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The following are mostly quotes, with some paraphrases and summaries. I sometimes include my own ideas and questions.
1. There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana, raised in the mystical hills east of Fort Wayne.
2. The Master learned of this world in the public schools of Indiana, and as he grew, in his trade as a mechanic of automobiles.
3. But the Master had learnings from other hands and other schools, from other lives that he had lived. He remembered these, and remembering became wise and strong, so that others saw his strength and came to him for counsel.
4. The Master believed that he had power to help himself and all mankind, and as he believed so it was for him, so that others saw his power and came to him to be healed of their troubles and their many diseases.
5. The Master believed that it is well for any man to think upon himself as a son of God, and as be believed, so it was, and the shops and garages where he worked became crowded and jammed with those who sought his learning and his touch, and the streets outside with those who longed only that the shadow of his passing might fall upon them, and change their lives.
6. It came to pass, because of the crowds, that the several foremen and shop managers bid the Master leave his tools and go his way, for so tightly was he thronged that neither he nor other mechanics had room to work upon the automobiles.
7. So it was that he went into the countryside, and people following began to call him Messsiah, and worker of miracles; and as they believed, it was so.
8. If a storm passed as he spoke, not a raindrop touched a listener's head; the last of the multitude heard his words as clearly as the first, no matter lightning nor thunder in the sky about. And always he spoke to them in parables.
9. And he said unto them, "Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and to sickness, to riches and to poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another."
10. A mill-man spoke and said, "Easy words for you, Master, for you are guided as we are not, and need not toil as we toil. A man has to work for his living in this world."
11. The Master answered and said, "Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river.
12. "The current of the river swept silently over them all -- young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.
13. "Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth.
14. "But one creature said at last, 'I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'
15. "The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!'
16. "But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.
17. "Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
18. "And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!'
19. "And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.'
20. "But they cried the more, 'Saviour!' all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Saviour."
21. And it came to pass when he saw that the multitude thronged him the more day on day, tighter and closer and fiercer than ever they had, when he saw that they pressed him to heal them without rest, and feed them always with his miracles, to learn for them and to live their lives, he went alone that day unto a hilltop apart, and there he prayed.
22. And he said in his heart, Infinite Radiant Is, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me, let me lay aside this impossible task. I cannot live the life of one other soul, yet ten thousand cry to me for life. I'm sorry I allowed it all to happen. If it be thy will, let me go back to my engines and my tools and let me live as other men.
23. And a voice spoke to him on the hilltop, a voice neither male nor female, loud nor soft, a voice infinitely kind. And the voice said unto him, "Not my will, but thine be done. For what is thy will is mine for thee. Go thy way as other men, and be thou happy on the Earth."
24. And hearing, the Master was glad, and gave thanks, and came down from the hilltop humming a little mechanic's song. And when the throng pressed him with its woes, beseeching him to heal for it and learn for it and feed it nonstop from his understanding and to entertain it with his wonders, he smiled upon the multitude and said pleasantly unto them, "I quit."
25. For a moment the multitude was stricken dumb with astonishment.
26. And he said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?"
27. "Of course, Master!" cried the many. "It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!"
28. "No matter what those tortures, nor how difficult the task?"
29. "Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked," said they.
30. "And what would you do," the Master said unto the multitude, "if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.' What would you do then?"
31. And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood.
32. And the Master said unto the silence, "In the path of our happiness shall we find the learning for which we have chosen this lifetime. So it is that I have learned this day, and choose to leave you now to walk your own path, as you please."
33. And he went his way through the crowds and left them, and he returned to the everyday world of men and machines.
In those days (and even today?), science was believed to be "value-free" and not guided by "emotions."
{Added 12/01/98}
I had two paper bags, and the first of these I opened, producing a freshly cooked crab, which I placed on the table. I then challenged the class somewhat as follows: "I want you to produce arguments which will convince me that this object is the remains of a living thing. You may imagine, if you will, that you are Martians and that on Mars you are familiar with living things, being indeed yourselves alive. But, of course, you have never seen crabs or lobsters. A number of objects like this, many of them fragmentary, have arrived, perhaps by meteor. You are to inspect them and arrive at the conclusion that they are the remains of living things. How would you arrive at that conclusion?"
...the question [is]: Is there a biological species of entropy?
Both questions concerned the underlying notion of a dividing line between the world of the living (where distinctions are drawn and difference can be a cause) and the world of nonliving billiard balls and galaxies (where forces and impacts are the "causes" of events). These are the two worlds that Jung (following the Gnostics) calls creatura (the living) and pleroma (the nonliving). I was asking: What is the difference between the physical world of pleroma, where forces and impacts provide sufficient basis of explanation, and the creatura, where nothing can be understood until differences and distinctions are invoked?
In my life, I have put the descriptions of sticks and stones and billiard balls and galaxies in one box, the pleroma, and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things: crabs, people, problems of beauty, and problems of difference. The contents of the second box are the subject of the book.
... "Break the pattern which connects the items of learning and you necessarily destroy all quality."
I offer you the phrase the pattern which connects as a synonym, another possible title for this book.
{Added 12/01/98-12/08/98}
What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me? And me to you? And all the six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the back-ward schizophrenic in another?
I want to tell you why I have been a biologist all my life, what it is that I have been trying to study. What thoughts can I share regarding the total biological world in which we live and have our being? How is it put together?
What now must be said is difficult, appears to be quite empty, and is of very great and deep importance to you and to me. At this historic juncture, I believe it to be important to the survival of the whole biosphere, which you know is threatened.
What is the pattern which connects all the living creatures?
{Added 12/08/98}
Let me go back to my crab and my class of beatniks. I was very lucky to be
teaching people who were not scientists and the bias of whose minds was even
anti-scientific. All untrained as they were, their bias was aesthetic. I would
define that word, for the moment, by saying that they were not like Peter
Bly, the character of whom Wordsworth sang
A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him;
And it was nothing more.
Rather, they would meet the primrose with recognition and empathy.
By aesthetic, I mean responsive to the pattern which connects.
So you see, I was lucky. Perhaps by coincidence, I faced them with what was
(though I knew it not) an aesthetic question: How are you related to this
creature? What pattern connects you to it?
By putting them on an imaginary planet, "Mars," I stripped them of all thought of lobsters, amoebas, cabbages, and so on and forced the diagnosis of life back into identification with living self: "You carry the bench marks, the criteria, with which you could look at the crab to find that it, too, carries the same marks." My question was much more sophisticated that I knew.
{Added 12/08/98-12/09/98}
Yes, indeed, the two claws are characterized (ugly word) by embodying similar relations between parts. Never quantities, always shapes, forms, and relations. This was, indeed, something that characterized the crab as a member of creatura, a living thing.
Later, it appeared that not only are the two claws built on the same "ground plan" (i.e., upon corresponding sets of relations between corresponding parts), but that these relations between corresponding parts extend down the series of the walking legs. We could recognize in every leg pieces that corresponded to the pieces in the claw.
And in your own body, of course, the same sort of thing is true. Humerus in the upper arm corresponds to femur in the thigh, and radius-ulna corresponds to tibia-fibula; the carpals in the wrist correspond to tarsals in the foot; fingers correspond to toes.
