Blindness, Goals . . .
[from conference proceedings, 1988]
Sometimes we have a blind enchantment
with the kind of material well-being
we have enjoyed in recent decades.
During this era of expanding productivity and increasing technology
we have neglected many essentials of life.
We have forgotten our dependence
upon other life forms.
We have considered science and technology
to be goals in and of themselves.
Consider this statement of Albert Einstein:
“What hopes and fears does the scientific method imply for mankind?
I do not think that this is the right way to put the question.
Whatever this tool in the hands of men will produce
depends entirely on the nature of the goals alive in this mankind.
Once these goals exist,
the scientific method furnishes means to realize them.
Yet it cannot furnish the very goals.
The scientific method itself would not have led anywhere,
it would not even have been born without a passionate striving
for clear understanding.
Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem, in my opinion,
to characterize our age.
If we desire sincerely and passionately the safety, the welfare,
and the free development of the talents of all men,
we shall not be in want to the means to approach such a state.
Even if only a small part of mankind strives for such goals.”
Edmund Sinnott alludes to the goal-seeking nature of life forms 1.
I want to point to the goal-seeking nature of coevolution and life systems.
Coevolution is a subject to which Jerzy alerted me last fall.
Masanobu Fukuoka says,
“All things in the universe undergo constant change together . . . ” 2.
The sources from which I quote or formulate these statements
are here, at the conference, in what we will call the reading lounge.
Wednesday, Kiyo [Izumi] pointed out another blindness,
a blind intolerance towards certain areas of human experience
and exploration, subjects called mystical or subjective.
I would hope, at this conference,
we would overcome
at least some of our blind enchantment with the objective
and our blind intolerance of the subjective.
I hope we can understand
the way in which we affect what we observe
in the process of observing it.
I hope we can understand how we shape and distort
by what we consider relevant and irrelevant,
what we even consider real and unreal.
I quote again from Masanobu Fukuoka,
” . . . there is a world of difference between thinking you understand
and actually understanding” 3.
To elucidate that viewpoint, I quote from Zen, The Turn Towards Life,
“Thinking belongs to the material world, and grew out of it . . .
Once man attempts to apply his thinking to the non-material world,
however, he is in for trouble,
for he does not see that thought is a tool
with a very limited application,
and that when pressed into service in fields where it does not belong,
creates mischief and chaos.
But because it has served him so well in the limited material field,
man has turned it into a god, and worships it,
and even regards it as the first principle of life!”
Footnotes:
1 Cell and the Psyche; The Problems of Organic Form;
Biology of the Spirit; Man, Matter and Mind
2 The Road Back to Nature, p. 25
3 The Road Back to Nature, p. 25
copyright 2011, 2013, ECOhealth / Eve Revere
