Danger to Freedom .

[china]

As most of our education is the acquisition of knowledge, it is making us more and more mechanical: our minds are functioning along narrow grooves, whether it be scientific, philosophic, religious, business or technological knowledge that we are acquiring. Our ways of life, both at home and outside it, and our specialising in a particular career, are making our minds more and more narrow, limited and incomplete. All this leads to a mechanistic way of life, a mental standardisation, and so gradually the State, even a democratic State, dictates what we should become. Most thoughtful people are naturally aware of this but unfortunately they seem to accept it and live with it. So this has become a danger to freedom.

Freedom is a very complex issue and to understand the complexity of it the flowering of the mind is necessary. Each one will naturally give a different definition of the flowering of man depending on his culture, on his so called education, experience, religious superstition - that is, on his conditioning. Here we are not dealing with opinion or prejudice, but rather with a non-verbal understanding of the implications and consequences of the flowering of the mind. This flowering is the total unfoldment and cultivation of our minds, our hearts and our physical well-being. That is, to live in complete harmony in which there is no opposition or contradiction between them.
The flowering of the mind can take place only when there is clear perception, objective, non-personal, unburdened by any kind of imposition upon it. It is not what to think but how to think clearly. We have been for centuries, through propaganda and so on, encouraged in what to think. Most modern education is that and not the investigation of the whole movement of thought. The flowering implies freedom: like any plant it requires freedom to grow ,belive it or not .

Your thoughts as always.

 

[china]

........and so gradually the State, even a democratic State, dictates what we should become. Most thoughtful people are naturally aware of this but unfortunately they seem to accept it and live with it. So this has become a danger to freedom.

....

we all live in a best country in a world , we are free and we can do whatever we wont to do .

I think God has to bless more than just the Queen .

 

[darkbeaver]

Most of our education isn't acquisition of knowledge, it's acquisition of habit. If knowledge was the bussiness of schools there would be a free planet with plenty for all. Knowledge is power. Even the broader education of emersion in the western culture isn't knowledge. That flowering of the mind is exactly what the conditioning or teaching of habit is designed to prevent.You've said as much further on . I get your drift though.

 

[scratch]

Most of our education isn't acquisition of knowledge, it's acquisition of habit. If knowledge was the bussiness of schools there would be a free planet with plenty for all. Knowledge is power. Even the broader education of emersion in the western culture isn't knowledge. That flowering of the mind is exactly what the conditioning or teaching of habit is designed to prevent.You've said as much further on . I get your drift though.

So dark, what I learned in the early 70s is still being pushed today?
That kind of knowledge isn't power.

 

[china]

darkbeaver ,

Most of our education isn't acquisition of knowledge, it's acquisition of habit

.
Good point ,anyone else.....Dexter ?

 

[iARTthere4iam]

There are certain skill sets wich require us to ignore other subjects. For example, a surgeon performing a heart surgery can be forgiven for not giving his attention to philosophy or the root causes societal decay. That same surgeon may find satisfaction in classical music or horticulture or politics outside the operating theatre and that is fine but so that the medical student can at some point actually move on to becoming a working doctor it is necessary that his or her education be based on needed skill and not on the accumulation of general knowledge. As each of us is different, even among workers in similar fields, within a single field you will find various combinations of skills, knowledge and abilities. Doctors may have all studied similar skills related to medicine but will differ because of specialising within medicine, a pediatrician may have a very different set of skill from a clinical researcher or two surgeons one with a history in sports and another with an aptitude for engineering may go off in very different paths.

 

[darkbeaver]

I Art points to the complexity of profession this points to the necessary specialization and the acompanying specialist language. Does this involve further restrictions on freedom or does it promote fragmentation and erosion of continuity?

