much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.~ Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.
Gladwell always asks us to look again. He challenges our thinking, as in the very way we think we actually think. He's disarmingly pleasant, a skilled storyteller with broad appeal who uses hard data to help us see beyond our vaunted assumptions and theories -- the things that are also used to shape policy. Pulling together strings from different sciences, he applies studies, makes us mull with him.
Most of all (and the reason he's attacked): he challenges the main authorizing strategy of the elites: the illusion that we live in some sort of meritocracy.
much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.~ Malcolm Gladwell in Blink.
Gladwell always asks us to look again. He challenges our thinking, as in the very way we think we actually think. He's disarmingly pleasant, a skilled storyteller with broad appeal who uses hard data to help us see beyond our vaunted assumptions and theories -- the things that are also used to shape policy. Pulling together strings from different sciences, he applies studies, makes us mull with him.
Most of all (and the reason he's attacked): he challenges the main authorizing strategy of the elites: the illusion that we live in some sort of meritocracy.
Jung said our purpose is to lighten the darkness of the creator*. Which, when you get to really understand Jung, means -- We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself. Or more simply -- Love is the way in.
------------------- My son (a musician and bot-wrting programmer) writes me:
I don't understand what that means. ------------------ I write: In a word, compassion. We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself was the theme of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. (And now we have your buddy Tyson)
What I think that means is that ...
...we choose what we want to be. Consciousness is Matter waking up to itself. If we want to keep living as a species, we need to understand that we come from, are part of, in all times, the Cosmos. That the symbiotic path -- whose guiding wisdom is compassion -- is the principle of what endures.
*Awareness, which is always just a little larger than the 'universe' it 'contains' and the very nature of sentiency seems - as far as i can make out - to manifest simultaneously as *quintillions* of ants, stars, fellow sentient beings and other sundry possibilities of similar nature. To imagine that one is only one of these - let alone an infinitesimally small speck of nothing within it - is the gateway to hell.
Listening - in the blazing sunlight - to Arvo Pärt's exquisite Ode IX, from Kanon Pokajanen (album I Am the True Vine, put out by harmonia mundi usa). If you don't know Pärt's work at all, GET to know it: in my opinion the most beautiful stuff being written today. Suggested albums are:
Tabula Rasa (ECM)
De Profundis (HMU)
Te Deum (ECM)
I Am the True Vine (HMU)
Aside from Sainte Colombe and certain Dhrupad artists, this is about all I listen to while working.
A. N. L. Retentif
**** From: deborah
More ants:
INDRA'S LESSON Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) Wisdom Stories -------
Jung said our purpose is to lighten the darkness of the creator*. Which, when you get to really understand Jung, means -- We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself. Or more simply -- Love is the way in.
-------------------
My son (a musician and bot-wrting programmer) writes me:
I don't understand what that means.
------------------
I write:
In a word, compassion. We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself was the theme of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. (And now we have your buddy Tyson)