The anatomy of the crab if repetitive and rhythmical. It is, like music, repetitive with modulation. Indeed, the direction from head toward tail corresponds to a sequence in time: In embryology, the head is older than the tail. A flow of information is possible, from front to rear.
Professional biologists talk about phylogenetic homology (see Glossary) for that class of facts of which one example is the formal resemblance between my limb bones and those of a horse. Another example is the formal resemblance
That is one class of facts. Another (somehow similar?) class of facts is what they call serial homology. One example is the rhythmic repetition with change from appendage to appendage down the length of the beast (crab of man); another (perhaps not quite comparable because of the difference in relation to time) would be the bilateral symmetry of the man or crab.
{Added 12/09/98-12/10/98}
Let me start again. The parts of a crab are connected by various patterns of bilateral symmetry, of serial homology, and so on. Let us call these patterns within the individual growing crab first-order connections. But now we look at crab and lobster and we again find connection by pattern. Call it second-order connection, or phylogenetic homology.
Now we look at man or horse and find that, here again, we can see symmetries and serial homologies. When we look at the two together, we find the same cross-species sharing of pattern with a difference (phylogenetic homology). And, of course, we also find the same discarding of magnitudes in favor of shapes, patterns, and relations. In other words, as this distribution of formal resemblances is spelled out, it turns out that gross anatomy exhibits three levels or logical types of descriptive propositions:
1. The parts of any member of Creatura are to be compared with other parts
of the same individual to give first-order connections.
2. Crabs are to be compared with lobsters or men with horses to find similar
relations between parts (i.e., to give second-order connections).
3. The comparison between crabs and lobsters is to be compared with the
comparison between man and horse to provide third-order connections.
We have constructed a ladder of how to think about... the pattern which connects.
{Added 12/11/98}
My central thesis...
{Added 12/eie/98}
The President knew the man needed no introduction, so, without a word of identification, he simply told the employees of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare assembled to hear his speech: "Peter Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. It's the aim of my administration to prove Mr. Drucker wrong." If Richard Nixon thought he did not have to identify Peter Drucker thirty years ago, must I do it know? Drucker's fame is planetary. (The test of planetary is to have one of your novels be a best seller in Brazil.) According to a recent book on management gurus, Peter Drucker is "one of the few thinkers in any discipline who can claim to have changed the world: he is the inventor of privatization, the apostle of a new class of knowledge workers, the champion of management as a serious discipline." Drucker has been called everything from "the father of management" to "the man who changed the face of industrial America" to "the one great thinker management theory has produced."
{Added 12/30/98}
term: "society of organizations" -- compared to what?
{Added 12/30/98}
For sixty years Drucker has taken on a new subject every three or four years and read up on it to the capacious limits of his curiosity. One year it might be Japanese art, which he taught on the side for six years at Pomona College; another year it could be sixteenth-century finance; yet another the history of technology or of work -- or of American statesmen or of British rule in India. He recommends intellectual omnivorousness as a form of self-renewal.
{Added 12/30/98}
Miss Elsa devised a way to make Peter responsible for his own learning. She gave him a notebook and required him to record what he expected to learn at the beginning of each week and then to check his expectations against the results at the end of the week. (Miss Elsa, it appears, invented "Managing by Objectives," Drucker's signature management concept.)
{Added 12/31/98}
a) Things can be measured.
b) If effect X happened before, the same causes will cause X to happen again.
c) Single things are a part of a class of things. Abstraction tends to be forgotten. So, for example, all humans are treated alike, because they are all human.
d) The future can be predicted.
e) Statistics and probability apply to the real world, and can be used to predict the future.
f) It is possible for people to be objective.
g) People are motivated to seek objectivity to alleviate their anxiety, fear, and tension. [Philip Slater]
My father decided in the sixties that he would try as much as he could to present his ideas in an aphoristic style. Aphorisms, as Francis Bacon said, are incomplete, a bit like cartoons. They are not filled-out essay writing that is highly compressed. ...
Tested P-47 "Thunderbolts", formulated emergency procedures, and ordered changes in the plane's design, which helped save lives.
{Added 12/17/98}
Submitted himself to medical testing at Mayo Clinic, and came up with idea to train himself to become aware of hypoxic condition and switch oxygen tanks, which became part of indoctrination program for pilots.
{Added 12/17/98}
As those Thunderbolts entered production--becoming the most effective bomber escort planes in the European Theater--Lindbergh steadily devoted more time to United's development of the Navy Marine Corsair (Vought F4U), which would be used as both a carrier fighter and a land-based plane. Between December 1942 and July 1943, Lindbergh made eight trips to Hartford, where he taught pilots the fine points of flying the plane, with its unique, upturned-wing design. Trained as a fighter pilot and frustrated at not having seen action, Lindbergh participated in maneuvers and mock combat. Deak Lyman, formerly of The New York Times, then working as an executive for United Aircraft, recalled Lindbergh's taking his plane up and engaging in a high-altitude gunnery contest against two of the Marines' best pilots. Lyman said the forty-one-year-old civilian "outguessed, outflew, and outshot" both his opponents, each practically half his age.
{Added 12/17/98}
Until the arrangements were made, Lindbergh continued to test planes, mostly single-seater or two-place planes at military bases. The work was dangerous, as some of the planes were experimental and others were obsolete, many with untried or overworked parts. During four days in January at Eglin Field in Florida, Lindbergh flew eight different planes--including the Boeing B-29, which America was about to release into the skies. This superfortress--capable of flying 350 m.p.h., with a radius of over two thousand miles, and a maximum bomb-load of twenty thousand pounds--was the pride of the nearly one hundred thousand planes the United Sates would produce that year, a vast improvement in speed, range, and load over any of of the 2200 planes America had produced in 1939"
{Added 12/18/98}
Here comes this wave. Look at all this whiteness and all those bubbles. I said to
myself, "I've been taught at school that to be able to design a model -- because a
bubble is a sphere -- you have to use pi, and the number, pi, 3.14159265, on and on
goes the number." We find it cannot be resolved because it is a transcendental
irrational. So I said, "When nature makes one of those bubbles, how many places
did she have to carry out pi before she discovered you can't resolve it? And at
what point does nature decide to make a fake bubble?" I said, "I don't think nature
is turning out any fake bubbles, I think nature's not using pi." This made me
start looking for ways in which nature did contrive all mensurations, all her
spontaneous associations, without using such numbers.
Buckminster Fuller (An Autobiographical Monologue / Scenario): Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder, 1980
{Added 12/18/98}
Physics has found no solids! So to keep on teaching our children the word solid immediately is to drive home a way of thinking that is going to be neither reliable nor useful.
There are no surfaces, there are no solids, there are no straight lines, there are no planes.
Buckminster Fuller (An Autobiographical Monologue / Scenario) Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder, 1980
{Added 12/21/98}
There comes a time, however, when we discover other ways of doing the same task more economically -- as, for instance, when we discover that a 200-ton transoceanic jet airplane -- considered on an annual round-trip-frequency basis -- can outperform the passenger-carrying capability of the 85,000-ton Queen Mary.
Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller, 1981.
{Added 01/07/99}
I am not a thing -- a noun. I am not flesh. At eighty-five, I have taken in over a thousand tons of air, food, and water, which temporarily became my flesh and which progressively disassociated from me. You and I seem to be verbs -- evolutionary processes. Are we not integral functions of the Universe?
Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller, 1981.
{Added 01/07/99}
1053.832 Radiation outcasts. Radiation does not broadcast; broadcast is a planar statement; there are no planes. Out is inherently omnidivergent. Radiation omnicasts but does not and cannot *in*cast; it can only go-in-to-go-out. *In* is gravity.
1053.833 If radiation "goes through" a system and comes out on the other side, it does so because (1) there was no frequency interference -- it just occurred
between the system's occurrence frequencies -- or (2) there was tangential interference and deflection thereby of the of angle of travel, wherefore it did not go
through; it went by.
Synergetics by Buckminster Fuller, 1975.
{Added 01/07/99}
It is a nontrivial matter that we are almost always unaware of trends in our changes of state. There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to
sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the
moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing
pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, 1979.
{Added 01/08/99}
Human sense organs can receive only news of difference, and the differences must be coded into events in time (i.e. into changes) in order
to be perceptible. Ordinary static differences that remain constant for more than a few seconds become perceptible only by scanning.
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, 1979.
{Added 01/08/99}
Ross Ashby long ago pointed out that no system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything new unless the system contains some source of the
random. In the computer, this will be a random-number generator which will ensure that the "seeking," trial-and-error moves of the machine will ultimately cover
all the possibilities of the set to be explored.
Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, 1979.
{Added 01/08/99}
From the perspective of soul, however, we see each opposing either/or as a conjoined both/and. We can be here only because we are not there; in this way the "here" and "there" belong together. "That comes from this, and this comes from that--which means that that and this give birth to one another. Life rises from death and death from life." (Chuang-tsu) If God exists beyond all the heavens, then God must be hidden in what is closest and most familiar to us. "When there is no more separation between "this and that, it is called the still-point of Tao. At the still-point in the center of the circle one can see the infinite in all things." I can be separated from you only because at a deeper level we are joined in something inseparable. I cannot be alone alone.
The still center, the soul, does not oppose anything. Not opposing anything, it does nothing. As
soul, we do not act; we are. As ego, we cope with the world, change it, arrange it, try to improve
it. We cope with ourselves, too, becoming our own projects, struggling to be who and where we are
not. When we become aware of the still-point in a person, of a deed that has no doer, we are aware
of soul; we are in the presence of presence.
[pp. 11-12 quote]
By midday it became apparent that the teacher had lost direction. Moreover, no provision had been made for food. There was increasing grumbling but he continued walking, sometimes through underbrush and sometimes across faces of crumbling rock.
When they reached the summit in the late afternoon, they found other wanderers already there who had strolled up a well-worn path. The disciples complained to the teacher.
He said only, "These others have climbed a different mountain."
[p. 33 quote]
Indeed, the grander the vision, the more extensive--and the more surprising--our preparation has been.
Through the whole course of our ordinary life, veils are dropping away but as long as we are looking from
the perspective of ego we never notice.
[p. 83 quote]
--RIG VEDA, X:129
[p. 89 quote] [from p. 23, A. L. Basham, "The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism, 1989]
--An Anonymous Sufi
[p. 125 quote] [from Kenneth Cragg, "Wisdom of The Sufis", 1976, p. 48]
My God was more like the sky over the sound: gray, vast, cold, full of veiled threat. You had to be a sharp thinker for this one and you had to work at it to get close. Getting close required dedication, sacrifice, and vigilance. For Bob's it was enough just to be there for morning worship, according to the Book of Common Prayer. Whether you come late, doze a little, even let your mind wander, it's all the same.
I wanted a God I could experience in some amazing way. Bob's faith overlapped so completely with his life that God was more like a companion than, well, like God. Such an experience of God seemed to me too unexceptional, too ordinary, reassuring but boring. I was always looking for a revelation, a sign, an appearance in the void so unexpected it threw off all your thinking. There was something lovely in the idea of a God who just puts an arm across your shoulders, but still, I wanted to be carried up, swept away.
There was an irony here I missed completely. If the God implicit in Bob's faith was an affable aristocrat, there was at least an openness to every sort of experience. No one in his variety of Christianity was privileged by the quality of their private relation to the Divine. My idea of the experience of God, on the other hand, led to religious elitism. In wanting a special revelation of my own, I wanted also to be special among the citizens of faith. The certainty I longed for would, I thought, give my voice a discernible authority--a direct route to spiritual arrogance.
I was impatient with Bob's lack of theological earnestness. My Presbyterian conviction that in time
everything would be explained, even if current explanations were still incomplete, seemed to amuse him.
[pp. 129-130 quote]
Spiritual arrogance is hardly unique to Christianity. I imagine I could just as easily have argued that this perspiring and unhappy citizen needed nothing so much as the Buddhist dharma, or the five pillars of Islam, or the ritual instructions of the Yajur Veda, or the wisdom of the Torah.
Mystics frequently warn us against seeing the whole world from a perspective unique to our own tradition.
Ibn Arabi, a master of Sufi gnosticism, observed that if we remembered that "the water takes its color
from the vessel containing it," we would not interfere with the beliefs of others "but would perceive God
in every form of belief." But how do we get at the clear water? How especially can we presume to find God
everywhere without arriving at an even higher arrogance?
[pp. 133-134 quote]
[inner quote from Reynold A. Nicholson, "The Mystics of Islam", 1975, p. 88.]
So the obvious fact that when we are talking we are not silent yields to the more complicated fact that when we are not talking we are still not silent. How then do we go about the task of shutting down the inner voices that are trying to get our attention?
It is possible to get ourselves to stop talking by talking to ourselves, but only with virtuosic effort. We would need to develop an inner discipline by which we are always ready to spring out with a mental "Stop!" each time a word enters the edge of consciousness. This, however, would be less the practice of silence than the practice of shouting ourselves down. The result is something closer to mental wordlessness than to genuine silence. It is still the art of silencing , not the art of silence.
We won't make any progress in reaching a deeper level of silence until we abandon the struggle to silence ourselves and begin to listen to the many voices that insist on speaking within us. To do this we must become a listener who has nothing to say. Before we can become such a listener we must first know whose voices they are. In one sense, of course, they are all our own. There are no other speakers actually residing in us. In another sense, however, none of these voices is ours. They originate in our parents and children, in friends, lovers, teachers, in our critics and models, heroes and heroines. "Stand chin-to-chin with each of life's challenges and slug it out," my father says in one of his characteristic lectures. Dead thirty years, he is standing right at my shoulder. "It's better to lose than not to fight at all," he adds and gives me a gentle shove. "Will you miss me?" Alice asked a few days before she died, and continues to ask over and over again. Though the speakers are absent there is an urging, an insistent energy in their voices. These words don't just whip through our interiority like leaves in a storm. They require a response. "You know, I'm not really a slugger," I try to tell my father. "Yes, Alice," I say each time she asks. "Yes."
There is a paradox here. These words are spoken by others. We could not possibly have invented the words or the speakers. And yet, because no one is actually speaking them in us, they are also our own. When we step back to be a listener who has nothing to say, we see ourselves not just noisy with words but deep in conversation with scores of others. That we can have this conversation completely within ourselves shows how far we can isolate our interiority from others. None of the conversants need ever know we are talking with them. On the other hand, because every voice within us is someone's voice, we know this isolation can never be complete.
