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Interview with Dr. John Hanley - Page 10 INT: And thinking about it, too, there's very few arenas in life where people are more committed to being right, and maintaining the fact that they are right, than in academia, education, and religion. I think a lot of the heartburn with this style of education came from those arenas. JH: Well, I'm glad you mentioned the religious part. You know, again, I think that the church--again, this is just my interpretation--the church really felt threatened as well that, somehow, Large Group Awareness Trainings (Lifespring, et al) were trying to take away what they were set up to achieve. Of course, we were not: we were not a competition in any way. We didn't want to have anything to do with being a religious organization, or having people's belief systems be like ours, or having people involved in all the ambience of what one does when they are a member of a church. But I believe that the church got defensive and said, "Hey, wait a minute! People aren't coming to church as much as they used to, or they're coming in a way or they are speaking up whereas before they were just following." And I think that created a little hubbub as well. But as time goes on, I believe that the technology of transformation now has gone through the bumps and bruises that, frankly, I think any society has got to test. So I don't feel as if they did it to us; I think that what the psychological community and the religious community and all the rest of the communities did was to the good of all, and it forced us to be as good as we could be. At the end of the day, I think now that most psychologists and most sociologists and most educators will agree that there's something to this transformational technology and that, be it religious or secular, all can benefit from that technology. And also the fact that--and I don't know whether I should have let it happen or not or if there was anything I could have done about it--but the fact that so many people now are using the Lifespring technology in the US and worldwide. After a while it just becomes obvious that there's something of real value here, and I think the institutions in America have accepted the fact that there is real value. INT: When you use the word transformational technology, technology indicates, to me, something that is identifiable, replicable, duplicable, and intentional versus something that is mysterious. Can you expand on just what you mean when you apply the word technology to the approach that Lifespring has taken? JH: Well, I can give it a shot. When I say transformational technology, what I mean is that there's an understanding that the training presents a certain world view and that that world view is not presented as the truth, but rather as a possibility, and also that it's presented that same way each and every time. The results from that presentation and people's experience and participation produce a fairly predictable, positive result at the conclusion. |
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