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Communications
Thought of the Week Archives
April 2000
April 3
One of the principal features of postmardenism is the lack of transcendent
purpose of meaning. Goallessness and the postmodern deconstruction
of authority go hand in hand: not only has postmodernism come about
because a lot of people have lost faith in progress and are therefore
running around without Goals; but also, people who run around in
postmardern times are deprived of access to advice from reliable
authorities when it comes to makeing choices among their goals.
Goals are not given because in neither the historical dimension
of purposeful action or the vertical dimension of some ladder to
heaven can one find an absolutely fixed target for taking aim at
a Goal.
- James Ogilvy
Living without a goal (p. 64)
April 10
These three quotes are from the end of Navajo and Tibetan Sacred
Wisdom: The Circle of the Spirit, by Peter Gold (p. 239).
- The Anglo way of life is that of an industrialized society. It
is very, very competitive. ...A white man easily becomes lost and
lacks his identity in his computerized society. In the Navajo way
of life, it is peaceful, independent and truly a democratic society.
~ Navajo elder ~
- What it comes down to is simply this: if what Buddhists, the Shoshone,
the Hope, the Christians are suggesting is true, then all of industrial/technological
civilization is really on the wrong track, because its drive and energy
are purely mechanical and self-serving -- real values are within nature,
family, mind, and into liberation. Implicit in the possibilities of
a way of living and being which is dialectically harmonious and complexly
simple, because that's The Way.
~ Gary Snyder ~
- The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should
transcend a personal god and avoid dogma and theology. it should be
based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things
natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity.
~ Albert Einstein ~
April 17
"We have been waiting for help for a long time. But it never has been
easy. The people must do it. You must do it." Betonie sounded as if he
were explaining something simple but important to a small child. But Tayo's
stomach clenched around the words like knives stuck into his guts. There
was something large and terrifying in the old man's words. He wanted to
yell at the medicine man, to yell the things the white doctors had yelled
at him -- that he had to think only of himself, and not about the others,
that he would never get well as long as he used words like "we" and "us."
But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were
telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine
didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness
was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in
something great and inclusive of everything.
Leslie Marmon Silko,
Ceremony
April 24
...The realm of the grand interfusion is free from all determinations
and contradictions. It is beyond the reach of all intellectual processes.
In this realm there is neither space nor time; it is infinite. As Chuang
Tzu describes it: "Being is without dwelling place. Continuity is without
duration. Being without dwelling place is space. Continuity without duration
is time. There is birth, there is death, there is issuing forth, there
is entering in. That through which one passes in and out without seeing
its form is the Gate of Heaven. The Gate of Heaven is nonbeing. All things
spang from nonbeing" (Ch. XXIII). The realm of nonbeing is absolutely
free from limitations and distinctions. In this case nonbeing is the one-without-contrast;
that is, the unity of all things. It is called Tao, or The Great.
...Tao is the primordial source of every beginning and every end
and to which all death returns.
Chang Chung-yuan
Creativiny and Taoism: A Study in Chinese Philosophy, Art and Poetry
April 30
Perception is the knowledge we have of objects or of their movements
by direct and immediate contact, while intelligence is a form of knowledge
obtaining when detours are involved and when spatio-temporal distances
between subject and object increase. It is possible then that intellectual
structures...pre-exist, wholly or in part, from the outset in the form
of organizations common to perception and to thought. ...It is therefore
essential that we should start with perceptual structures, to enquire
whether we may not derive from them an explanation of the whole of thought,
including groupings themselves.
Jean Piaget
Psychology of Intelligence
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