to prompt questions at the interface of psychology and religion. I had the sense that these would speak to students in both an academic and a personal way, as in fact they did.

In this paper I will first describe student background and interest, then give a brief overview of the course, then focus on the work of one scholar and teacher, Marc Gafni, whose writing in particular spoke to the students in a powerful way.

In the course of the term I had to develop and articulate to myself my own changing philosophy of teaching, which I began to explore in a 2009 article in the Exeter alumni/ae bulletin entitled “In Pursuit of Truths.”

I will describe this evolution more deeply at the end of the article, but also briefly mention it here.

(more…)

Teaching Marc Gafni’s “Unique Self” Enlightenment in the classroom – by Kathy BrownbackKathy2026-06-10T03:37:31-07:00