I don't wish that to sound like I am saying the public has a right to know everything and that less than full disclosure is wrong, only that people will always question the motivations for what is withheld, as they also should constantly be judgmental in "why" they are told the things they "are" told. And both, what is told vs. what is withheld, is meant to have them think a certain way, and ultimately to create an intended reaction or response to the telling.
I can hardly say I have never advocated that more should be known about what the government has done illegally and the damage I think it is doing. I have said that occasionally in extreme ways and in very strong language, and I have said it more subtly and often as well. The secrecy and subterfuge, not only to the public but to the Congress, and possibly even the President, on what has been going on these past dozen years has vastly diminished the United States' reputation, economy, honor, and standing in the world. And it is not the "telling" of these things which has done the damage, but the actual "doing" of them in the first place. The second makes the first inevitable, so long as the truth is valued. It may not be as valued in the here and now, but hopefully will one day become again considered of the utmost importance.
This little referenced "reality," given the wars it makes possible based upon falsified and easily falsifiable "evidence," that such a mentality makes inevitable, is not only a danger to our economy but to everyone everywhere. It will make starting that "one" next war not only possible but probable, whichever one it might be, that "Great" one which we will not be able to control or to stop until tens of millions, hundred of millions, and yes, even billions are dead relatively quickly. I have not made the arguments for greater openness for truth's sake alone, though that is a good reason, but because it should also be considered as a necessity for survival.
I also thought of writing about how the word or concept of "interference" kept popping up in my writings and what I meant by it. At times I state it is inevitable that we end up "interfering" in others lives, often in ways we would not wish to, but that is what living does and what living cannot help but doing. At other times, I sound aloof, like in "Star Trek" with the "Prime Directive," as if it is not my place to change anything, to not interfere in anything going on now, only to study it as a detached "observer" of people.
This going back and forth on if it is "interfering" or not, I see as similar to 'Arrogance and Humility' and what it came out of or was included in, "Morality: Individual and Social." How we live and interact within society is also creating what society will become, and whether it will become more just or more unjust. To simply always "go along to get along" pretty much means whether it improves or not will always be left only to those others who do not do that, and when you see that those others are not pushing it in a positive direction, that "going along to get along" means you are also keeping it going in that wrong direction by not standing up and saying, this is wrong.
When you see that happening, know or believe that it will continue to happen, and still do nothing, you can no longer hide and say it is not your place to interfere, because at that point, by letting what is right or good continue to lose out or to die, you have chosen a side simply by doing nothing. And if you see it sliding downward, you have probably by default, chosen or ended up on the wrong side, if you care or if you might ever again begin to care.
When is it "your job" to speak out, when is it your turn to take an unpopular but principled stand, that something that each person needs to decide for themselves. And as much as countries like to revel in their "power," when they try to kill that "conscience" in its public, making them think they have no right to make such assessments of their government or culture, they devolve into selfishness, greed, and brutality. But whether to get involved against the real or "silent" majority, which is often really a minority simply killing all dissent, that is up to each person to weigh and decide for him or herself.
Arrogance and Humility, Greenwald and Snowden, Not Helping vs Breaking Rules, Running Interference (Most recent post)
Truthrevival.org, February 6, 2014
In my studying of other cultures, the biggest revelations for me came from studying Chinese philosophy and Buddhism, and getting beyond the duality of 'Good' and 'Evil.' Such attitudes are called 'Eastern thinking' in opposition to our 'Western thinking.' No culture in the next 100 years can call itself 'developed' or 'enlightened' without having a foot firmly in place on both sides. Each exposes the limitations in the others type of thinking. Each side has its own poisons as well.
The West seeks to eliminate all opposing viewpoints to its 'universal' values, now by the US actions, unsubtly at the point of a gun, while openly violating all of those values at the same time. But the West has a toleration for ethnic diversity which the East lacks. Yet the shortcomings of both lie in their imagined 'superiority' over others, that you cannot be at the 'top' of the cultural spectrum without others being at the bottom. More limitations of words and concepts.
