Sorry folks, I reread this post and had to correct the multiple errors.
This is the corrected version.
REH
Brian McAndrews wrote:
> Hi Ray, I learned a very important lesson from 4 Mohawk women who I was
> privileged to teach a few years ago. They told me that in their culture,
> when a person is asked a question, the answer might come hours or weeks
> later. The answer might also be in the form of a story that might not
> immediately seem to connect with the question. This made for a very
> interesting course. Schools tend to want answers within seconds; like the
> way many on FW fire back responses.
I hear it as the difference between the way the arts (perfect project orientation)
as opposed to the academics (time clock orientation) are taught.
What is the discipline being taught in each case?
> So I've thought a lot about beginning to respond to your response. Here is
> my beginning:
Thanks!
> Try reading Wittgenstein's writing as aphorisms. He firmly believed that
> 'philosophy ought to be written only as a poetic composition.' Wittgenstein
> used physics and oracles as symbols. Each representing a different way of
> meaning making. Oracle is the symbol for prophet, mystic, shaman, medicine
> man, angel, vision quester, mediator, seer, dreamer -
Actually, I tend to read everything as "expression" limited by time and space.
In this way you have two types of meaning that is layered.
The initial type is Denotative (dictionary culturally agreed specific meaning)
and is one to three layers deep, the second is Connotative and can be
as much as four layers deep. We tend to like sevens.
> I remember the final
> paragraph of your News Years message to FW:
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> "Being both a pagan and a priest, this might seem strange to some that I
> would suggest a possible answer within such a thought but nonetheless I am
> offering the thought. It is said that meditation is the highest form of
> prayer amongst my people. I would suggest a meditation on the balance of
> things for this new year. Meditate on your neighbors, not from the
> standpoint of conversion to your way of thought, but with the idea that a
> healthy neighbor is less likely to be a destructive one. If you pray for
> the balance of human societies, the health of their children and the
> development of their potential as humans, and then you do the same for the
> rest of life on the earth and the earth itself, then at least within
> yourself you will grow more aware. And who knows what will happen if we
> all grow more aware and less anesthetized by both the pace and demands of
> the world that we have decided to dream into place up until the
> present? Happy New Year!"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I would put what you wrote above under the oracle symbol.
There are two kinds of compliments here. I acknowledge both of them. Thank you.
What I wrote is about a process that is built around the health of a
system as a result of awareness processes asserted by the whole
person in solving the problems of that system. In some ways it
is what the Management people from MIT Sloan school are
using and calling "Learning Organizations." The late Donald Schoen
called it "Reflective Practice."
Amongst our people, for serious issues we examine a problem in a
"ritual fashion" with specified steps that include the use of "taboo"
or as F.M. Alexander terms "conscious inhibition" in
developing focus within a short, intense time frame.
A short process can contain as few as seven steps with a longer
process involving physical and emotional fasting within a group
process that takes many days and can involve literally thousands
of "steps" in meditating on the problem.
In a group, each person is acknowledged as a universe that is
different from all others. That provides, in some cases, tens
of thousands of possibilities in examining the answers to problems.
Rather than "oracles" most native councils are termed "bureaucratic"
by the outside, because they refuse to announce a decision before
the processes have been completed.
This is why councils chosen by "white" election processes are
usually boycotted by traditionals. Their processes are considered
expedient, self serving and shallow when compared to the older
consensual explorative forms.
At the end of each time period, the people discuss the problem from
a non-protagonist position. Each person simply reports with the
belief that every position reported will eventually form a coherent
whole that will allow for a group action that is without conflict. This
is the "Democracy" of the American Indian processes that I was taught.
The process finishes only when there is a consensus on the action
to be taken.
> As for Newtonian physics, I'm not interested. I am, however, very
> interested in NEWTON's physics and the other matters that informed his
> thought. Newton wrote literally a barn full of stuff. 1/3 of it dealt with
> matters of physics, 1/3 dealt with matters of religion and theology, and
> 1/3 dealt with matters of alchemy. And of course there was much that
> overlapped all three.
The physical, the spiritual (spiritus "breath" or that which is the essence of
life)
and the transformational or the creative interaction between the purely
mechanical and the alive. "Inspiration" to breath in. "Inspirational" to
breathe
in creativity.
> Strange how the physics writings are what lingers.
This for me is because of the success of the extension, through technology,
of the physical body into the universe. I was taught that all of the
Universe we perceive, and conceive, is really found in the human body
and that it (the body) determines how we will think about the external
world. The eyes, for example, are completely different for
a honey bee from ours, as is their world, the ears of a dog hears a
universe we can only imagine and use technology to project imaginatively.
