Language Transfer Now Based in the UK!

...And a very important communiqué!

So I’ve had a shave, given myself a haircut, washed the smell of goat from under my fingernails and come down from the mountain to rejoin civilisation, for better or for worse. It’s no longer ‘a tour’, I’m in for the long haul. The idea evolved slowly, but I’ve ended up back home. After half a life swearing by other homes, I’m back in the country I grew up in, and back in a city - a city I love, Brighton or nowadays ‘Brighton & Hove’.

For those who don’t know, I’d been tucked away in the nook of some Asturian mountain for the past two years - farming, working on Language Transfer and turning my mind inside out. It hasn’t been easy, but it must have been necessary because I’m better than I’ve been in a long time. I’ve got a lot of work to do now, and luckily I’m finding myself easily motivated to do it, remembering so well as I do here the impact of these transcendental learning experiences on peoples’ lives. This has helped me shift my focus back to where it was when I began all of this in the first place - trying to create as many of these beautiful, soul affirming experiences as I could, rather than obsessing over the material in itself - the material creates itself when your focus is on the former. All of this and more is coming back to me, and I’m raring to go.

Focused on raising the bar of human experience, of connection, wonder, awe, self realisation and the rest, I’m happy to announce that I’ve given in. You’ve won! I will record more language courses after all, rather than delegating it all to The Platform as I had aspired to do. It has become clear to me that the Platform idea is, for now at least, not going to be the main source of new Language Transfer material as I had hoped it would, at least not until this project is bigger. I’ve by no means given up on the idea and I will continue to create infrastructure for new course writers such as Round Table sessions, but rather than denouncing the impossible conditions I am expected to work under and giving up on creating more courses myself, I’m going to fight -and invite you to fight- to change those conditions.

I feel I’ve learnt enough now about all the wrong ways to work in order to do this sustainably, but that means with sensible limitations in place. Introduction courses are infinitely easier for me to create in languages I don’t speak than Complete courses, and so that will be my new main focus - to continue including more languages into the Language Transfer fold, but never promising to complete them. That doesn’t meant that I won’t, only that I’ll need serious support to do it. Otherwise, I’ll just be working calmly and leisurely on one Introduction course at a time, without bringing myself to the brink of madness in the attempt to satisfy all of your insatiable learning desires. I’ve learnt my lesson and so I refuse to even attempt to do more without getting the support I need (and quite clearly deserve), and so the onus shifts to you, the learner, to demand Language Transfer gets that support.

When I was younger, I was happier to be the outcast doing things differently, to operate from the edge, to be wasteful with the abounding energy of youth as my efforts were so often met with resentment, to strain and stretch more than I should need to, and I was more understanding about not fitting in. As I get older though, I feel increasingly more irritated about being an outlier, by the fact that we are not taught in this way at school, that people are still suffering with their personal attempts at learning, that I have all these solutions that the establishment is too lazy and comfortable to care for, and that we all suffer because of the secondary consequences of leaving others’ learning desires and needs unrealised. Our wellbeing really is symbiotic, and not even in a spiritual or philosophical way, but rather in a stone cold practical and tangible way: the smarter and wiser we all are, the better we all live. With age, I begin to feel even somehow responsible that the bar in education remains so low, and that I’ve not changed that in spite of creating an alternative. It bothers me more that this better way is not the way, especially as I remember what life was like before I knew what learning could be like, how desperate it was to be stuck in a suffering mind which could be alleviated, freed, by learning, by knowledge and the wisdom it can generate. I see the same as I meet people, almost on a daily basis, that bought some language book or other which did nothing but convince them that the language was impossibly difficult or that they were impossibly stupid. People stuck in the confines of their culture desperate to experience and live another, but stuck in that limbo, for nothing more than technical reasons. I’m no longer content to be the quirky exception shyly or boastfully breaking the norm, I want to make The Thinking Method the norm.

As much energy as I have, though, it’s not going to get me much further than where we are already, not without your help that is. That’s because there are a great many vested interests in maintaining the status quo around our lazy educative ideas and more so, our lazy cultural relationship with the truth. Most of these interests do -it is my estimation- pertain to laziness rather than anything more sinister. Still, it is a snowballing problem that we continue to search for truths that we expect to exist in isolation of one another rather than support one another, and the effect of that on the collective consciousness is forever more clumsily evident. I can’t continue sitting around meekly asking for invites where I’m clearly not welcome, it’s time to demand entry.

I need all of that wonderful, loving energy you direct towards me in gratitude, turned on its head into indignation and directed at those politically responsible for education, as well as at all those (often publicly funded) bodies whose work I am doing. The truth is, whilst I love hearing about how life changing this experience was for you, whilst your gratitude helps remind me of the great importance of all of this, it’d be much more effectively directed in the form of complaints to those whose work it is to do what I’ve been doing. I need you to demand that this solution (The Thinking Method) stop being ignored, and demand explanations as to why it is. Enough of this, and slowly, slowly that glass ceiling is going to crack. But we need to make more noise, or rather a different type of noise, than we have been. Whilst it might feel futile to be shooting off emails or making phone calls about this, the accumulation of those emails and calls will eventually make a difference, especially when they are charged with genuine emotion. If those whose official work the mission of Language Transfer actually is wise up to it, they’ll soon realise that with a little discernment they can do the impossible job they are tasked with, or rather let me do it.

Categorically, I won’t be making any Complete courses in languages I’m not fluent in myself without extensive and guaranteed external help, both linguistic, technical, organisational and in terms of dissemination and promotion of the material - the works! And seeing that I’ve been knocking on doors for years trying to secure such collaborations, we need to up the efforts and so I’m asking the usership now to put the pressure on. That means that if you want to see a new course or an Intro course made Complete, then it’s not me you have to ask but rather those who could and should facilitate it. Here’s where we can get creative too, it could be anything from an airline, an embassy or a company that collaborates, there only needs to be a mutual interest in the creation of the course. Who might collaborate, more than anything else depends on who is contacted! (So get busy.)

Thank you for your years of continued support. Although this project remains smaller than I can accept (and bigger than I ever expected!), it’s only your wildly enthusiastic sharing of the impact of this project on your own lives which has taken it out of total obscurity, and which has convinced me that we need to do so much more.

EDIT: You can also purchase a ‘sharer pack’ from the ‘non-shop’ (where you’re only paying for production and shipping) to help you take advantage of serendipitous encounters with possible supporters! Having physical sharer cards on hand makes all the difference when it comes to real-life networking, as does the other cool merch in the packs! www.languagetransfer.org/non-shop