All Learning is Remembering

I learned yesterday in a talk by Michael Meade that "all learning is remembering." What I'm hearing him say is that if you want to learn there has to be some remembering involved. In other words, the knowledge is already there it is just needs to be awakened. It's also interesting to note that in The Story of B Daniel Quinn titled one section The Great Forgetting and followed up later with a section titled The Great Remembering. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that if any schooling program isn't aimed at remembering then all it is doing is putting kids and adults to sleep and it isn't worth the taxpayers money. The Quote below out of The Story of B better illustrates some aspects of this remembering.

"B means to gather the voices of humans all over planet into one voice singing, 'The world must live, the world must live! We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies. The age of The Great Forgetting has ended, and all its lies and delusions have been dispelled. Now we remember who we are. Our kin are not cherubim, seraphim, thrones, principalities, and powers. Our kin are mayflies, lemurs, snakes, eagles, and badgers. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has abated, so we no longer imagine that Man was ill-made. We no longer imagine that the gods botched their work when it came to us. We no longer think they know how to make every single thing in the whole vast universe except a human being. The blinding we suffered in the Great Forgetting has passed, so we can no longer live as though nothing matters but us. We can no longer believe that suffering is the lot the gods hand in mind for us. We can no longer believe that death is sweet release to our true destiny. We no longer yearn for the nothingness of nirvana. We no longer dream of wearing crowns of gold in the royal court of heaven.'"--Pg. 324, The Story of B

Daniel Quinn Quote Saturday

"Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they must assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us -- provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They reassure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the polls."-- Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

Quinn Quote Saturday

"It's a sign of our cultural collapse that supporting our vision has come to be seen as wicked, while undermining that vision has come to be seen as noble."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.50, The Story of B

Quinn Quote Saturday

"That's it, Jared. That's where the REAL gods of the universe write what they write. Your God writes in words. The gods I'm talking about write in galaxies and star systems and planets and oceans and forests and whales and birds and gnats."--Daniel Quinn, Pg.135, The Story of B

Quinn Quote Saturday

"The God of revealed religions - and by this I mean religions like yours...is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can't make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can't seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to ever conceivable theological question in aboslutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we'd have them do unto us. What's that - a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyways. To be honest, I'd be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that." - [Pg.135, The Story of B]

Quinn Quote Saturday

"The fundamental...delusion is that humanity itself was designed - and therefore destined - to become us. This is a twin of the idea that the entire universe was created in order to produce this planet. We would smile patronizingly if the Gebusi (A tribe in Australia) boasted that humanity was divinely destined to become Gebusi, but we're perfectly satisfied that humanity was divinely destined to become us." - page 129, The Story of B

Quinn Quote Saturday

"Circumstances have at last shattered our mad cultural vision, have at last rendered our self-aggrandizing mythology meaningless, have at last strangled our arrogant song. We've lost our ability to believe that the world was made for Man and that Man was made to conquer and rule it. We've lost our ability to believe that the world will automatically and inevitably support us in our conquest, will swallow all the poison we can generate without coming to harm. We've lost our ablitiy to believe that God is enequivocally on our side against the rest of creation."--Daniel Quinn, Pg. 284, The Story of B

The Boiling Frog

On of my favorite sections out of The Story of B.

Quinn Quote Saturday

"The evangelist John wrote, 'You must not love the world or the things of the world, for those who love the world are strangers to the love of the Father.' Then just two sentences later, he wrote: 'Children, the final hour is at hand! You've heard that the Antichrist is coming. He's not one but many, and when the many of him are among us, you'll know the final hour has come.'"

"John knew what he was talking about. He was right to warn his followers against those who love the world. We are the ones he was talking about, and this is the final hour--but it's their final hour, not ours. They've had their day, and this is indeed the final hour of that day.

