Beauty is Fitting in the Art of One to Many LO22452

AM de Lange (amdelange@gold.up.ac.za)
Mon, 16 Aug 1999 15:35:18 +0200

Replying to LO22447 --

Dear Organlearners,

Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes, with

>Subject: Beauty is Fitting in the Art of One to Many LO22447

Greetings Andrew,

I cannot write too much since I had my share for this week.

But I want to write this note to tell you how much I appreciated your
contribution. Even its title is beautiful -- pregnant with its many
possible colours of investigation. You did well in drawing some of these
colours yourself.

One such colour not only caught my attention, but also unlashed my
emotions, especially sorrow and anger.

>I recalled how Scott Peck had written that after years of AA
>counselling he had concluded the spirit of the bottle was
>haphazardly mistaken for the Holy Spirit in some wretched
>misreading on the map of life. Somewhere on the road to
>spirituality, (the search for something eternally better, best?)
>they just wandered somehow into the warm and comforting
>arms of another spirit. For a fragmentary moment I glimpsed
>Jesus sitting with them and not in the Bodlean Library. Asking
>myself where should I rather sit and digest true knowledge?
>Another variance then agreed with itself.

The search for spirituality.

I get angry because we excuse ourselves from the destructive immergences
from others. One way is to say that it is not us who cause these
immergences, but the system. By this we acknowledge that we have become
slaves of the system, even should the system be devoid of any
spirituality.

The majority of white people here in South Africa who voted for
the ideology and policy of apartheid, did exactly the same. They
condoned a system in which spirituality was not possible. When I
began to question this lack of spirituality in 1969, I began to
experience the life of a non-conformist. However, I made two
fundamental errors myself in those days. I assumed that
(1) apartheid could be modified in such a manner that
(2) spirituality could be incorporated again.

Today I know better.
(1) I cannot modify things which cause destructive immergences.
I cannot alter the course slightly and expect to still reach my
destination. When it concerns destructive immergences, I have
to make a complete U turn. Only thereafter will slight alterations
in the course help me to focus on my destination.

(2) Spirituality cannot be incorporated. Spirituality can only
emerge from within. Some say that we each need nothing more
than ourselves. In other words, spirituality can emerge from
within without the intervention of any agent, whether it be
God Creator or some creation/creature reckoned to be a deity.
I do not want to cause a percussion on this issue because
our understanding of God Creator evolves just as our perceptions
on any other topic evolves from our hours as kids to our days
as old timers. But I want to stress that for me God Creator
plays a decisive role in the emergence of spirituality. This is
especially so in the light of the essentiality fruitfulness. I also
want to stress that I cannot simply incorporate God Creator
because I then place myself above God.

Having to stress AS MY PERSONAL OPINION that God Creator plays a decisive
role in the emergence of spirituality and that I cannot command God
Creator at my will, makes me sad rather than angry. Perhaps It should have
been the other way around.

Anyway, I am sad because it is through personal spiritual emergences that
I became sure of spirituality as an emergent phenomenon. Many books,
including the Bible comment on spirituality. It is because of those books
that I considered spirituality as a possibility, but not as a certainty.
However, each time, as soon as I began to investigate spirituality, I was
told that it was a private and not a public issue. In other words, using
post-modern terminology, I was told that spirituality is for Learning
Individuals, but not for Learning Organisations.

Andrew, think of the title which you created: "Beauty is Fitting in the
Art of One to Many". Now think of spirituality and my closing sentences of
the previous paragraph. What these people were telling me, is that
spirituality is ugly since I have to keep it to myself -- the ONE-TO-ONE
mapping. In other words, there is no beauty in me telling others -- the
ONE-TO-MANY mapping -- that spirituality is the key to humane living.

The older I become, the more I am told to shut up about the
following:
The ugly thing to do as a teacher, is to keep quiet about
the beauty of spiritual emergences.
(Some colleagues tell me that it is sheer nonsense like
spirituality itself. They never want to associate themselves with
me.) The result is that more and more people, nowadays even in
childhood, try to INCORPORATE spiritual emergences by taking
drugs.

When I was kid in primary school, no kid that I knew of took any kind of
drug. In secondary school I and all my friends suspected five pupils who
drank liquor and two who smoked marujiana. But we did not even know for
sure. At university I met the first person (a student in pharmacy of all
subjects!) who took to pills. But nowadays even my granddaughter Jessica
in the lowest grade of primary school have to struggle with two problems
-- teachers forbidding her to expose her spirituality and older pupils
inviting her to take drugs.

Yes, we have made an ugly monster out of our educational system. And the
most horrendous thing to do, is to condone this system as a necessary
evil.

Andrew, I enjoyed the next very much.

>"If the machine produces tranquillity and satisfaction it's right.
>If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your
>mind is changed. The test of the machine is always your own
>mind. There is no other test."
>
>The skeptic smiled and said, "What if the machine is wrong and
>I feel tranquil and satisfied about that?"
>
>"If you really don't care you aren't going to know its wrong. The
>thought will never occur to you. But to pronounce it wrong is an
>act of caring, so your reply is self-contradictory."
>Robert Pirsig. 1974.

The art of caring is to love people and never to judge even one of them.
The art of caring is also to make very sure what else other than persons
is wrong or false. It even includes complex systems. The system is not a
person and will never become one, despite all the efforts of so many
people. God Creator is not a system and will never become one, despite all
the efforts of so many personalities.

Thinking of one God Creator as more than one person is evident
of what Andrew calls
Beauty is Fitting in the Art of One to Many
Thinking onself in the shoes of other persons in the system is
evident of what Andrew calls
Beauty is Fitting in the Art of One to Many
Articulate one's own thoughts carefully so as for fellow learners
to expore them in a dialogue is evident of what Andrew calls
Beauty is Fitting in the Art of One to Many

Thank you Andrew.

Thank you Rick. This list is a beauty.

>Round and round and round.

>Best wishes,

The same here.

-- 

At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa

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