Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
Benjamin Franklin
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Hello Botswana
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How many phantoms are dancing on your nose? How many window shades have you yanked down? How long have you been waiting for the curtain to go up? Do you, as with most people, have two big boxes, one in the attic and the other in the cellar, one marked "unimportant" and the other marked "I'll get to you some day" and they are both filled up with stuff?
One night I was walking a teen age girl home from a meeting. It was dark, she was anxious to get home and glad for the company. On the way we passed a field that would be a shortcut, but she didn't want to go into it if there was water. I offered to go and find out but she said not to. Instead she picked up a rock about the size of her fist and threw it. We heard it splash in the water and avoided the field. I asked her where she learned that and she said it was from her brother. It's the sort of lore country people know. This city boy learned a lesson.
When I'm in a hurry and I want to know the meaning and spelling of a word I'll go to the online dictionary. But if I have the time I'll open up my big 2,214 page Random House/Websters unabridged and find what I'm looking for plus 5 or 6 other words I've never heard of before. That's how I discovered acerbic, abiosis, praxis, proleptic, mondagreen and jerk. Some of them are not all that useful to me but when they are I will use them to entertain us poor, effete, eastern, intellectual snobs, as I think Newt described us.
Someone I once knew said to me "Why do you insist on believing that everyone is as intelligent as you are?" My first answer is: Because I want them to be. But the real answer is that I don't consider myself any more intelligent than anyone else. But I am curious. Einstein once said that he wasn't all that clever but that he was just very curious.
We are all ignorant of most things, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the desire to remain ignorant is a cud chewing crime. A man will refuse to read the Quran but he'll set fire to it. People did not read Kazantzakis' "The Last Temptation Of Christ" but they demonstrated against the film. The professional wrestler says :If I can do it, it aint art." and yet he rehearses and acts out a scripted wrestling match every time he steps into the ring. One of the nations wealthiest CEOs says he's never given a dollar to any cultural cause, never will and he's proud of it. The ignorance is breath taking. If I didn't doubt it I would think that some people are abjectly and shudderingly frightened to death of the "terrorism" of philosophy, science, art and ideas.
"Don't go looking into things that don't concern you." How will you know if they concern you or not until you look into them? "The more you know the less you know." Yes. Isn't that great?
Ignorance is the perpetually dancing phantom distracting us from the realities. It's the strange light on the other ise of the window shade. It's what's behind the curtain. It's the monster in the cellar and the ghost in the attic. It's the shadow on Plato's wall. It's the creature from outer space. It's the great, terrifying unknown, which once known is simply known.
"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:" Matthew 7:7. So what's the big deal? For ignorance there is an excuse. For unwillingness to ask, seek and knock there is no excuse.
DB - The Vagabond
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One day puzzle, First one in with the right answer wins the badge.
"Every Jerrerson, Nixon and Truman. Or,
Every ----------. ------------- and -------------.
dbdacoba@aol.com
***********************
SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.
Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?
dbdacoba@aol.com
4 answers so far
I eagerly await your answer.
DB
******************
Showing posts with label Benjamin Franklin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Benjamin Franklin. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Spring Cleaning
While we may not be able to control all that happens to us, we can control what happens inside us.
Benjamin Franklin
**********************
In a month it will be Spring. That traditionally means spring cleaning. Time to go through that box of letters you forgot to answer, are the taxes done and the other bits of paper work, go through the closet and get some things to the dry cleaners or to your local Salvation Army or Good Will. The vacuum cleaner needs to go into some of those corners you overlook when you do the vacuuming. When it gets warm enough you need to get into the garage and straighten up. As you go through your cleaning, rearranging and freshening up you will no doubt find things that you can live without, litter, unnecessary ballast, scraps of this and that you don't even remember receiving, burdens of responsibility you no longer feel the need to bear. It's a good time for awakening, for new beginnings and fresh starts. But there is another form of cleaning that needs to be done and not just in the Spring but all year, every day.
As human being we face one insurmountable obligation. It is to understand ourselves. We may avoid the task as much as we can but sooner or later certain circumstances of life will force us to face ourselves squarely and erectly in front of our own examining committee. Then it is time for the best kind of cleansing.
There will come a point in life's journey when an awakening will come, probably more than once, a startling question or series of questions we will ask of ourselves: Who am I and who am I not?
The human being is a very complex creature, a compound of ancestry, background, up bringing, family, education, environment, hopes, aspirations, failures, successes and thousands of other influences on us. If life is a puzzle, so are we.
When the great awakening starts you gradually realize and accept that some, perhaps many, of the thoughts you think are not your thoughts. Things you think you believe are things you don't really believe, knowledge you are sure of is not knowledge at all, things you fear are merely phantoms with no substance to them at all.