When writing about my poetry and Taoism which influenced it, I first had to speak to the fact that it was using a different 'language' than what I had been raised in. The East/West divide in thinking are different ways of looking at the world, each forged by different histories which must now combine themselves without pride and patriotism into a common world history which includes both ways of thinking. And that history will be influenced by both, without the elimination of either one side or the other. Yet that is where militaristic thinking warps the development, the myth that that is possible, to totally eradicate or completely subdue your enemy. It is up to politicians and historians to sell that to the public as not being an immoral thing. "It was inevitable, they left us no choice but to destroy them."
Chinese (Mandarin) was one of the first languages I studied, in part, to try to understand the palette of ideas which lead to this different type of thinking and world view than the one which I had been raised in. Reading the "Tao Te Ching" was one of the most enlightening events of my life and opened up new worlds of thinking embodied in the views and cultures of others. Such knowledge are bridges that the cultural totalitarians on both sides of the Pacific are afraid of.
In China, the obvious threat is of Western ideas of liberty, now ironically available in practice to their own wealthiest elite at home, to single party rule. Yet at least there is change going on there. America has become the dinosaur of political change compared to almost anywhere else in the world, China, Russia, India, the European Union (which most Americans know almost nothing about), and has become notable in recent political evolutionary changes only for its erosion of freedoms and increasing absence of regard for human rights. Secret prisons, kidnappings, torture, election rigging, funding and arming civil wars (all sides) and terrorist groups in countries which it does not like, holding people without trials, spying on journalists, whistle-blowers, demonstrators, wrong voters, and on and on. And not keeping Americans ignorant of how the rest of the world sees us now puts our own elites hold on power in danger. Thus our "news" networks instead of informing us of our transgressions and slide, instead mock the rest of the world for being 'uncivilized' and 'resenting our freedoms.'
Wordplay - TruthRevival.Org First Post
TruthRevival.org, April 6th, 2007
[What un-motivates me]
In my previous post, 'Arrogance and Humility, Greenwald and Snowden, Not Helping vs Breaking Rules, Running Interference', I mentioned that I had early in my life formed a set of rules that I choose to live by which have a very complicated mix of ideas about what is "interfering" in things. What is my place to try to work to change about what may happen, verses when I think I am going too far.
I mentioned some things, or alluded to them, in that where people want to fail, let them fail. Philosophically, for me that pertains to humanity as well. I said if even if seeing all of humanity as lost in the woods blinding following those who would only lead them in deeper until they were doomed to starve to death, then that is the way I think it should be.
I grant that most would find this both arrogant of me thinking I could make any significant impact on this and use that to justify my own complacency, and that others would see that as heartless and aloof. I don't have any hard and fast rules about what is interfering and basically I threw out the rules completely about 10 years ago and basically had to deal with whatever presented itself in the best way I could. (My interpretation of what is not "knowingly interfering" became broader than usual.) But I never intended to deviate from that detachment, or at least never chose to unless I thought it was absolutely necessary.
I trace back this forced or contrived indifference to what happens, to when I was 16 and I first read the 'Tao Te Ching' by Lao Tzo, a text about 2500 years old. To say it was eye opening is an understatement. In that text, I found my own perception of the future or its potential embodied within the past. It fitted into it like a complex key into a complex lock, through hundreds of authors over thousands of years, and I was looking straight into the roots of how it developed.
I consider myself a Christian, but my understanding of Taoism goes well beyond the few short lines known to American popular culture or pseudo-pop-psychologists or philosophers. From those original few short lines of the 'Tao Te Ching', which were so important to me copied the ones I thought the most true or relevant into my own notebook, I went on to reading the 'Texts of Taoism' by James Legge. With Volume II of those works, I highlighted much of the texts on page after page which again, made the most impact on me or resonated most with my thinking.
By the time I got to the University of Massachusetts, I discovered many books, including a large multi-volumed encyclopedia set of Taoist philosophy spanning thousands of years, and read through much of them. Though I have little understanding of religious Taoism, much of the philosophy aspects of Taoism I found went far beyond anything I have seen in Western thought. Other texts such as 'The Tao of Physics', merely on scratch the surface of the potential of how these ideas may play out in the future.