All language is therefore shared language. Even the most intimate and hidden conversation with ourselves is in words we have learned from speaking with others. In fact, we don't know what we are saying to ourselves unless we know what these words would mean if we spoke them to another. It is a curious fact that we cannot make up a private language to use only within ourselves. We might devise a secret code with an array of sounds and signs indecipherable to others, but if we couldn't translate them into language someone else could understand we couldn't make sense of them either.
For this reason, unless we have listeners other than ourselves, we cannot speak at all. I can't say anything to you unless you are waiting to receive my words. But I won't know I have said anything until you respond with your own speech. Then, of course, you won't speak unless my words have behind them a waiting silence of my own. Silence precedes our discourse with each other and makes it possible, but it must be a shared silence. Before each of us can have a voice of our own, we must enter a silence we can enter only together. It is a silence without walls.
By stepping back to be the listener who has nothing to say we discover that just as there is no language that is exclusively our own, there is no silence that is not a shared silence.
Because our speaking with each other implies a shared silence, because it is a silence that language cannot exhaust, the mysticism of language does not reside in what we say but in the very existence of language itself. Every spoken word is a threshold into our own inwardness and at the same time into oneness with others.
The soul has nothing to say. Its essential silence makes voices possible but it has no voice of its own. Therefore, from the perspective of soul, it is the ongoing, renewable, changeable nature of language, its continuing life, that is most important. Because the meanings of words arise in the way speakers respond to each other, there is a constant evolution of the meaning of any given word over the course of its use. The meaningfulness of our speech has much more to do with our ability to keep our discourse with each other open than it has to do with pinning down the meanings of words and expressions. We know our discourse is meaningful not by what we have said but by what has yet to be said. Soul draws our speech forward in the direction of the unspeakable. Only thus can it remain speech.
Ego, always the earnest dualist in us, is eager to maintain boundaries between speaker and listener. It wants
to direct the flow of words, knowing in advance where our conversation with others is headed. A builder of
walls, the ego longs for control over the meaning of words. But doing so, it walls itself in and though it
may increase the volume of words it says less and less.
[pp 160-164]
The story came after Gerry as well. Even if it started with her mother, it had a persistent energy her mother
could not have given it. It awoke a listener in Gerry's childhood that would not go back to sleep in her
adulthood. But it awoke a listener in me as well. Why would a tale so contrary to fact and seemingly silly
persist in seizing our attention unless there were a listener in us awake to something we could not yet notice?
[p 171]
The faithfulness of stories to fact is often the way we evaluate them. "Is that story true?" "Did that really happen?" But stories seem to have a life of their own that allows them to race on without so much as a glance at the factual.
Because of their inherent liveliness, stories command a sharper attention than facts, however appropriate facts
may be to the matter under discussion. The way an audience is visibly awakened by a narrative example during an
otherwise precisely factual lecture shows that stories touch us closer to a listener's center than accurate
descriptions of objective states of affairs. Gerry would not have grabbed my Milwaukee Braves cap and slid over
to her corner of the front seat to lecture on the mechanics of her conception and delivery, nor if she had would I
have remembered. The mythic story of her birth was abruptly invalidated by a few physiological details but it
obviously had far too much vitality to be buried by the truth.
[pp 171-172]
I can recall an earlier but futile quest for a new logical system. In Science and Sanity Altred Korzybski, basing his analysis on what we had learned of
the brain by 1933, claimed that 'present-day theories of meaning are extremely confused, ultimately hopeless, and probably harmful to the sanity of the human
race...We face a complete methodological departure from two-valued "objective" orientation to general infinite-valued "process" orientation... The problem is
whether we deal with scientific methods of 350 BC or AD 1933.' His non-Aristotelian world view did little to stave off a decade of death and destruction, but
since then we've learned a lot more about the nature of mind and brain.
-- Sheldon Lee Glashow
{Added 01/14/99}
As a biological system the human brain handles information in a way that is quite different from traditional information systems. In traditional information systems we store information symbolically and then operate on these symbols according to certain rules (logic, mathematics, grammar etc.). Traditional computers store information in memory and then act upon it with the processor. In biological systems the information and the receiving surface act together as a self-organizing system -- which means they produce patterns and arrangements on their own. In biology information triggers the next stable state of the system.
{Added 01/22/99}
Civilization has done a marvelous job in taming thinking by putting it into a symbol and rules game -- without reference to the underlying information system. Today -- for the first time in history -- we can look at the underlying system. We can being to examine the impact of that understanding on our traditional thinking habits. For example lateral thinking and provocation are mathematically necessary in self-organizing patterning systems.
{Added 01/22/99}
Since every valuable creative idea must always be logical in hindsight (otherwise we could not appreciate its value) we have believed that logic is sufficient. This is totally wrong in a patterning system.
{Added 01/22/99}
Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human mind.
{Added 01/26/99}
Why humour is so significant and why it has been so neglected by traditional thinkers together form the key to this book. Humour tells us more about how the brain works as mind, than does any other behaviour of the mind -- including reason. It indicates that our traditional thinking methods, and our thinking about these methods, have been based on the wrong model of information system. It tells us something about perception which we have traditionally neglected in favour of logic. It tells us directly about the possibility of changes in perception. It shows us that these changes can be followed by instant changes in emotion -- something that can never be achieved by logic.
{Added 01/26/99}
The last Renaissance was clearly based on the re-discovery of ancient Greek (about 400 BC) thinking habits of logic, reason, argument, truth and the importance of man. Before the last Renaissance the thinking habits of the Western world were derived entirely from dogma and theology. Maps of the world had to show large land masses with Jerusalem at the dead centre -- not because the experience of navigators had suggested such a disposition of land but because dogma said that was how it had to be.
'I am right -- you are wrong' is a short-hand crystallization of the thinking habits that both formed the last Renaissance and were further developed by it. The search for truth -- as distinct from dogma -- was to be made through the exposure of falsity by means of argument, reason and logic. This reason, not dogma, was to decide what was right and what was wrong.
{Added 01/26/99}
The new thinking habits of the New Renaissance are to be based on the most fundamental of all bases, more fundamental than philosophical word-play or belief systems. They are to be based directly on how the human brain works, and, in particular, the way the human brain creates perception.
{Added 01/28/99}
We can come to see how the thinking habits of the last Renaissance emphasized some of the worst habits of mind. We can come to see why the thinking and language systems we developed and now esteem so highly are good at logic but poor at perception. We can see how that failure to deal with perception gives rise to the inadequacies and dangers of our current thinking.
{Added 01/28/99}
No one had encouraged me to think about the way other people used words to inform or persuade me, to sway me politically or manipulate my emotions, to prejudice
me or make me want to buy something. Now one had told me that I used language that way, without knowing it.
-- Robert MacNeil (in Introduction)
{Added 01/18/99}
Hayakawa made me understand for the first time what it is in language that makes one statement a report and another a judgment; one objective, another
subjective. That is the most elementary lesson of journalism, and of all disciplined writing, but no one had taught it explicitly.