Then you may ask where these ideas, thoughts and phantoms come from. They may come from some other influence but if they are phantoms then it doesn't matter where they come from. They are trash. It's an amazing thing to realize that the thought I am thinking is not my thought. The idea I have been cherishing is not my idea and if I really faced myself squarely I would know it isn't really what I think or believe. And the most dangerous are those false ideas we have formed on our own, the messes we have made for ourselves and then claim as our own.
Worst of all is that those thought, ideas, fears and beliefs have an effect on us. They are parasites eating away at our happiness and the harmony of our lives, they are not just dust collecting in the corners or taking up space in the garage, they are viciously confusing us and making life a greater burden than it needs to be and masking from us our true selves.
If you bought a dozen apples and when you got home you found thirteen in the bag and one of them was full of worms, would you hold on to it because maybe it was one of those you paid for? Would you not send it immediately into the garbage? And then wouldn't you carefully examine the other twelve, and if you found another one with worms would you hold on to it because you know you paid for it? Wouldn't you rather trash it?
We should carefully examine, under the clear light of reason, all the thoughts we carry in the bag of our own thinking and quickly dispense with the wormy ones. Then we should go into the corners and closed up places of our minds and find the things that may have been there for years but need to be vacuumed up and thrown out.
It isn't easy, neither is spring cleaning, but no one ever claimed that understanding ourselves was easy. But the essential part of knowing who we are is knowing who we are not.
DB - The Vagabond
*********************
WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?
dbdacoba@aol.com
Only 7 responses so far
I await your answer.
DB
******************************
Benjamin Franklin
**********************
In a month it will be Spring. That traditionally means spring cleaning. Time to go through that box of letters you forgot to answer, are the taxes done and the other bits of paper work, go through the closet and get some things to the dry cleaners or to your local Salvation Army or Good Will. The vacuum cleaner needs to go into some of those corners you overlook when you do the vacuuming. When it gets warm enough you need to get into the garage and straighten up. As you go through your cleaning, rearranging and freshening up you will no doubt find things that you can live without, litter, unnecessary ballast, scraps of this and that you don't even remember receiving, burdens of responsibility you no longer feel the need to bear. It's a good time for awakening, for new beginnings and fresh starts. But there is another form of cleaning that needs to be done and not just in the Spring but all year, every day.
As human being we face one insurmountable obligation. It is to understand ourselves. We may avoid the task as much as we can but sooner or later certain circumstances of life will force us to face ourselves squarely and erectly in front of our own examining committee. Then it is time for the best kind of cleansing.
There will come a point in life's journey when an awakening will come, probably more than once, a startling question or series of questions we will ask of ourselves: Who am I and who am I not?
The human being is a very complex creature, a compound of ancestry, background, up bringing, family, education, environment, hopes, aspirations, failures, successes and thousands of other influences on us. If life is a puzzle, so are we.
When the great awakening starts you gradually realize and accept that some, perhaps many, of the thoughts you think are not your thoughts. Things you think you believe are things you don't really believe, knowledge you are sure of is not knowledge at all, things you fear are merely phantoms with no substance to them at all.
Then you may ask where these ideas, thoughts and phantoms come from. They may come from some other influence but if they are phantoms then it doesn't matter where they come from. They are trash. It's an amazing thing to realize that the thought I am thinking is not my thought. The idea I have been cherishing is not my idea and if I really faced myself squarely I would know it isn't really what I think or believe. And the most dangerous are those false ideas we have formed on our own, the messes we have made for ourselves and then claim as our own.
Worst of all is that those thought, ideas, fears and beliefs have an effect on us. They are parasites eating away at our happiness and the harmony of our lives, they are not just dust collecting in the corners or taking up space in the garage, they are viciously confusing us and making life a greater burden than it needs to be and masking from us our true selves.
If you bought a dozen apples and when you got home you found thirteen in the bag and one of them was full of worms, would you hold on to it because maybe it was one of those you paid for? Would you not send it immediately into the garbage? And then wouldn't you carefully examine the other twelve, and if you found another one with worms would you hold on to it because you know you paid for it? Wouldn't you rather trash it?
We should carefully examine, under the clear light of reason, all the thoughts we carry in the bag of our own thinking and quickly dispense with the wormy ones. Then we should go into the corners and closed up places of our minds and find the things that may have been there for years but need to be vacuumed up and thrown out.
It isn't easy, neither is spring cleaning, but no one ever claimed that understanding ourselves was easy. But the essential part of knowing who we are is knowing who we are not.
