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Thought of the Week Archives
October 1998

October 5, 1998

Education is at present concerned with outward efficiency, and it utterly disregards, or deliberately perverts, the inward nature of man; it develops only one part of him and leaves the rest to drag along as best it can. Our inner confusion, antagonism and fear ever overcome the outer structure or society, however nobly conceived and cunningly built. When there is not the right kind of education we destroy one another, and physical security for every individual is denied. To educate the student rightly is to help him to understand the total process of himself; for it is only when there is integration of the mind and heart in everyday action that there can be intelligence and inward transformation.

J. Krishnamurti
Education and the Significance of Life

October 12, 1998

...Both God and the devil are at an infinite and dissociated remove from human experience, and this reflects the structure of civilization. Conversely, among primitive peoples, all antinomies [Contradiction or opposition, especially between two laws or rules; a paradox] are bound into the ritual cycle. The sacred is an immediate aspect of man's experience. Good and evil, creation and destruction--the dual image of the deity, as expressed in the trickster--are fused in the network of actions that define primitive society. Therefore, moral fanaticism, based as it is on abstract notions of pure good, pure evil, and the exclusive moral possibility or fate of any particular individual--what may be called moral exceptionalism--is absent among primitive people. In primitive perspective, human beings are assumed to be capable of any excess. But every step of the way, the person is held to account for those actions that seriously threaten the balance of society and nature.

Stanley Diamond
from the introduction to The Trickster, by Paul Radin

October 19, 1998

Considering the archetype of the self as a purposive intelligence or meaning, as expressing itself in an unfolding "vision" of what we are meant to be, is a truly revolutionary idea. Only when we seek to make this process conscious and intentionally attempt to actualize this meaning, this vision, to bring it into concrete reality, does it truly become the individuation process.
...
For Jung, activating and implementing the individuation process is the highest goal in life. The ego [center of conscious self] must develop a dialogue with that primordial wisdom or meaning, that ray of divinity within us, the self, and consciously realize its [the self's] vision of wholeness in our everyday activities.

Victor Mansfield
Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making

October 26, 1998

An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.

from 14,000 Quips and Quotes for Writers and Speakers
E. C. McKenzie