-- Robert MacNeil (in Introduction)
{Added 01/18/99}
To learn to think more clearly, to speak and to write more effectively, and to listen and to read with greater understanding--these are the goals of the study of language. This book tries to approach these traditional goals by the methods of modern semantics--that is, through an understanding in biological and functional terms of the role of language in human life and through an understanding of the different uses of language: language to persuade and control behavior, language to transmit information, language to create and express social cohesion, and the language of poetry and the imagination.
{Added 1/19/99}
Words that convey no information may nevertheless move carloads of shaving cream or cake mix, as we all know from television commercials. Words can start people marching in the streets--and can stir others to stoning the marchers. Words that make no sense as prose can make a great deal of sense as poetry. Words that seem simple and clear to some may be puzzling and obscure to others. With words we sugarcoat our nastiest motives and our worst behavior, but with words we also formulate our highest ideals and aspirations. (Do the words we utter arise as a result of our thoughts, or are our thoughts determined by the linguistic systems we happen to have been taught?)
{Added 1/19/99}
How would you respond if someone said to you, "Taters ain't doin' good this year"? Those who approach the study of language and speech from a traditional point of view have seen their first duty as that of correcting the speaker's grammar, pronunciation, and diction in order to bring them up to literate standards. Students of language with a semantic orientation will give priority to a different task. They might ask such questions as "What potatoes do you mean? Those on your farm, or those throughout the county? How do you know? From personal observation? From reports from credible sources?" In short, teachers of semantics will concern themselves, and teach their students to concern themselves, first of all with the truth, the adequacy, and the degree of trustworthiness of statements.
{Added 1/20/99}
The original version of this book, Language in Action,, was in many respects a response to the dangers of propaganda, especially as exemplified in Adolf Hitler's success in persuading millions to share his maniacal and destructive views. It was my conviction then, as it remains now, that we need to have a habitually critical attitude toward language--our own as well as that of others--both to provide for our personal well-being and to ensure that we will function adequately as citizens. Hitler is gone, but if the majority of our fellow citizens are more susceptible to the slogans of fear and race hatred than to those of peaceful accommodation and mutual respect among human beings, our political liberties remain at the mercy of any eloquent and unscrupulous demagogue.
{Added 1/20/99}
People who think of themselves as tough-minded and realistic, among them influential political leaders and businessmen as well as go-getters and small-time hustlers, tend to take it for granted that human nature is selfish and that life is a struggle in which only the fittest may survive. According to this philosophy, the basic law by which man must live, in spite of his surface veneer of civilization, is the struggle of the jungle. The 'fittest' are those who can bring to the struggle superior force, superior cunning, and superior ruthlessness.
The wide currency of this philosophy of the "survival of the fittest" enables people who act ruthlessly and selfishly, whether in personal rivalries, business competition, or international relations, to allay their consciences by telling themselves that they are only obeying a law of nature. But a disinterested observer is entitled to ask whether the ruthlessness of the tiger, the cunning of the fox, and obedience to the law of the jungle are, in their *human* applications, actually evidence of human fitness to survive. If human beings are to pick up pointers on behavior from the lower animals, are there not animals other than beasts of prey from which we might learn lessons in survival?
We might, for example, point to the rabbit or the deer and define fitness to survive as superior rapidity in running away from our enemies. We might point to the
earthworm or the mole and define it as the ability to keep out of sight and out of the way. We might point to the oyster or the housefly and define it as the
ability to propagate our kind faster than our enemies can eat us up. In Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", we see a world designed by those who would model human
beings after the social ants. The world, under the management of a super-brain trust, might be made as well integrated, smooth, and efficient as an ant colony and,
as Huxley shows, just about as meaningless. If we simply look to animals in order to define what we mean by "fitness to survive," there is no limit to the subhuman
systems of behavior that can be devised: we may emulate lobsters, dogs, sparrows, parakeets, giraffes, skunks, or the parasitical worms, because they have all
obviously survived in one way or another. We are still entitled to ask, however, if human survival does not revolve around a different kind of fitness from that
of the lower animals.
Because of the wide prevalence of the dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest philosophy
in our world (although the H-bomb has awakened some people to the need for a change
in philosophy). it is worthwhile to look into the present scientific standing of the
phrase "survival of the fittest." Biologists distinguish between two kinds of struggle
for survival. First, there is the interspecific struggle, warfare between different
species of animals, as between wolves and deer or men and bacteria. Second, there is the
intraspecific struggle, warfare among members of a single species, as when rats fight
other rats or men fight other men. A great deal of evidence in modern biology
indicates that those species which have developed elaborate means of intraspecific
competition often unfit themselves for interspecific competition, so that such species
are either already extinct or are threatened with extinction at any time. The
peacock's tail, although useful in sexual competition against other peacocks, is only a hindrance in coping with the environment or competing against other species.
The peacock could therefore be wiped out overnight by a sudden change in ecological balance. There is evidence, too, that strength and fierceness in fighting and
killing other animals, whether in interspecific or intraspecific competition, have never been enough in themselves to guarantee the survival of a species. Many a
mammoth reptile, equipped with magnificent offensive and defensive armaments, ceased millions of years ago to walk the earth. (footnote 2)
If we are going to talk about human survival, one of the first things to do, even if we grant that men must fight to live, is to distinguish between those qualities that are useful to men in fighting the environment and other species (for example, floods, storms, wild animals, insects, or bacteria) and those qualities (such as aggressiveness) that are useful in fighting other men.
The principle that if we don't hang together we shall all hang separately was
discovered by nature long before it was put into words by man. Cooperation within a
species (and sometimes with other species) is essential to the survival of most living
creatures. Man, moreover, is the talking animal--and any theory of human
survival that leaves this fact out of account is no more scientific than would be a
theory of beaver survival that failed to consider the interesting uses a beaver makes
of its teeth and flat tail. Let us see what talking--human communication--means.
{Added 11/12/98,12/11/98,12/14/98}
The symbol is not the thing symbolized; the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory it stands for.
{Added 12/14/98}
The Seven Radical Rules for Business Success
1. Always tell the truth.
2. Always take 100 percent responsibility for any activity you're involved in.
3. Scrupulously attend to all agreements you make and others make with you.
4. Never gossip and never get in the middle of communications between other people.
5. Set aside daily creative think-time and make it sacred.
6. Make a to-do list and update it constantly throughout the day.
7. Go to the source. Whenever you hear of something that makes you feel uncomfortable, talk to all parties concerned and listen carefully to them.
{Added 07/13/99}
(Interviewed by Gail Hudson)
Amazon.com: Why did you choose the title After the Ecstasy, the Laundry?
Jack Kornfield: Many people believe that there will be some great enlightenment that will change everything, and they will live happily ever after. But as it turns out, there is no enlightened retirement. After whatever awakenings have happened to people, then the next task is to integrate and fulfill those experiences in their lives. We all know that after the honeymoon comes the marriage, and after the election comes the hard task of governance, and spiritual life is the same. After the ecstasy, the laundry.
Amazon.com: It seems like it's a struggle to keep up with the laundry in the United States. There are so many distractions--e-mail, phone calls, television, consumerism.