DB - The Vagabond
*********************
WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)
What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?
dbdacoba@aol.com
Only 7 responses so far
I await your answer.
DB
******************************
Monday, August 16, 2010
What Do You Mean By That?
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
***********************
Unfortunately we are close to fools' fates, closer than we think. And one of the biggest dangers to our survival is what it has always been, the felonious use of language, the written word but more importantly the spoken word. How people speak influences either consciously or subconsciously the way people think, and most people don't notice it.
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately" Benjamin Franklin.
During the Revolution hanging was a common form of execution but no simple matter. Most Americans don't realize how extremely dangerous it was for our founders. If we had lost that war they would have faced terrible deaths.
Even as the conflict was going on many people lost their lives at the end of a rope. There was almost no falling through a trap door and breaking your neck. People were simply strung up and left to struggle until they died. It took some hardier sorts 3 days to die, jumping up to grab a breath in a futile effort to stay alive. Thus the phrase "dancin' at the end of a rope" came to be. Fortunately for the United States the founders did "hang together."
Today the battle is with words. Lately, one of the nastiest uses of language is something called "implicature," a seemingly simple remark with another, sometimes, hidden meaning. "He's Italian and therefore he's very musical." Are there any Italians who are not musical? Of course there are.
A few episodes ago I wrote about my colleague in Connecticut who was sincerely struggling with his racism and who referred to a man he had recently met as "black but nice." He was in effect saying that all or most black people are not nice. I had to talk him out of that verbiage. He wasn't even aware of how prejudiced a remark it was. And that's the problem with implicature.
"The Liberals have got it wrong again" is a vicious remark which says that all Liberals are always wrong and always have been. No one can make that claim. History proves it wrong.
Or how about "Even though he's a Conservative he's very smart."? Meaning all or most other Conservatives are stupid. History proves that one wrong also.
Now we have "He's a Muslim therefore he must be a terrorist sympathizer."
How are we ever going to live together as brothers with this sort of unjust and egregious language? How can we hang together if we can't acknowledge an individual's right to be who he genuinely is? How can we avoid the fool's fate if we keep speaking foolishness?
Beware of implicatures. They will fool you if you don't listen carefully to the fast talking fabulists.
DB - The Vagabond
************************
SUMMER QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Who are the 2 (two) most important people alive today? Why?
Only 6 responses so far.
dbdacoba@aol.com
Thank you.
DB
********************
Martin Luther King, Jr.
***********************
Unfortunately we are close to fools' fates, closer than we think. And one of the biggest dangers to our survival is what it has always been, the felonious use of language, the written word but more importantly the spoken word. How people speak influences either consciously or subconsciously the way people think, and most people don't notice it.
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately" Benjamin Franklin.
During the Revolution hanging was a common form of execution but no simple matter. Most Americans don't realize how extremely dangerous it was for our founders. If we had lost that war they would have faced terrible deaths.
Even as the conflict was going on many people lost their lives at the end of a rope. There was almost no falling through a trap door and breaking your neck. People were simply strung up and left to struggle until they died. It took some hardier sorts 3 days to die, jumping up to grab a breath in a futile effort to stay alive. Thus the phrase "dancin' at the end of a rope" came to be. Fortunately for the United States the founders did "hang together."
Today the battle is with words. Lately, one of the nastiest uses of language is something called "implicature," a seemingly simple remark with another, sometimes, hidden meaning. "He's Italian and therefore he's very musical." Are there any Italians who are not musical? Of course there are.
A few episodes ago I wrote about my colleague in Connecticut who was sincerely struggling with his racism and who referred to a man he had recently met as "black but nice." He was in effect saying that all or most black people are not nice. I had to talk him out of that verbiage. He wasn't even aware of how prejudiced a remark it was. And that's the problem with implicature.
"The Liberals have got it wrong again" is a vicious remark which says that all Liberals are always wrong and always have been. No one can make that claim. History proves it wrong.
Or how about "Even though he's a Conservative he's very smart."? Meaning all or most other Conservatives are stupid. History proves that one wrong also.
Now we have "He's a Muslim therefore he must be a terrorist sympathizer."
How are we ever going to live together as brothers with this sort of unjust and egregious language? How can we hang together if we can't acknowledge an individual's right to be who he genuinely is? How can we avoid the fool's fate if we keep speaking foolishness?
Beware of implicatures. They will fool you if you don't listen carefully to the fast talking fabulists.
DB - The Vagabond
************************
SUMMER QUESTION
(This is not a contest.)
Who are the 2 (two) most important people alive today? Why?
Only 6 responses so far.
dbdacoba@aol.com
Thank you.
DB
********************
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