Friday, June 23, 2006
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A place to meet for honest and positive dialogue about the School, and about the Teaching it exists to offer. Stop, listen, respond and participate. A principal reference point is the words of His Holiness Sri Shantananda Sarasvati.
5 comments:
Knowledge of salmon fishing. Yesterday I heard Michael Shepheard read some of his sonnets. One was about the spiritual way back - he compared it to a salmon swimming upstream in order to return to its spawning ground - its home. Perhaps not 'modern', but 'modern' in the sense that traditional wisdom as understood in the School does not usually take in the Scottish borders.
Are we really so out of date? The last organization that stopped at the Scottish border was the Roman Empire.
It is a beautiful image (go Mike!), but there's also quantum physics, evolution, psychology, modern ethics ... all things never before known, at least in present form.
Do these things add anything? Or just materialism gone mad ...
Now evolution - a thorned bush as seen by the School. Anyone who wants to dive into that hornets' nest is welcome to the hot potato and my mixed metaphors.
But psychology - now's there an avenue to be explored. Earlier in the life of this blog there was a reference to Neuro-Linguistic Psychology which I find - so far as I understand it - very interesting in terms of overcoming the barriers which people put up to acting freely on their chosen path - and helping others to do so. Coaching it's called.
There's an obvious problem to getting interested in any psychology. The subject in itself may divert from the spiritual path and you along with it, i.e., one may become so interested in one's own response that picking personal daisies seems more attractive than walking on.
At an early stage people often start accusing others of being 'in denial' - cod psychology.
But that's the trouble with any system (know-alls) and, in time, can be worked through and out.
Have you heard Michael Shepheard's poem about wire coat hangers?
I'm not so sure that evolution is such a problem. We were once not allowed to believe in it, but that was just one man's peculiarity. Those days are gone.
One thing that can be said is that it puts the kibosh on much of Plato's theory of the Ideas. Plato would say that the horse is based on an ideal horse ... but evolution shows that there have been millions of infinite gradations in what we call "horse".
Wouldn't say that there is nothing worthwhile in the Ideas, but after Darwin anyone who still believes it in toto is todo loco.
Evolution was not put there by the Devil, it's just a piece of knowledge. I think that the bigger the apparent can of worms, the more useful it is to dive in, even if there are hornets in there too.
Sorry, Michael, for spelling your surname incorrectly. It's really Shepherd.
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