My understandings which I believe are intuitive I found run deep within those texts and it was amazing to see how those same ideas were interpreted literally in texts going back thousands of years which rivaled in similar ways how Christianity developed over time. But in Taoism, they developed in a much less rigid, less doctrinaire, and less patriarchal way. The best ideas literally rose to the top and were expanded upon.
And that is at its best about what history can achieve. You are both starting at the end of the line, but that end is also the head of the line. Not to say you should use those ideas as substitutions for your own judgement, and that is where many Christians fail. Many of them believe in things rote, verbatim, word for word. But to instead use their insights to show how they reached the same conclusions you have, but in different ways and in different times according to their own circumstances.
I have similarly studied Buddhism, though not in as great detail. I would hardly call myself well read on it, but I have read through a few books and studied it in a cross-cultural sense. It resonates within me as well and I similarly am impressed by how it has developed and has been expanded upon over many centuries.
When I said I consider myself a Christian-Taoism-Buddhist, it is in no particular order, but more of that these three philosophies are central to my own thinking about the past as well as what I think have the most promise to be developed further into the future. They are different good ways forward and not mutually exclusive ones, in the best possible future scenarios.
Prediction and prophesy I have tried very hard to distance myself from because as I have stated many times, I do not think the future can or will only go one way. Many roads are possible and all will be traveled, just not in the sense that we will see or know given we each will experience only one timeline in our lives.
But I also believe we try to sense out what those future potential paths are for us, and we do so with both reason and emotion, emotively searching out what we think "should" happen as well as what we logically believe most likely will. And our aspirational and inspirational goals should always triumph over our expectational ones because they are more powerful. And they are more broad in reach because often what our intellect believes is impossible is only because of how we were raised and our own diminish potential in imagination to realize and actualize our own best potentials.
I tend to skew at an extreme end of that spectrum. I believe much is possible that many people do not. In many ways, it to me is ridiculously easy to try to tip that one way or another. In those few times my own restrictions allow me to attempt to do so, often I have been proven correct.
But one of the central aspects of my own personal philosophy is the Taoist idea of "to do without doing," and to not interfere in "worldly affairs" to use a badly worded but common idea central to Taoist beliefs. I see it as "my place" simply to study the world and those around me and to "interfere" only when asked, when needed, and never to do so because of my own, substantially developed, ego or needs.
I wrote a poem, 'Repeats', (not to be taken literally as most are not,) about the idea of being put into the distant past. "I've lost the future, looking behind not ahead. Now I live in what was in an age that for me is dead. These peoples' futures are my ancient history. Half of what I know has even yet to be."
I wrote from that perspective because it gave me a chance to put words to my own ideas about trying as best I can in not altering whatever may be happening around me, save when I think I should get involved and try to change things due to others needs or common sense. I was able to clarify that feeling in the fourth stanza which for me put it most succinctly. "I must watch the horrors helpless to change a thing, and sit idly through the storms that I know the future will bring."
Again, that was not meant to be literal nor a prophecy to be fulfilled. It was simply to help brace myself against the urge to interfere in things which will be bad, but may be in the scheme of things thought necessary. To conquer my own ego about what I should try to change versus what I feel should be left to others to work or stand against.
But I learned, as I knew then, it is not that easy, nor should it be, and I would never relinquish my judgement in the present to any doctrine, not even my own. That each present should be a participant in its own future so to speak, and in each present, new vistas become visible and new directions may be seen which were not completely visible in the past, no matter how good or far reaching your intuition or foresight is or may have been.
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Notes on Translations of The Tao Te Ching.
The translation of the Tao Te Ching, which actually means in English, The Way and Its Power, to which I was first exposed was most likely flawed. The one that seems closest to what I remember was a controversial one in that it was not written as a translation of Chinese text, which was the original language.
It was not even written by someone with as far a study of Taoism as even I have done. That was the version by Stephen Mtchell, based on his interpretations of English versions. However, Huston Smith, a religious scholar whose judgement I would recommend and believe in general, thought it to be "as close to being as definitive as any for our time as I could imagine."
Normally I would be skeptical of something which was admittedly reinterpreted from second hand translations into what would be quite possibly far from the text it is claiming to represent. However, as a 16 year old, if I had read instead a better more scholarly literal translation, I doubt it would have captured my imagination so completely.
