*I find it fascinating that you and Yabby waste no time in putting the boot into anyone who dares to suggest an alternative to Western thinking, anyone who is being creative in their vision.*

Poirot, I find it fascinating that you should expect me to have
double standards. Feel free to criticise and question our system,
I certainly do. But apply the same standard of critique to
your own ponderings of an alternate system, as you do to the
one that we presently have. The one we have has clearly evolved
into what it is for some good reasons.

So all I am doing is applying yours and Squeers standards of
critique to what you write and lo and behold, then you are
amazed.

Believe me, you are not the first to think that they are special,
because they ponder about the world and have read books. I call
them the fairy flock.

As a teenager, I lived for a couple of years in Paris and would
listen to philosophers on the banks of the Seine, spout their
stuff. At that age I was still impressionable.

Hundreds of thousands of educated people were attracted to the
old Bhagwhan as they searched for meaning and he preached his
philosophies. They showered him with Rolls Royces and all the
sex he could handle. Its a profitable business to impress the
impressionable.

Yabby,

I always appreciate your input (and Houellie's too) - after all, I'm here to try and learn something...so it's all grist to the mill.

Dear Poirot,

In the last few years - books that used to be the purview of only dedicated spiritual seekers now hit the bestseller lists and stay there for weeks and months.

As the philosopher Schopenhauer once wrote, "Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident."

Some people still linger between ridicule and opposition, but millions throughout the world are beginning to regard as self-evident principles of ancient spiritual wisdom. There is so much hatred in the world that people are turning to spiritual ideas looking for answers. Embracing cold, technical, mechanistic reasoning (not that those are embraceable things) and suppressing their most essential strengths: passion, intuition, ideas, many people find no longer satisfying. Many people are no longer prepared to give up their hearts to the illusionary fruits of the material world. They find that a life without heart is a life without its life force. Like Chinese women who bound their feet and then could no longer walk freely, some people feel that having bound their hearts, they have stunted their growth as moral beings. And perhaps therein - lies the hope for mankind - and the antidote against global hatred.

Lexi,

On those three stages of Schopenhauer's: as Freud said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Sometimes a ridiculous idea is just that. How do we know the difference between 'one of Schopenhauer's' and 'one of Freud's' ? We test them. We see if they are refutable, or falsifiable:

* If they can't be falsified or tested, then we quite properly put them aside: they are not part of 'knowledge', only of metaphysics, surmising, 'what-if'.

* If they can be tested and are found to hold up, then we move into Schopenhauer's second and third stages.

* If they can be tested and are found wanting, we reject them.

That's modern, post-Enlightenment, 'Western' knowledge, or epistemology, how we go about knowing, what counts as valid knowledge. If some ancient notion can stand up to that process, then it can be incorporated into 'modern' knowledge. If not, then it may not count as knowledge - opinion maybe, perspective, point of view, outlook, part of one's ideology - but not knowledge :)

Joe

Hi Joe,

My reference was to Western materialism versus spirituality. As we give up our collective enslavement to the dictates of Western materialism, we relinquish the increasingly primitive belief that the world outside remains unaffected by our thoughts. We've begun to recognise that our individual minds create our collective realities, and we're ready to take responsibility for the world by taking more seriously our individual contributions to it. Personal transformation can and does have global effects.

As I've written in the past - I don't have all the answers to the big questions in life. I'm still on my own road to discovery. I find that the more I learn, the more I realise how little I know. But everything is relative, everything has its story, and everyone has obstacles to overcome. They are our greatest teachers. Each of us goes through transitions and transformations. The important thing is that we acknowledge and learn from them. If someone asks me what makes me happiest, it's never anything I can quantify like a possession or something I can touch. It's the spirit of the human being, which can fill me with more joy than anything in the world. I have met some amazing souls who have truly inspired me.

Digby Wolfe wrote the following for a TV Special:

"Here's to the kids who are different;
the kids who don't always get A's,
the kids who have ears twice the size of their
peers', or names that go on for days.
Here's to the kids who are different,
the kids who are just out of step,
the kids they all tease, who have cuts on their knees
and whose sneakers are constantly wet.
Here's to the kids who are different,
the kids with a mischievous streak,
for when they have grown,
as history has shown,
it's their difference that makes them unique."

Hi Lexi,

Digby Wolfe - I haven't heard his name for nearly fifty years.

Yes, we are all different in some way, there are no two people who are exactly the same - but we are all similar in the sense that we all have - or should have - equal rights, equal access to opportunities and happiness and fulfilment, whether we are male or female, Black or White.

I reckon you would love Sheri Tepper's "Gate to Women's Country". Intricately clever :)

Joe