Kornfield: We live in a society that could be characterized as having an absence of the sacred. We're so busy that we now have 24-hour banking and 24-hour stockbrokers and 24-hour supermarkets. But where is the pause and the time to step back and listen to the heart? In most wise societies there's one day a week--the Muslims have Friday, and the Buddhists have full and new and quarter moon days. Even the heartbeat that we have--if you tried to use any other muscle as often as the heart beats, it would get exhausted. The reason your heart can beat so long and hard is because between each beat it takes a rest.
Amazon.com: I remember reading a book called Sabbath by Wayne Muller, which is [Image] about reclaiming a sacred day or even a sacred hour when we rest. In our busyness, we've lost the Sabbath in our daily lives.
Kornfield: Yes! Let me ask you this: I don't know anyone who has a computer and e-mail who has more free time than before they got their computer or before they got their e-mail, do you?
Amazon.com: No, I don't. So what advice is there for people who live in this kind of a culture?
Kornfield: The advice is contrary to the words of the culture. It is to take time off. To walk in nature. To create a quiet place for yourself. To learn an inner, contemplative practice--yoga and meditation. To learn mindful eating and mindful speech. To find friends who value the life of the heart. To take time to serve others. To live more simply. To listen to music. To do those things that quiet the mind and open the heart. And we know what they are.
In the introduction there's this little quote from Pir Vilayat Khan, the 75-year-old head of the Sufi Order in the West, where he says, "Of so many great teachers I've met in India and Asia, if you were to bring them to America and get them a house, two cars, a spouse, three kids, a job, insurance, and taxes, they would all have a hard time."
It's important to acknowledge that it's not easy, that a spiritual life in modern culture is swimming upstream a little bit. But the beautiful thing is that it's possible and that it can transform everything that we touch.
Amazon.com: So many people spend their adulthood searching for the right religion or spiritual path. Why do you say that it doesn't really matter what discipline we choose? That it's the commitment that will bring the change and growth?
Kornfield: Looking to find a path that touches your heart is important, and for some people it may be necessary to visit several teachers and taste several traditions. But once you have, the only way that your heart is transformed is to undertake some practice in an honorable way, whether it is a Native American vision quest or a Buddhist sitting meditation or a Hindu prayer and service and chanting in the holy way or a Christian contemplative prayer. And to do it over and over so that on the days that we feel afraid or small-minded or lost or upset, we actually understand how this spiritual discipline can help us to navigate through that with a compassionate heart.
Amazon.com: What are the benefits of committing to a spiritual practice?
Kornfield: The promise of spiritual practice is a shift from the small sense of self or the body of fear, in which we are frightened or needy or angry because we didn't get what we wanted. We are caught up in gain and loss and praise and blame. And from that perspective, there's a great deal of conflict and suffering. One can expect an awakening to our true nature, or our Buddha nature, or our true self, which is inherently at ease, connected, compassionate, and forgiving, because we're not in need of things.
Spiritual life doesn't make you a good person. You are a good person, you are a holy being, when you are born. What spiritual life does is remind us that this is who we really are.
Amazon.com: I was interested in how you characterized commitment as an expression of freedom.
Kornfield: In American popular culture there's a kind of misunderstanding of freedom. We have the freedom to buy a Plymouth or a Toyota or a Land Rover, or to buy one of 50 different kinds of beer, right? It's really the freedom of our desires.
But a deeper meaning of freedom is that we are free to not be caught in greed, not be caught in fear, not be caught in hatred. That our heart is free. Instead of being trapped in fear or grasping or hatred, we are free to love. We are free to care for this earth. We are free to express the beauty of our own lives.
There's a very big difference between attachment and commitment. Commitment is central and essential for spiritual life. If you have no commitment, the first time you sit in meditation and your knees hurt, or you get restless, or your mind wanders, you'll get up and say, "This isn't for me." You need a commitment in order to learn a deeper freedom, which is how to be with all of the joys and sorrows of the world and still keep your heart open.
Amazon.com: How would you guide someone who is interested in starting a spiritual practice?
Kornfield: One of the first tasks in a wide spiritual life is to actually learn to be where we are, not to be in our fantasy or imagination or in the past, but to be where we are. That means to take a seat, stabilize the body, quiet the mind, and just pay attention to what's so now.
The common way to do that is to feel the flow of the breath as it comes in and out, or to say a simple mantra. Some people will have a simple prayer that they repeat or some holy phrase that helps them not to leave this place--something to bring the sense of the sacred to their own breath and body, their feelings and thoughts.
And if someone begins in this way, then next they can start to notice, what is actually here? What feelings are present? What's the state of my body? Is my mind frightened or agitated or contracted? Or is it open or peaceful or easy? And this leads them to a deeper level of understanding and compassion. You're really compassionate when you look at your own life honestly. Then you realize everybody else struggles the same way that you do! So the mind quiets and the heart opens.
[from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/51543/102-8501030-8521730]
This [Catholic] God could be loving and reassuring one minute, sure that you had potential, and then fiercely disappointed the next, noticing every little mistake and just in general what a fraud you really were. He was a God whom his children could talk to, confide in, and trust, unless his mood shifted suddenly and he decided instead to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah.
{Added 05/20/99}
This book is not an argument within orthodox science; it is a critique (a la Godel) of orthodox science and of the ground on which it rests, of its unproved articles of faith, and of its taken-for-granted definitions, axioms, and concepts. It is an examination of science as one philosophy of knowledge among other philosophies. It rejects the traditional but unexamined conviction that orthodox science is the path to knowledge or even that it is the only reliable path. I consider this conventional view to be philosophically, historically, psychologically and sociologically naive. As a philosophical doctrine orthodox science is ethnocentric, being Western rather than universal. It is unaware that it is a product of time and place, that it is not an eternal, unchangeable, inexorably progressing truth. Not only is it relative to time, place, and local culture, but it is also characterologically relative, for I believe it to be a reflection far more narrowly of the cautious, obsessional world view centered on the need for safety than of a more mature, generally human, comprehensive view of life. Such weaknesses as these become especially glaring in the area of psychology, where the goal is the knowledge of persons and of their actions and works.
{Added 03/29/99}
NOMOTHETIC AND IDIOGRAPHIC KNOWING
First of all, we should be aware that this question itself about a person, is ruled out by many scientists as trivial or "unscientific." Practically all scientists (of the impersonal) proceed on the tacit or explicit assumption that one studies classes or groups of things, not single things. Of course you actually look at one thing at a time, one paramecium, one piece of quartz, one particular kidney, one schizophrenic. but each one is treated as a sample of a species or of a class, and therefore as interchangeable... No ordinary scientific journal would accept a meticulous description of a particular white rat or a particular fish. The main business of classical science is generalization, abstracting what is common to all white rats or fish, etc. (Teratology, the study of exceptions and of "marvels," i.e., of monsters, is of no great scientific interest except as it teaches more about the "normal" processes of embryology by contrast.)
Any one sample is just that, a sample; it is not itself. It stands for something. It is anonymous, expendable, not unique, not sacred, not sine qua non; it has no proper name all its own and is not worthwhile in itself as a particular instance. It is interesting only insofar as it represents something other than itself. This is what I mean when I say that orthodox, textbook science normally and centrally studies classes of things, or interchangeable objects. There are no individuals in a textbook of physics or chemistry, let alone mathematics.