Similarly, I read one translation in college which was further "modified" from the original text by being rendered as poetry in English. From my studies on translating poetry from one language to another even with modern languages, I can only imagine how much, or rather how little, that volume would have to do with the original Chinese version of 2500 years ago.
The difficulty of any translation of the Tao Te Ching is that it is hard to translate accurately any language of 2500 years ago, and Ancient Chinese is no easier. People can claim their translations or "reinterpretations" best embody the "spirit" of the author's intent but that is guesswork and are usually unsustainable claims.
What I can say is that with a philosophy that evolved over thousands of years, the best insights into the original texts is found by reading the works of people nearer to that time for whom their texts were closer to the original, and for which our translations improve. Their "interpretations" of the same philosophy probably had more accurate translations for them to work with 2000, 1500, and 1000 years ago, than our translations of the oldest texts. Thus their perspectives and interpretations nearer to our time increasingly become more easily translatable into modern Chinese and thus into English.
I find Chuang Tzu (Chuang Chou, 2375 years ago), or the works attributed to him, far more understandable and less open to reinterpretations than the works attributed to Lao Tzu.[Free online on many sites as The Texts of Taoism Part II, translated by James Legge, first published in 1891.] Of their supposed texts, many claim neither to be the work of a single author, and they probably are not. But to find which interpretations of a 2500 year old text may be truer, one can find out more by reading the disciples works closest to that time to see or to get an idea of what they themselves were working from, to find which modern translations best fit that pattern.
But this gets into the question of which is the most true (accurate translation) or whether that is the most important thing in the long run. Philosophies evolve and are constant reinterpreted. New ideas come along and use claim to past authors to justify or propagate themselves.
Getting a true record of the past is important on one hand, but the misguided or bad translations themselves become the history as well and can be more influential in the long run that the original texts which they may have little to do with as far as an accurate portrayal. Thus authorship needs to be taken with a grain of salt, that it is not so important as which ideas were the "original" ones but which were developed and better fleshed out over centuries of time. Which ones had the most meaning or impact upon people the longest, and those are equally as important as which ones started it all.
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Here is a replay of my first post here 7 years ago. An unfortunate loosey and loosely and lousily worded email last year had me unfortunately describe this site as "encouraging people to blow the whistle" which not only was poorly timed and badly worded but also untrue. After that and subsequent things, I reread most of the posts here, and though I sometimes came close to doing something like that here and there, that was never the intent of or what was behind my creation of this site. I did not say I would do that, nor than others should do so, but did say towards the end that...
"There has been so much of a backlog of falsehood, misrepresentation, propaganda, and outright self- destructive lying to the American people by the Bush Administration of the 21st century that as it begins to get exposed, it has the potential to point us, and because of our possibly undue influence or control over the rest of the world, to point the world on a new and better path as we begin once more to speak what we believe to be the truth. We need to try to know what is outside of ourselves, what lies outside of our bodies, minds, beliefs, mindsets and national borders, that is not irrelevant, not without truths of their own which we do not destroy without destroying our own ability to grow.
The truth will begin to be let out more and more. We in the West, we need to demand a media that shows us to ourselves as the rest of the world knows us, so we may see what they do and we do not. To see ourselves from the most points of view. To see ourselves from the most points of approximations or representations of truth that may not be true in individuality, but in sum, in total, in the view we are purposely now kept from seeing, which comes as close to the truth as we will ever get without retreating into our own unquestioning assumptions, dogma, propaganda, hubris, and self-delusions. We have become and have been led by the embodiment of such a dark path of willful ignorance."
The best "mission statement" I had to what this site was meant for or to be was there in its full first post which I (twice) excerpted above and am placing in its full form below. It was one of the ones which I am still the most proud of. I was writing extremely well that April and this one one of those posts, and it was a good kickoff to a site still almost no one has heard of.
