What Did You Learn,
Unlearn from this piece?
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
A
READER WRITES:
Dr.
Fisher,
What
you have taught me is, mainly, to cease brooding over the future. I keep a catalog of favorite quotes and when
son, Ben, was younger he accused me of always speaking in headlines. Here I go again, quoting from three of my
favorite persons, each can be fit into your form below.
Eleanor
Roosevelt: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their
dreams.
Abraham
Lincoln: The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.
Winston
Churchill: If we open a quarrel between
past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.
Mysticism
clouds, especially the catholic mystic forms both Roman and Eastern Orthodox. Ethos, pathos and logos, the three pillars of
rhetoric Aristotle embraced, are present in your offering, however you leave a
multitude of loose ends dangling as you ponder this need in mankind to worship. Is it the community that is lacking?
Robert
Thurman, the Buddhism expert, promotes the leveling of all popular religions
into the state of peaceful understanding and respect. For this state to evolve the three jewels of
Buddhism must come together. Buddha, the
yellow jewel is enlightenment or the awaking.
Dharma, the blue jewel, is teaching or the reverse the learning face.
Shanga, the red jewel, is community.
You
have exposed a mountain, mining it will be a gigantic chore. Drawing it together again will be your
triumph.
Musing
from the various religious orders, centuries old, from the Paulines, Jesuits,
Dominicans...beyond to the Tao, to become one with Nature. Will you get to spiritual and beyond to the
soul? RW
DR.
FISHER RESPONDS:
Dear RW,
You
skip the essence of what I am saying to fixate on our cultural moorings -- East
& West -- which I claim in this piece is not the problem but rather our
chronic preoccupation.
I
am beyond these indices that you enumerate as they have long ago been
internalized.
This
is not a blast against Americanism or Catholicism, much less Christianity, but
an attempt to illustrate they are symptoms of a larger problem, our inability
to understand ourselves choosing instead to intellectualize our problems
away. Of course, that never works.
We
are appalled by our madness because we refuse to see it as part of our
sanity. What this age suffers from is
too much sanity, too much rationality, too much certainty, and not enough
madness.
A
year ago today, July 19, 2014, a Malaysian commercial airliner with 298 people on board was shot down
over the eastern Ukraine, a war
zone.
Was
this madness? Of course, in one sense it
was, but sane to the rebels who claim the plane should not have been flying
over their disputed territory.
Madness,
not sanity, frees the mind from the times.
It gets inside our cognitive dissonance.
Sanity defends the lie as we see in the case of these rebels, and by
extension in the case of Vladimir Putin who obviously had a hand in this
misguided action.
That
is what I am saying.
That
is the essence of what is being said here. Americanism and Catholicism are
merely peripheral to all that.
What
did you learn from reading this piece?
What did you unlearn if anything?
That is my interest.
Jim
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