Taking this as a centering point, as typical and as paradigmatic, astronomers, geologists, and biologists, dealing as they sometimes do with unique instances such as a particular planet or a particular earthquake or a particular sweetpea or drosophila, yet move toward generality as the approved way of becoming more scientific. For most scientists this is the only direction in which scientific knowledge grows.
And yet as we move further away from the central model of impersonal, generalizing, similarity-seeking science, we find that there are people who are systematically and persistently curious about unique, idiographic, individual instances that are not interchangeable, that are sui generic and happen only once--some psychologists, for instance, and some ethnologists, some biologists, some historians, and of course all human beings in their intimate personal relations. (I am sure physicists and chemists have spent as much time puzzling over their [spouses] as they have over atoms.) {Added 03/29/99}
T. S. Eliot, when asked, "Please, Sir, what do you mean by the line: 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'?" replied: "I mean, 'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'..."... Picasso has been similarly quoted: "Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand it? But in the case of a painting people have to understand."
{Added 03/29/99}
People who do not have to work for a living, and have all the money they need to do whatever they want, and to gratify their every desire, wind up being bored. They succumb to boredom. Wealthy people who have little interest in intellectual pursuits, or in the arts, are especially prone to this unpleasant state. Schopenhauer has this to say about such people:
As soon as want and suffering give man a relaxation, boredom is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion and amusement. The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, to kill time, in other words, to escape from boredom. Just as need and want are the constant scourge of the people, so is boredom that of the world of fashion.
Sensual desires are satisfied in sequence, one after the other. Joseph Brodksy explains that boredom is a product of repetition. The repetition of satisfied pleasures over and over again, again and again, eventually produces boredom. Brodsky, in his 1989 commencement address at Dartmouth College, said that, nobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time is repetitive. To the graduating students of this elite Ivy League school, he said:
Potential haves, youll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, youll try to devise ways of escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets mentioned before, you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate; you may take up promiscuity, alcohol, travel, cooking lessons, drugs, psychoanalysis.
This Nobel laureate did not paint a pretty picture for these soon-to-graduate college students. His advice to them? Meet boredom head on, and wallow in it! [See "Boredom's Uses" by Joseph Brodsky, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine October, 1989, page 30.]
According to Bryan Magee, and other scholars, there are three principal features of an aesthetic experience: 1) seeing the universal in the particular; 2) having a sense of time standing still; and 3) a feeling, if only for a moment, of being taken out of oneself and of no longer being a separate entity.
Thelonious Monk probes the depths of rhythm, melodically expressed, to a level that is perhaps unequalled in music. One writer describes him as jazzs mysterious shaman.(77) With a jagged, spare style, he is given to playing behind the beat, and he sometimes seems to disregard bar lines altogether. His work is infused throughout with a wry sense of rhythmic anticipation and delay, and he juxtaposes uncanny rhythmic accents with unexpected moments of silence. One is taken aback at how he seems to go right to the essence of melody and rhythm, in what turns out to be a very simple fashion.
Listen to his recording of Bags Groove with Miles Davis recorded in 1954 on the Prestige label. It is available on CD and is in The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz (Revised). He pares rhythm down to a rock bottom, universal level. One commentator describes Monks solo on Bags Groove as one of the purest moments of beauty in the history of jazz.(78) Readers who are not familiar with Thelonious Monks music should rent the video Straight No Chaser, an excellent documentary about Monks life and music. It contains rare archival footage, including film of him playing during that famous engagement at the Five Spot. I recommend that you listen to his Blue Note and Riverside recordings, all available on CD. See also the excellent Thelonious Monk Website, at www.achilles.net/~howardm/tsmonk.html.
A good example in the realm of popular music of how simplicity embraces universality can be seen in the music of the Beatles. Their tunes, lyrics, and musical style, with their smooth blend of ensemble singing, have a natural and seemingly effortless charm. It has an inspired and refined simplicity. Another example where true art can be found in popular music is in the reggae music of the Jamaican singer, guitarist, and songwriter Bob Marley. His music has a universal and timeless simplicity. It is simultaneously consoling-uplifting-relaxing-energizing-and sensuous. Listen to his song, Three Little Birds, where he sings, in a relaxed syncopated cadence, Dont worry bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right. Listen to only this one song by Bob Marley and you will understand why 100,000 people showed up to attend a The Metaphysics of Music 145 performance he gave in Milan in 1979 during his record-breaking European tour (two years before he died, at the age of 36, from lung cancer).
Music, more so than physics, takes us to a metaphysical dimension where we can sense the innermost reality of the world. In my opinion, music that best gives us an intuitive glimpse of this realm is the following (in no particular order):
The objective or manifest comprises all things and events that are or have been accessible to the senses; thus it includes the past and the present. Sunsets, trees, other people's bodies, rocks, and ashtrays are all termed manifest or objective if they have been or are external events, impinging on our senses.
The subjective or unmanifest refers to all that appears and exists in the mind, or as the Hopi would say, 'in the heart.' The real future then, is only a portion of the subjective realm. The unmanifest realm also includes hopes, desires, wishes, and any other kinds of 'if' trips. As the unmanifest becomes the manifest, we might say that the imaginary becomes real. The Hopi notion of the unmanifest includes not just what is in the mind of man but also what is in the inner heart or core of animals, plants, things -- in fact, in the heart of the universe itself. For instance, in the actual growth of corn, the formation of clouds and their condensation into rain, in the planning and carrying out of communal activities, the Hopis perceive the unmanifest becoming manifest.
Whatever is hoped for, wished for, or strived for, is deemed unmanifest and in the subjective, mental realm. It does *not*, however, advance toward manifestation out of a distant future; it is **already present** in vital form. Whether or not something unmanifest becomes manifest is a different matter. Things may change from the unmanifest to the manifest or they may not, but the Hopi's here-now incorporates both realms. As subjective events become more definite and more assured, they become more manifest. But they do not change in a serial fashion -- one by one, minute by minute, day by day -- rather, events flow, merge, and overlap, growing into manifestation, much as plants grow. The Hopi is assured of his wife's making a blanket in two more days, although the finished blanket is not entirely manifest yet.
The manifest or objective merely involves a coming to fruition of the inner thoughts, desires, or purposes of everything in the world. Every living and nonliving thing has its private core of unmanifest desires; what becomes manifest, what becomes public and real, arises from some average of the covert desires of everything and everyone.
Once something has become manifest it does not disappear into the past. To the Hopi, it is implicit that everything that ever happened still is. The here-now of the Hopi includes what we call the past and what we call the future as well as what we call the imaginary. It might be much easier for Hopis to experience the transcendental here-now described in Chapter IV because of their cultural-linguistic background than it is for us.
Based upon his study of the Hopi language, Whorf astutely picked out some other awkward ways in which we think about time. He said that our objectified, spatialized view of time dulls our sense of the cumulative value of innumerable small moments. He writes: To us, for who time is motion on a space, unvarying repetition seems to scatter its force along a row of units of that space, and be wasted. To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion, but a "getting later" of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated. It is a storing up on an invisible change that holds over into later events. [p. 151 Whorf, Benjamin Lee "Language, Thought, and Reality" 1956] Every teacher knows the difficulty of getting pupils to recognize that repetitive practice is not a "waste of time," but only hindsight enables us to sing out to others that "practice makes perfect."
