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Thought of the Week Archives
June 2000
June 5
Teaching has two fundamental challenges now. It has to provide a based
for knowledge, but it also has to provide connections. T. S. Eliot, in
commenting on Dante's Inferno, describes hell as someplace "where
nothing connects with nothing." The teaching profession has to provide
connections between subjects and between disciplines in order to re-create
that totality of knowledge. Nationalism used to provide that. Tribalism
did. Philosophical views did. Religion did. But as most of these things
collapse around us, there's a great burden on the educational establishment
to provide some kind of intellectual coherence, some kind of connection
with our past, with our current present, and with the future. That's why
it's tougher now, not only for the student, but also for the teacher,
especially when all of us have become specialists. We frown upon generalists
because we think they're cutting corners in coming up with solutions.
The result is we have not come up with solutions.
...
That's why education's sole function now is to provide the introduction
to learning. We can no longer claim, as we did in the sixteenth century,
that in four years we can produce an educated, cultured person, plus give
this individual professional training and know-how and a vocation. Life
has become more complex. ...We have to tell our students that life is
complex. We're living in awesome and exciting times. We're going to provide
you with a compass, with a rule, with a Geiger counter, and we're going
to give you a critical mind to be able to search throughout your entire
life, in order to be an education person.
...
...Naisbitt wrote in Megatrends that "the world is drowning
in detail but starved for knowledge." What we need is meaning now, coherence,
unity, connections, but all without trivializing, without giving us a
kind of handbook or bulletin that bypasses the process to think critically.
Everybody wants ready-made answers so one can follow them without undergoing,
as Sheridan said in 1779, "the fatigue of judging for themselves." We
are abdicating our right to think and our right to explore. We cannot
rely on "credentialing." We are abdicating our right to think and our
right to explore. The school and the university are only means to allow
us to rediscover our possibilities and our potentials.
excerpts from a conversation with Vartan Gregorian
former president of the New York Public Library and former president of
Brown University
A World of Ideas, Bill Moyers
June 12
The mind seeks knowledge as a handle on the cosmos from which it gains
leverage for greater control and self-satisfaction, but synchronicity
will not allow itself to be used so roughly. ...We must sacrifice the
urgent, petty agendas of the ego to a larger field of participation. We
must learn humility and own humor, finding guidance in intuition and making
logic a servant rather than a master. Control is a personal experience,
surrender is a transpersonal one. Through surrender we learn to move with
the rhythms that flow through our existence and in so doing open ourselves
to the wellsprings of life that are the gift of the divine Trickster.
- Allan Combs and Mark Holand
Synchronicity: Science, Myth, and the Trickster (p. 144)
June 19
The question is often asked of me, "How do you work with synchronicity?"
to which I reply most frequently, "Be open to the meaning in what you
did not want to happen." Only such an attitude of openness, an ability
to set aside our own agendas and consider that ours might be a story we
did not, could not, anticipate will allow the meaning of what seems initially
like mere bad luck to flower into what it is destined to be.
- Robert H. Hopcke
There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives
(p. 57)
June 26
The persona is a mask that is used to relate to and interact with the
outer world. Usually, the persona is opposite to the shadow. For example,
a woman who is overly sweet and angelic on the surface might tend to have
a sour and cruel shadow. An illustration from literature is Robert Louis
Stevenson's well-known Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde doubling, a single individual
with the persona of a wonderful doctor and the shadow of a devilish criminal.
As these two examples imply, the persona is often a self-adopted role
based on the norms, traditions, ideals, and values of the collective or
culture. This is one manifestation of Jung's No. 1 personality. The opposite
(the shadow) is always present in the unconscious and it will express
itself one way or another.
- David Rosen, M.D.
The Tao of Jung: The Way of Integrity (p. 29)
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