Category — Philosophy
oh, aldous, baby, sing it sweet and true
“Literary or scientific, liberal or specialist, all our education is predominantly verbal and therefore fails to accomplish what it is supposed to do. Instead of transforming children into fully developed adults, it turns out students of the natural sciences who are completely unaware of Nature as the primary fact of experience. It inflicts upon the world students of the humanities who know nothing of humanity, their own or anyone else’s.
Gestault psychologists, such as Samuel Renshaw, have devised methods for widening the range of and increasing the acuity of human perceptions. But do our educators apply them? The answer is, No.
Teachers in every field of psycho-physical skill, from seeing to tennis, from tight-rope walking to prayer, have discovered, by trial and error, the conditions of optimum functioning within their special fields. But have any of the great Foundations financed a project for co-ordinating these empirical findings into a general theory and practice of heightened creativeness? Again, so far as I am aware, the answer is, No.
All sorts of cultists and queer fish teach all kinds of techniques for achieving health, contentment, peace of mind; and for many of their hearers many of these techniques are demonsratably effective. But do we see respectable psychologists, philosophers and clergymen boldly descending into those odd and sometimes malodorous wells, at the bottom of which poor Truth is so often condemned to sit? Yet once more the answer is, No.
[…]
When it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system […] no really respectable university or church will do anything about it.”
-Aldous Huxley “The Doors of Perception” 1954
‘always
Listening to Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Luther College – One Sweet World
October 12, 2010 2 Comments
