Mid-afternoon. You and Paul spent a couple of hours this morning looking a ‘kid fence’ to put across the fireplace room and the kitchen so when you close the doors to the study Owen is fairly secure in one room rather than the whole downstairs area. Kid-proofing takes more time than you or Carol remembered. Kim, Paul and Owen are off to visit with four of her former Miami University roommates and their husbands and families this afternoon. You just awoke from a two hour nap and have been chatting with Carol about Owen’s clothes for Christmas. Presently she is working on her iPad on the bed while you are in the black leather ‘Lazy-boy’ styled chair backing up your computer.
The above paragraph has much irrelevant description, Amorella. For example, we only have one chair in the bedroom and by adding ‘black’ it sounds as if there is another chair of another color.
Yes, I noticed you were bothered by this as I was writing. This fact alone is rather odd, don’t you think? – Amorella.
No. I most always let you have your say.
I mean the fact you consciously observe while I am writing.
Oh. – Well, I do watch what you write, but the problem is that I have to wait until you stop to actually write/think about it myself. Besides, I need to see the sentence or paragraph complete to understand what it is you are saying in context. I have been doing this since 1988 and have grown much more accustomed to the procedure. It is all a form of automaticity, maybe it is subconscious rather than unconscious – the processing procedure. This hardly seems worth noting as this is the way it works. Too much information.
Are you going to research some quotations on the ‘ancients’ of peoples?
Don’t you know? Of course I am.
Then why don’t you since this is all irrelevant. – Amorella.
I found this almost immediately.
[From:] WISDOM OF THE ELDERS
....”Knowledge of ancient people versus modern man” . . . .
Discussion Paper Lecture for dr. Hans ADAM
Philosophies and Natural Sciences Handed in by
Maricela YIP Salzburg, 9th of Jan. 2002
[www.sbg.ac.at/ipk/avstudio/pierofun/transcript/wisdom.pdf]
Introduction
David Suzuki, Ph.D., is a professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada; he is an environmentalist and broadcaster and had received numerous prizes for his contribution to science and conservation of the earth. Peter Knudtson is a Vancouver-based writer specializing in Natural history, Science, ecology, animal behavior, he has a masters degree in biology from California State University, BA in premedical in zoology from the University of California, Riverside, and he studied at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.
David Suzuki speaking in front of the Australian Museum Society:
Science is a very competitive activity, and we judge our fellow scientists by the papers they publish. And if you stop publishing you are very quickly written off by your peer group. We say "oh yeah, she's over the hill, or he's gone senile, he's passed it." And that's why even today all across this country and Canada you see all these old farts in the lab who have not had an original thought in years, but who are still doing their experiments 'cause they wanna keep publishing, they don't wanna be written off. There are though, many scientists who achieve all of the honors and the recognition, the Nobel prizes and the awards, who can afford then to sit back and say: ".... you know, I'd like to look at the bigger picture.... like, how did we get here, where are we going, what's it all about?" And often they are written off as senile, but if you read what they are writing at that point, you find some very interesting things. When Peter and I chose the title "Wisdom of the Elders", we were not just talking about the elders in the aboriginal world, we were talking about scientific elders, whose words as elders are too often discarded or ignored. So here is one. Here is an elder that I think is pretty hard to write him off as a light weight. His name is Albert Einstein. He said: " .... one cannot but be in all. When one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality, it is enough if one tries to merely comprehend a little of this mystery each day, never loose a holy curiosity...."
Now those are remarkable words coming from a scientist, all, mystery, holy.... those are words we typically say, well that's religion , that has nothing to do with science. And one day Einstein was asked by a very good friend: "Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?" Now remember that's what I was taught - and certainly early in my career, that's what I believed. Give us upgrant money and time and we'll answer anything you wanna ask. So when Einstein was asked, can everything be explained scientifically, his answer was Yes, it would be possible, but it would make no sense, it would be description without meaning, as if you would describe Beethoven's symphony as a variation of wave pressure. And of course he is absolutely right. You see, a physicist could describe a Beethoven symphony very precisely as the sequence of wave pressure striking your ear, but he would absolutely miss the spiritual sense that makes that symphony of any meaning to you.
And I find that among my colleagues in genetics, those who now have seen the human genome project - the project to decipher the 3 billion letters in a human cell - the genetic blueprint of human kind, who think that within that blueprint then resides a complete understanding of what it is to be a human being, they have lost the essence of what Einstein was saying. You simply can't have that kind of description without the spiritual sense that goes with what a human being is.
***
I realize this is not what is wanted but the words are very stirring. Also, I am going to have to choose some key words for this search for quotations such as the one attributed to Lao Tzu in yesterday’s blog.
Dr. Sazuki’s words focus on “the spiritual sense that goes with what a human being is.” This blog is my representation of personal humanity in the same sense. Post. – Amorella.
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