When we are poor at our perceptions there is much that is real
in the world that goes unexperienced. (Plato again)
This limitation makes the objects and realities that circus and stage
performers take for granted, in the development of skills like trapeze
work and the altered states that exist in extreme musical theater works,
"supernatural" to the average person and superstitious to the 19th
century physical scientist. (Remember Bergman's "Magician"?)
I have a friend Dr. Paula Washington who wrote her Ph.D. Thesis
on these brain wave states inhabited by "Peak Ensemble
Performers." Her work was completed in the NYU Brain Research
Labs and proved that the brain wave states that people performing
difficult tasks manifest are learned, constitute a linguistic connection
between individuals (without words) and constitute a bonding
experience that creates empathy, parallel action and a sense of
well being amongst the participants.
One might make the point that being non-literal (not word/symbol oriented)
constitutes some kind of mystical, non-physics reality. But Washington's
data doesn't confirm that. She even makes the point that by inhabiting the
same brain state beta and delta waves, they were "on the same wave length."
In a private conversation with me, she indicated that there was data that
reached across space to distances beyond sight or sound. That it was
"states of mind" where information was being transferred and that there
had been studies of Shamanic states were the distance between
individuals participating had been considerable.
We, traditional peoples, consider these things not to be super-natural,
but techniques that are taught and learned for a practical purpose and
constitute their own logic systems. (ala C. Geertz or E.T. Hall)
Herbert Read makes the point in "Education Through Art" that Plato
understood the foundation of all knowledge to be the perception of
structures and formal process. Plato made Art the basis of all education
in his "futurist" writings as the best at holistically developing these skills.
So this is not in the least bit revolutionary or new.
> Alchemy and the philosophy upon which it is based makes for fascinating
> reading.
>
> Ray, have you ever wondered why it seems absurd to talk about progress in art
> i.e.Michaelangelo through to Picasso; and why it seems natural to talk about
> progress in science i.e. Galileo through to Einstein?
What is progressive about science except the unfolding of human
historical understandings within a given psycho/cultural context?
You may teach any of the scientific fields of endeavor in any particular
order.
That is not true of Music. There is a progressive order to the pedagogy
of the Arts that is more rigid in its progress than in Math or Science
because the primary modality of Math and Science is practical while the
progress of the arts is holistically theoretical and pedagogical. (Theoretical
physicist friends argue with me on this but I contend that they don't do it
for its lack of utility but that the use is in the challenge of complexity.
Solving
the challenge of complexity in art is called virtuosity and is only the beginning
and constitutes a very low level of "progress.")
As for Michelangelo and Picasso, they exist in two different systems
of artistic language and values. They have the same complexity and
both are true as expressions of the values and cultures of their individual
time.
You can look at science artistically, in the sense of creating a
new invention or theory. Or when you create the atmosphere of a
particular era on the stage. In creating the reality of that time, you
re-create the complexity, including the science, of the human experience
in the past. Science in that sense becomes a system of information that
is expressive of a time and place just as art is.
For us in projecting the future of society, this all becomes an issue
only with economics and the theories of Utility and Value. When value
equaled use and utility then it could be tied to an evolving history of greater
and greater efficiency of use or in the case of economics, productivity. But
if that is true as an indicator of progress then why do we still have the same
problems as in 2,000 years ago or as in the time of Charles Dickens? It is
clearly not progressive by cyclic or maybe a spiral downward for most of
humanity as many have contended on this list.
Science and Art from the past shows the humanity of the individuals
of the time as well as showing their mistakes and gross failures. So I'm
not sure that "Progress" outside of the "specific" of a practical project,
like a space mirror or the teaching of ballet or the violin is really an
appropriate formula. It seems to have been at the root of some pretty
awful actions over the last 300 years or so.
Explain to me how those
"scientists" planned to hide their mistake on that Space Mirror? Usually
such "scientists" blame it on lack of objective, critical thought done by
incompetent bureaucrats or "touchy, feely" artist types. I think that the
dichotomy of thought that creates such poles is at its heart inaccurate.
I would instead, think of the value of a constant evolving of our conscious
awareness, of both inner and outer realties, as more practical and thus
"progressive." I would also think that both can be lost in one
generation given a catastrophic event. So much for progress.
> Well that is enough for now. I've briefly touched on a few of your initial
> comments. More to come after I have thought some more. I want to comment on
> your A.I. Richards quote. Richards sat in on some of Wittgenstein's classes.
Interesting thought. One of the interesting things about poetry to
an artist is that it is the most specific use of words of all of the
possible forms. Every word is specific in its use of meaning.
Remember Dylan Thomas' descriptions in the:
Poem in October:
"It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore"
It is my fifty-seventh year to heaven and I always enjoy your thoughts Brian.
Regards
REH
