International Lions University
The academic mindset has typically been reinforcing the status quo of social classes and has been instrumental in the perpetuation of wars, eugenics and racism, segregation and injustice, pollution, industrial mayhem and technological devastation. The way academic work has been directed so far, in a pursuit of an elusive notion of ‘knowledge’ and progress, does not provide indications that it has made life on earth more harmonious, safe, and more satisfying. Non-intellectually minded people who live in connection and peace with nature report that their life was meaningful and often filled with wisdom. The academic world has in the main been built on the dualism between nature and culture, and the pursuit of scientific objects to the detriment of our life as human subjects.
This explains why a number of current thinkers express a plea to create a more humane and sustainable life, for all species, and modify the mindset and the orientation that allow the academic world to perpetuate the criteria through which iniquity and intolerance emerge. While the medieval university had some understanding of the connections between the microcosm and the macrocosm, humans and cosmic rhythms, this knowledge has been lost in the modern era to the point that the survival of the human species and even all other species on earth are at stake.
Deep knowledge- life understanding, both subjective and objective-was relegated to the discipline of philosophy and epistemology of sciences, as if it were dead knowledge. It is no wonder modern science has led us to numerous disasters as it does not take into account in its scope the impacts it creates on the living subjects and their environment. This understanding should constitute the transdisciplinary background of any discipline (Nicolescu, 2002), creating new principles for academic disciplines and knowledge itself.
International Lions University is an attempt at researching and recovering part of this lost understanding, and exploring it within the knowledge of the current world needs. This will be in terms of real and deep communication for peace, new energies, general wellness and social justice. It will bring a resolution of poverty, a just civil society and the preservation of commons, environmental protection, truthfulness of medias, the separation of powers; and an international alliance against corruption, State terrorism, organized crime, piracy, women and children’s trade, and all forms of technological abuse.
International Lions University is oriented towards the integration of mind and matter from the postmodern semiotic perspective that any object implies a subject that perceives it: subjective and objective worlds are in a relation of mutual implication (Deely, 2009). Its goal is to gather researchers from various nations to cooperate in the creation of new concepts and a new life on earth: resolving the above issues of peace, energy, and wellness; as well as climatic instability, and creating a world at peace within sustainable environments.
To support this concept, the proposal is to create new University campuses regulated by deeper modes of knowing. The project is developed in the following documents. The following pages present:
References
Deely, J. (2009). Purely objective reality. New York: De Gruyter, Semiotics, Communication and Cognition.
Jahn, R. G., & Dunne, B. J. (2011). Consciousness and the source of reality. Princeton, NJ: ICLR Press.
Nicolescu, B. (2002). The Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Note: We are very grateful to Professor Francois Victor Tochon, a professor emeritus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison whose education department has been ranked the best in the world for the past 19 years, who created the Deep Approach and allowed us to use the above text adapted from his book, Deep University, which was published by Deep University Press in 2017 with the ISBN number of 978-1-939755-26-1.