Wordplay - TruthRevival.Org First Post
revival: -> awakening, cheering, consolation, enkindling, reshening, invigoration, quickening, reanimation, reawakening, recovery, recrudescence, regeneration, rejuvenation, renaissance, renewal, restoration, resurgence, resurrection, resuscitation, revitalization
Thesaurus.com
revival:-> reanimation, rebirth, regeneration, rejuvenation, renewal, resurgence, resurrection, resuscitation, revitalization
Related Words: renaissance, reactivation; rally, recovery, recuperation
Near Antonyms death, expiration, extinction
Merriam-Webster
I have always been fascinated by words, with their capacity to not only let us express ourselves, but that they are the palette of how to frame what we have to think about. They spring up when an idea or event comes up which we feel the need to express to others. They are a paper trail, when recorded in a written language, of where we have been before, when new concepts emerged which needed short well-defined sounds of themselves, apart from all others, to be named as a single and separate thing, a word distinct, self-inclusive.
That is why I have studied languages, to try to get into the heads of cultures to gauge their present mindsets, which concepts they think are most important at the moment, important enough to be set aside apart from all others, to be crystallized in peoples minds as words, as something which they have grown up with, think they know, as basic words of common sense, the building blocks of how they frame their worlds.
I have not been able to study languages in detail enough for my aims, as it would take up too much of my time which I have not had either the resources in money for, nor lack of other things I deemed more important to be focused on instead of hiding myself away for long periods of time to absorb the richness of the past, and bask in the diversity of culture and different mindsets inherent in studying different languages of the present.
As with so many other things, I have dabbled in trying to understand language, but just dabbling has its merits, as well as well thought-out expertise does. We are all dabblers in many subjects because the immense body of recorded language and history now makes complete expertise on more than one (or a few) topics virtually impossible without surrendering much of your life and free-time to it, but having some expertise in many things is, or can be, as valuable as great expertise in one or a few things.
And if no one had lesser expertise in fields, experts in that would have no one else but each other and their students to sell their books to, or not having a public educated enough to relate to or understand what they have to say and contribute. And without a mass audience, no matter how relevant they are to society, they can be pushed to the fringes of irrelevance of purposeful ignorance by those who pander and offer the public pseudo-knowledge for 'guidance' or for control. Without some ability by the mass public to gauge the expertise of those who are called experts, we simply open our heads to their opinions and give up willing the right to question them.
My dabbling with languages began with Latin, which lead me to the name I used for business, Scandere, which means to climb. I did not know it at the time but it was a perfect match for the definition to the name I had resolved to take for myself as an adult since I was a child, which means to descend. They, like so many concepts, like words, bookend each other, for you cannot have one word or concept without entailing its opposite. Anything and its opposite are united in conceptualization. You build another word for its opposite, whether spoken or not, admitted or not, and a third for the spectrum which includes them both, or as a single concept or single way of looking at things.
In addition to writing as a non-expert about words and my fascination with them, I have written about the dangers of polemic thinking, such as good and evil, because this often leads to identical actions on each side, supposedly for different causes or hoping for different effects. Step back far enough and you see they are the same thing, use the same methods, are two sides of the same coin, and ultimately are the same concept.
I have seen things in modern Christianity, mainstream Christianity, which are nearly identical to Satanism, which itself while trying to distance itself supposedly 180 degrees from many things, adopted the same language, the same words, the same concepts, and the same myths as Christianity. Many things denounced as Paganism, later as Satanism, were incorporated into the Catholic Church, and many truly independent alternative religions in Europe were falsely condemned as Satanism, again itself being an offshoot of Christianity, which these European religions had nothing to do with Christianity, Satan, or anything associated with the religions of the Middle-East, and why they were all treated (and often massacred) all with the same brush. If it wasn't what the Church said to be the case, then it must be Satanic. If you weren't with everything that you were told to believe, if you weren't blindly with us, you obviously must be working for and with the most evil of evils. Even simply by just rejecting our dogma, our black and white mindset, our definitions, our words.
My fascination with words has framed much of my life. In my teens I started writing poetry seriously and was taken in with the concept of using multiple levels of meaning with the fewest words possible, the swordplay of wordplay, the essence of communication. That is what religions teach us as well from the earliest of our recorded histories, using stories or parables to convey deeper meanings you cannot either say outright because of the unquestioning times you live in, or that they need to be embodied in people, real or imagined, to become relevant, fleshed out, comprehensible.