"Now our day begins."--Daniel Quinn, the last page of The Story of B

Voids

Derrick Jensen and Daniel Quinn on voids:

"Quite suddenly, after six thousand years of totalitarian agriculture and civilization building, the people of our culture--East and West, twins of a single birth--were beginning to wonder if their lives made sense, were beginning to perceive a void in themselves that economic success and civil esteem could not fill, were beginning to imagine that something was profoundly, even innately, WRONG with them." (Daniel Quinn, Pg.267-268, The Story of B)

"The same is true on the larger scale, as no comforts or elegancies, no feeling of power over another, no accumulation of property can make up for a failure to participate in the great liturgy. It's an attempt to use increasing amounts of emptiness to plug a great void (or, as R.D Laing wrote, 'How do you plug a void plugging a void?'). It's an attempt to cure loneliness through power. But loneliness can only be cured through relationship, and relationship is precisely what expoitation and abuse destroy." (Derrick Jensen, pg.567, Endgame)

Truths

‎"Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to saying it not at all. It is indeed sufficient for people to hear the laws of thermodynamics once, and to understand that they're written down somewhere, should they ever be needed again, but there are other truths, of a different human order, that must be enunciated again and again and again -- in the same words and in different words: again and again and again."---Daniel Quinn

Stopped in My Tracks

I had half a post written out until I came across this quote looking for another quote that I wanted to use in this post. "We've lost our ability to believe that God is unequivocally on our side against the rest of creation." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 284, The Story of B]

This post was going to be about what I think about most of the political letters written in to the editor of our local newspaper. But after reding that quote I don't have anything to say about those letters. I can't really name it, but there is something in that quote that cuts to the heart of the matter for me this morning.

Fifty-First Degree of Losing Faith

For some of you that have read "The Story of B" you might remember this line: "There is only one degree of having faith, but there are fifty degrees of losing it." And later on B goes on to say, "When that amount of faith is gone, however, then it's ALL gone, and you're at the fifty-first degree You're out, you're finished."

After listening to an interview with Daniel Everett on Wisconsin Public Radio it sounds to me like he reached that fifty-first degree that B was talking about. His book titled: Don't Sleep there are Snakes is an account of how he and his family tried to convert the Piraha people of Brazil to Christianity, but didn't have much success. Daniel went into the jungle a Christian but ended up leaving the jungle an atheist.

I haven't read the book yet but the interview was fascinating. I thought some of you might be interested.

Weaving

Just some notes here. Lately I've been reading various works by Vine Deloria. He's wise. Take this quote for example:

Now, every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people must be to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others. Because of hierarchies, European thinkers have not performed their proper social function. Instead, science and philosophy have taken the path already taken by Western religion and mystified themselves. The people who occupy the top positions in science, religion, and politics have one thing in common: they are responsible for creating a technical language incomprehensible to the rest of us, so that we will cede to them our right and responsibility to think. They, in turn, formulate a set of beautiful lies that lull us to sleep and distract us from our troubles, eventually depriving us of all rights - including, increasingly, the right to a livable world.

This takes me back to this excerpt out the Story of B:

"Animism looks for truth in the universe, not in books, revelations, and authorities. Science is the same. Though animism and science read the universe in different ways, both have complete confidence in its truthfulness." Pg. 136

Daniel Quinn goes on to explain how animism finds truth in the universe in a language that most people can understand. He has brought "wisdom back into the community and made it available to others." I'm really glad that he took the time to do this. He is wise too.

How's that for simplicity?

Whitetail Doe

Last week I shot a whitetail doe during the Wisconsin nine day gun deer season. I couldn't help but feel gifted. I couldn't help but feel that the universe took notice of me, much like a gambler must feel when their pick wins the race. On the other hand, I couldn't help but feel sadness that she will not see another sunrise or enjoy her motherly duty of having her fawns around.

I too often forget that my life will come to an end just as the deer's did a few days ago.

Out of all the mixed feelings and thoughts about this hunting experience, I know I come out of it feeling more alive than usual. There is something to be said about that.

I love deer hunting.

Pope is Warned of green Antichrist

For anyone who has read The Story of B, by Daniel Quinn this story will make a lot of sense. From the story:

An arch-conservative cardinal chosen by the Pope to deliver this year’s Lenten meditations to the Vatican hierarchy has caused consternation by giving warning of an Antichrist who is “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist”.

Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, 78, who retired as Archbishop of Bologna three years ago, quoted Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900), the Russian philosopher and mystic, as predicting that the Antichrist “will convoke an ecumenical council and seek the consensus of all the Christian confessions”.

The “masses” would follow the Antichrist, “with the exception of small groups of Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants” who would fight to prevent the watering down and ultimate destruction of the faith, he said.

The only problem with this is that there will be no central authority figure, that is the point of becoming "B".

I think it is to late for their religion, it is going to die a slow death.