 

[darkbeaver]

Do we really want to be free? Complete harmony with no oposition or contradiction is not a recognized human form China. Where there is no contradiction there is no question, where there is no question there can be no answer, where there is no answer there is no direction in my opinion, but I think some gnostic schools agree with much of what you're saying. Contradiction is a building block for many of us however and contrast is a fundemental requirement of life I think. I can't help thinking that complete harmony would be a perfect sort of hell. It begs the question, harmony with what? I think being alive indicates a higher degree of harmony as opposed to being dead which corresponds to a lower degree of harmony. Complete harmony with the universe as a human according to developmental science would require a transition to another level or dimension of existance, wouldn't it? Maybe death for some good students of life means transition to the next or different plain wherein the cycle of contradiction begins again and so on. Free is a difficult concept, relatively speaking you can spend a lifetime traveling but never arrive.

 

[china]

darkbeaver,

Do we really want to be free?

Why plural again ,(you are not the only one who writes in plural);are you afraid to ask .."am I afraid to be free" ; you are ? ,is it more comfortable to "hide in a crowd" ?

Complete harmony with no oposition or contradiction is not a recognized human form China.

There is harrmony when the "I" is absent .Then there is a true human without any contradiction or opposition .There are always contradictions among the "I"'s ,and these are recognized ;not with the "am".

 

[darkbeaver]

So dark, what I learned in the early 70s is still being pushed today?
That kind of knowledge isn't power.

I don't know what you learned in the seventys scratch. Heres an example of school then and now. Just last week I reviewed the fee schedual for the local community college, it is appaling blatant usery of youth and nothing else, the community colleges have become totally privatized and totally destructive. Entirely useless to our society and our fresh citizens, our finest resource, as the suits like to say. When I went to vocational school in the early seventys they allowed me room and board or traveling allowance or both, I was not encumbered with the need to work through school, today at our modern processing plants, for example, the student is expected to lay down $1700.00 first of August for Industrial Electro-Mech (millwright) which represents the first installment of approximately five thousand dollars for a two year course. First of August is six weeks from the earliest release from highschool in which time virtually no summer student would earn enough to cover that however the bankers are there to extend credit which the school staff fascilitates with abandon, the potential free citizen is enslaved monetarily right at the beginning of the process, which incidentally is whats called a "portfolio school" which in many cases concentrates on building a resumee/portfolio in advance of teaching the subject/trade/skill which would in the real world fill the damn resumee. In this way youth are captured by the bankers immeadiately and become bonded slaves to the credit houses years before they are gainfully employed, thier time is quite literally stolen. Bankers should be driven out of every community in the land capitalists should be hitched to ploughshares and some partial repayment to society extracted from thier sweat in the same manner they do to your children.

 

[iARTthere4iam]

China,

I do believe your heart is in the right place but you must keep in mind that we are limited beings and we live in a physical world that imposes it's own rules. Metaphysics aside, if we want to keep expanding our knowledge of our world it often is necessary for specialists to explore very narrow avenues of insight. Later, after the specialists have done the trailblazing of new areas of knowledge then the new information may be connected with other specific knowledge and disseminated among the non-specialists and the general population.

When I want to free my mind from all the limits of reality I undoubtedly turn to Kerouacs's "Scripture of the Golden Eternity".

He is called a Yogi, he is called a Priest,
a Minister, a Brahmin, a Parson, a Chaplain,
a Roshi, a Laoshih, a Master, a Patriarch, a Pope,
a Spiritual Commissar, a Counselor, an Adviser,
a Bodhisattva-Mahasattva, an Old Man, a Saint,
a Shaman, a Leader, who thinks nothing of
himself as separate from another self, not
higher nor lower, no stages and no definite
attainments, no mysterious stigmata or secret
holyhood, no wild dark knowledge and no
venerable authoritativeness, nay a giggling sage
sweeping out the kitchen with a broom. After
supper, a silent smoke. Because there is no
definite teaching: the world is undisciplined
Nature endlessly in every direction inward
to your body and outward into space.

 

[iARTthere4iam]

Don't you think $5000 is a good investment that one might wish to make on their own behalf to become a millwright? What is wrong with paying for services you use?

 

[china]

iARTthere4iam

Because there is no definite teaching:

There isn't any teaching ;there is only learning .Think it out .

the world is undisciplined

....and who/ what is the world ? the Martians ?
...we are the world ,you and I are the undisciplined self-creation .
....it all starts with ..."who am I" iARTthere4iam ?.....and you still write and think in plural.