And that is the essence of deeper levels of meaning to what is written, how different others might see it, for it is the diversity of perception and what different life experiences possible readers may bring to bear which gives poetry and other types of attempted 'positive' double-speech, their supposed deeper levels. Saying two things at once, or more, or far more with the same words, requires these other minds and mindsets to speak to, to give them these multiple meanings at once.
And you cannot speak to them without knowledge of them. The tragedy of America these days is in the 'writing off' of other cultures' views, especially upon our own actions, as being considered irrelevant and uninformed. To not want to see and know yourself from other cultures' points of views, as I have said before, not only makes you something ugly, something deformed in the light of general human development, it is to write off their perspectives as meaningless. They might as well not exist. And in that light as in so many other nations in the past, we are doing 'good' to 'remove' them.
It is a myth of the left and of progressives that Americans are peaceful and would never advocate genocide. They, the left, are as wrapped up in their own perspectives as much as the Neo-Conservatives are in choosing to see the world according to their own beliefs rather than to see the uncomfortable reality of the situation around them. I know to a great extent neither self-delusions of the left or right is absolute, that both know their mindsets are false, but they think by openly promoting them whenever possible as being true, that this will make them real, or at least more real or more relevant, by virtue of being believed by more people.
Most Americans, like most people in any other country, are peaceful people who are sent to war because of the machinations of leaderships that do not hear them and do not always respond to their wishes. But there is a dark side in all people, and in Americans as well. I have heard many voices since I have been back advocate genocide, the murders of thousands, even millions, and not just on television. "Bomb them all," "Nuke them and take their oil," and so on. This is not just because of shameless propaganda outlets like Fox News, it is almost a natural reflex when you think your side is good and the other side is bad or evil.
In my studying of other cultures, the biggest revelations for me came from studying Chinese philosophy and Buddhism, and getting beyond the duality of 'Good' and 'Evil.' Such attitudes are called 'Eastern thinking' in opposition to our 'Western thinking.' No culture in the next 100 years can call itself 'developed' or 'enlightened' without having a foot firmly in place on both sides. Each exposes the limitations in the others type of thinking. Each side has its own poisons as well.
The West seeks to eliminate all opposing viewpoints to its 'universal' values, now by the US actions, unsubtly at the point of a gun, while openly violating all of those values at the same time. But the West has a toleration for ethnic diversity which the East lacks. Yet the shortcomings of both lie in their imagined 'superiority' over others, that you cannot be at the 'top' of the cultural spectrum without others being at the bottom. More limitations of words and concepts.
When writing about my poetry and Taoism which influenced it, I first had to speak to the fact that it was using a different 'language' than what I had been raised in. The East/West divide in thinking are different ways of looking at the world, each forged by different histories which must now combine themselves without pride and patriotism into a common world history which includes both ways of thinking. And that history will be influenced by both, without the elimination of either one side or the other. Yet that is where militaristic thinking warps the development, the myth that that is possible, to totally eradicate or completely subdue your enemy. It is up to politicians and historians to sell that to the public as not being an immoral thing. "It was inevitable, they left us no choice but to destroy them."
Chinese (Mandarin) was one of the first languages I studied, in part, to try to understand the palette of ideas which lead to this different type of thinking and world view than the one which I had been raised in. Reading the "Tao Te Ching" was one of the most enlightening events of my life and opened up new worlds of thinking embodied in the views and cultures of others. Such knowledge are bridges that the cultural totalitarians on both sides of the Pacific are afraid of.
In China, the obvious threat is of Western ideas of liberty, now ironically available in practice to their own wealthiest elite at home, to single party rule. Yet at least there is change going on there. America has become the dinosaur of political change compared to almost anywhere else in the world, China, Russia, India, the European Union (which most Americans know almost nothing about), and has become notable in recent political evolutionary changes only for its erosion of freedoms and increasing absence of regard for human rights. Secret prisons, kidnappings, torture, election rigging, funding and arming civil wars (all sides) and terrorist groups in countries which it does not like, holding people without trials, spying on journalists, whistle-blowers, demonstrators, wrong voters, and on and on. And not keeping Americans ignorant of how the rest of the world sees us now puts our own elites hold on power in danger. Thus our "news" networks instead of informing us of our transgressions and slide, instead mock the rest of the world for being 'uncivilized' and 'resenting our freedoms.'
