Why Aesthetic Realism Needs To Be Studied

I remember in my very first consultation I was asked, after speaking about how nervous I felt in groups,  "Do you think other people are more like you or more different from you?"  I said "different" right away.  And I learned that was a big, though very common, mistake -- in England, Russia, the US -- everywhere.  It came from that desire which Eli Siegel identified as the biggest weakener of a person's mind -- contempt, the making less of the world in order to build up oneself.  It not only made me nervous, it made me unkind to see people that way.  What I've learned over the years has caused me to rethink my relation to other people from the ground up -- the way I think about friends, family, students, colleagues, and people I don't even know that I speak to for a minute in a grocery store, gives me so much more pleasure and pride.   


Imagine that in 2013, just last week, one of the leading Black professional footballers in the English Premier League had to go public with his criticism of football fans in Russia for mocking him with monkeysounds during a Champions League game!  Would this be happening if they were studying Aesthetic Realism?  No way.       
Those football fans in Russia (and I think and hope it was only a few) do not see  Yaya Touré as fundamentally like themselves; they see him as different and inferior.  Meanwhile he's one of the best footballers in the world!  So they are angry they have to look up to someone they feel driven to denigrate.  It's ugly and sad, and it wouldn't be happening at all if Aesthetic Realism were being studied, and people were learning about the fight in all of us between respect for the world and contempt.  

I respect this poem by Karen Romeo about Aesthetic Realism, her feelings about studying it; and about the damage done by the failure of the press to report honestly on Aesthetic Realism. I am sure that if the press and noted people in academia, culture and politics HAD been honest about Aesthetic Realism, people would be better off in many ways.

Read Karen Romeo's Sapphics on the Press Boycott of Aesthetic

Seminar in the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method

Come to this seminar, which I'm proud to be taking part in, about the teaching method that brings out kindness and the desire to be just in children as they learn math, history, & reading -- every subject. 

Aesthetic Realism Foundation Website

Look at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation website! 
Among many other things you can read this:

"How do we see people other than ourselves? is the biggest matter in everyone’s personal life. It’s also the biggest matter in America’s economy, and in what happens in our streets, schools, government. And it’s through Aesthetic Realism consultations that a person can make sense at last of how he or she sees other people—and change magnificently for the better!"

That is by Donita Ellison (and there's more...).  I've seen what she writes here is true, and will lead to greater justice in how we think about any person of any race.