In our language we split time into discrete parts just as if it were a material thing, like sand or water. We talk about chunks of time. We speak of "a moment" of time and unconsciously think of time as a succession of separate, distinct moments. This makes it harder for us to visualize the whole of events and their organic development from tiny seeds into full bloom. It probably makes it harder for us to plan ahead -- we are always "fighting against time" or striving to "make more time." We not only still consider time an objective thing, Einstein notwithstanding, but we think it an enemy, an evil thing thwarting our every desire!
Our notions of the objectlike structure of time have led us to keeping records, diaries, accounting journals, time graphs, and related symbolic devices. We talk about "saving" time, as if it were so many units of things to be hoarded and spent. Such an emphasis upon time leads us to a high evaluation of speed, which shows up in much of our behavior. We are always hurrying into the next moment, but the next moment, like tomorrow's jam, never comes. By hurrying into the future we easily miss the present, which means we easily miss living fully. "I haven't got time," we say and hurry away like the white rabbit. If we are forever making time to save time, we'll never have time to spend time. Time cannot be made, saved, had, or spent, It is always, only now.
In my opinion the Hopi view of time falls more in accordance with the operation of our consciousness. Our ordinary view of time is simply a habit of thought. This habit developed in us along with our speech patterns at about the age of three. We learned words for time and naturally absorbed rules of their use. We were taught about yesterday, promised candy tomorrow, fed at dinnertime, bedded at naptime and generally integrated into Western society according to notions of linear serialized time. Yet the physical world is certainly not divided into a past, present, and future. Somebody made up those concepts and now each succeeding generation tries to force the world to fit them. Modern physics has discarded them, and the Hopis never acquired them. This attachment to linear time as a one-dimensional "thing" that flows from the past to the future unnecessarily limits the free flow of our consciousness. While we don't have to study Hopi language or modern physics, doing so may aid the reopening of our consciousness.
[pp. 108-112]
"Getting There Without Drugs : Techniques and Theories for the
Expansion of Consciousness" by Buryl Payne. 1973.
{Transcribed to web by Rob Bednark 8/12/98}
Most of the stories we are told now are written by novelists and screenwriters, acted out by actors and actresses, stories that have beginnings and endings, stories that are not real. The stories we can tell each other have no beginning and ending. They are a front-row seat to the real experience. Even though they may have happened in a different time or place they have a familiar feel. In some way they are about us, too.
Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life's kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people's stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories.
Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life's events "behind us" and get on with our living. After we stop we see that certain of life's issues will be with us for as long as we live. We will pass through them again and again, each time with a new story, each time with a greater understanding, until they become indistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom. It's the way life teaches us how to live.
When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we spend together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone's lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants.
The kitchen table is a level playing field. Everyone's story matters. The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage.
Most parents know the importance of telling children their own story, over and over again, so that they come to know in the tellings who they are and to whom they belong. At the kitchen table we do this for each other. Hidden in all stories is the One story. The more we listen, the clearer that Story becomes. Our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains us, is in this story. The stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope, and healing, of loneliness and the end of loneliness. Stories about God.
In telling them, we are telling each other the human story. Stories that touch us in this place of common humanness awaken us weave us together as a family once again.
Sometimes when I ask people to tell me their story they tell me about their achievements, what they have acquired or built over a lifetime. So many of us do not know our own story. A story about who we are, not what we have done. About what we have faced to build what we have built, what we have drawn upon and risked to do it, what we have felt, thought, feared, and discovered through the events of our lives. The real story that belongs to us alone.
All real stories are true. Sometimes when a patient tells me their story, someone in their family will protest. "But it didn't happen quite that way, it happened more like this." Over the years I have come to know that the stories both these people tell me are equally true, equally genuine, and that neither of them may be "correct," an exact description of the event much as a video camera might have recorded it. Stories are someone's experience of the events of their life, they are not the events themselves. Most of us experience the same event very differently. We have seen it in our own unique way and the story we tell has more than a bit of ourselves in it. Truth is highly subjective.
All stories are full of bias and uniqueness; they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something familiar through new eyes. We become in that moment a guest in someone else's life, and together with them sit at the feet of their teacher. The meaning we may draw from someone's story may be different from the meaning they themselves have drawn. No matter. Facts bring us to knowledge, but stories lead to wisdom.
The best stories have many meanings; their meaning changes as our capacity to understand and appreciate meaning grows. Revisiting such stories over the years, one wonders how one could not have seen their present meaning all along, all the time unaware of what meaning a future reading may hold. Like the stories themselves, all these meanings are true.
Knowing your own story requires having a personal response to life, an inner experience of life. It is possible to live a life without experiencing it. Most children experience life more fully than we do. Children are aware of the particulars. For a child the time between Halloween and Christmas is made up of thousands and thousands of fully experienced moments. That takes longer to live through, longer to go by. After forty, Christmas seems to come three times a year.
I was once a pediatrician but I am no longer; for many years now I have listened to the stories of people with cancer and other life-threatening illnesses as their counselor. From them I have learned how to enjoy the minute particulars in life once again, the grace of a hot cup of coffee, the presence of a friend, the blessing of having a new cake of soap or an hour without pain. Such humble experience is the stuff that many of the very best stories are made of. If we think we have no stories it is because we have not paid enough attention to our lives. Most of us live lives that are far richer and more meaningful than we appreciate.
We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity or the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with a previously unsuspected meaning. It is almost as if we have been collecting pieces of a greater wisdom, sometimes over many years without knowing.
My mother was a woman who was full of stories. As a public-health visiting nurse, she had sat at many kitchen tables, drinking tea and listening. At the age of eighty-four she chose to have cardiac bypass surgery, because it was the last chance she had for life. Even so, the odds were long: four chances in ten that she would not survive the operation. But my mother was not your ordinary elderly lady. She had lived her life as a maverick and a risk taker and to her those odds looked good. The morning of her surgery, I came to her hospital room two hours early only to find that her surgery had been moved forward and I was barely in time to kiss her before they took her upstairs. Despite the sudden change in plans and the daunting odds she was facing, my mother was peaceful, even radiant.
"Oh good!" she greeted me. "You're here! There was something that I wanted to tell you. I wanted to be certain you knew that no matter what happens here, I am satisfied and I hope you will do whatever you can to be satisfied as well." Then she smiled her charming, rakish smile and they took her away. These were her final lucid words to me.
For a long time I thought about these words, trying to understand what they had meant. My mother had achieved a great deal in her life but I did not think it was this that had given her such ease and contentment in the face of possible death. Slowly I have come to understand that the key to this sort of satisfaction lies in the inner world, the world of stories and memories. It comes not from any outer achievement but from the richness of experiencing life and sharing the inner experience of life with others.
After thirty-five years of being a physician and more than forty years of living with my own life-threatening illness, I too am a woman who is full of stories. Stories I have lived and stories I have been told. I have stories about being a daughter, a granddaughter, a friend. Stories about being a patient and stories about being a doctor. Stories other doctors and patients have told me. Stories about my cat. Stories about things I do not understand. If I were sitting at your kitchen table the way a family physician used to do, these are some of the stories I would bring there with me.
Every one of these stories has helped me to live.
[pp xxv-xxx]