In addition to studying Chinese and Latin, other languages which I have dabbled in include Dutch, German, French, Spanish, and Russian. I have envied those who can speak a multitude of languages because each language can open up to them new concepts not inherent within, or stressed as much, in their own language or culture. But I still think, though that is obviously better than not doing so, using language at all in our thinking can limit our thinking only to ideas we have been exposed to previously. We need to go beyond the past embodied in languages.
In my earliest writing on the subject, I stated that "It is due to this limiting aspect of our languages that it is beneficial to clear one's mind of these concepts and deal in pure thought or pure existence. Just as in mathematics, how the answer is determined by the question, one could reasonably argue that all the thoughts we think are logically deduced from our experiences, both internal (feelings, moods) and external, and are defined by the rules of language. If we, however, clear our minds of both our experiences and our language we may be able to 'see' from a point of view which would be forever unobtainable as long as we are limited by language and experience." I have also written about words in First Words in Towards Tomorrow, and Perspective in Deconstructing the Universe.
And within that concept are the great lessons of Eastern thought, Taoism, Buddhism, and Zen: the need to recognize the limitations of languages, and by extension, of cultures, as contextual, limited in scope to those that they were originally developed within or for, but needing constant expansion and having that past, that foundation, being put in new contexts through new experiences and greater histories which they cannot contain without constricting them. Constricted growth is as close to death as it is to life. Growth must be free of the limitations of languages, of single cultures, of single ideologies, of single types of governmental or economic systems, or it is not growth at all, merely attempted sameness, death of better ideas, preventing new words, new concepts, new systems from emerging.
Truth is not found in words. Words like art, like anything in our environment, are attempts to make a representation of truth. The "Western" type of thinking, of an external objectifiable truth to reality has its roots in a wider viewpoint. Among the earliest Greek philosophers, Paramenides among others, knew that thinking was at best an approximation of truth, an elusive search meant to be unending, always sought after, yet forever out of reach.
That has nothing to do with the absolutism with which the West has come to be identified with, mainly as an excuse to impose its culture upon others. Parmenides said on truth, "both the unchanging truth behind all that which only seemingly comes and goes from being, and the opinions and perceptions of Man about this in which there cannot be found truth, ... it is necessary for you to see how untruths and misconceptions come to be seen as truth, both (the unchanging truth and our interpretations/ changing perceptions of things/ subjectivity) together create all experiences."
I began my own philosophical search as a cultural relativist, have moved beyond it, yet I am astounded and disheartened beyond measure to see my own culture, America, slam cultural relativism, as something trite, irrelevant, even a fashion without substance. It has become a victim of its own hyped up self-importance, a media preaching that ignorance is better than knowledge.
There has been so much of a backlog of falsehood, misrepresentation, propaganda, and outright self- destructive lying to the American people by the Bush Administration of the 21st century that as it begins to get exposed, it has the potential to point us, and because of our possibly undue influence or control over the rest of the world, to point the world on a new and better path as we begin once more to speak what we believe to be the truth. We need to try to know what is outside of ourselves, what lies outside of our bodies, minds, beliefs, mindsets and national borders, that is not irrelevant, not without truths of their own which we do not destroy without destroying our own ability to grow.
The truth will begin to be let out more and more. We in the West, we need to demand a media that shows us to ourselves as the rest of the world knows us, so we may see what they do and we do not. To see ourselves from the most points of view. To see ourselves from the most points of approximations or representations of truth that may not be true in individuality, but in sum, in total, in the view we are purposely now kept from seeing, which comes as close to the truth as we will ever get without retreating into our own unquestioning assumptions, dogma, propaganda, hubris, and self-delusions. We have become and have been led by the embodiment of such a dark path of willful ignorance.
Yet a new path has already begun. It is young yet, this truth telling, and its fate depends upon the actions of millions of others to survive against the legacy we have spun, yet I have faith in it. I have faith that it will grow, that it will survive, and it will dominate the lies, at least in the short term, and at least of the recent past.
4/06/07 - 2:04 PM
© 2007 By Jared DuBois
