En Memorium: Manning Marable

¡Hola Everybody…
Today, something funny and something sad… First: check out Fox clown Glenn Beck’s response to my challenges to his reality-challenged diatribes (click here). He really goes after yours truly here.

Secondly…

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-=[ Manning Marable ]=-

... we have to be aware of the power and importance of organizing not just around identity, but the materiality of daily life, which still, in many respects, is racialized for people of color. You build from that, but you have a grander social vision that transcends it and recognizes the strengths and limitations that are drawn from the particularity of identity.

-- Manning Marable

Manning Marable, scholar, writer, lecturer, and civil rights activist who founded the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University, died yesterday, April 1 at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City after a long illness. He was 60.

I first became acquainted with Prof. Manning’s work when his book, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America was recommended to me by a mentor. A classic study of racism and class in the United States, it was central to my education and development as political activist (as it was for countless others). I was immediately taken by his grasp and range, his academic acumen and his ability to deconstruct complex processes in a way that made the bigger picture easier to understand.

Years later, I was invited to participate as a panelist at a conference organized by Manning Marable on mass incarceration at Columbia University and I had the pleasure of meeting him and speaking with him briefly. I was struck by his humble manner and his willingness to support the work of those who otherwise would not be heard. I was also overwhelmed that the Manning Marable would ask me, an unknown, to present my ideas. I was, like fuckin’ high, that day.

I, like many of us familiar with his work, was looking forward to his magnum opus, his biography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, a project he devoted ten years of his life to bring to fruition. The book is scheduled to be published on Monday, and Mr. Marable, as was his wont, had been looking forward to leading a vigorous public discussion of his ideas. The book promises to be intellectually stimulating and challenges both popular and scholarly portrayals of Malcolm X, the black nationalist leader, describing a man often subject to doubts about religion, politics and other matters, a departure from the authoritarian figure of unswerving moral certainty that became an enduring icon of African-American pride.

The work is particularly critical of Alex Haley’s often cited work, the “Autobiography of Malcolm X,” now a regular fixture on college reading lists, which Mr. Marable described as “fictive.” Drawing on diaries, private correspondence and surveillance records to a much greater extent than previous biographies, Manning’s book also suggests that the New York City Police Department and the F.B.I. had advance knowledge of Malcolm X’s assassination but allowed it to happen and then deliberately bungled the investigation.

I will be looking forward to reading this work and I will definitely mourn the passing of what was surely one of the intellectual giants of The Cause. It is said that no one individual truly dies. That the actions we commit in our lives continue to reverberate long after we are gone. It is said that one has died only when the memory of that individual is lost. If this indeed the case, then Manning Marable will live in our heart of hearts for a long time.

RIP Prof. Marable…

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

The Friday Sex Blog [The Heart of the Truth]

¡Hola! Everybody...
First, I get shanghaied into dinner with a former supervisee. Actually, I suggested dinner, but I didn't count on it becoming an extended convo about my project and a drinking binge (his). By the time I convinced to go home it was late.

Drunk people are boring, BTW.

On my way home, I'm stoked because I have a fire in my belly about a post I have germinating -- inspired by the recent events in Wisconsin. But before I get to my place, I get a call from a former lover and she needs to talk. She's a dear friend, and she's always been there for me. Besides, she's like, one of the hawtest women I have ever known (I'm superficial, shoot me). Already long story shorter: By the time I get home, it's really late and that fire in my belly -- the story I had germinating for a few days -- it's gone...

It's Friday and that means it's all about sex...

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-=[ Knowing, Feeling & Living ]=-

Go through the motions and look as if...

My father loved telling us to “go through the motions” and appear as if we knew what we were doing. I don’t think he meant it as a way of life, but as a way to adapt temporarily to a strange situation. I think what he meant was that sometimes taking your cue from keen observation was necessary before knowing the truth.

Everybody knows at least some truth. For example, most people know it’s unhealthy to overeat. Of those who know this truth, less feel the truth as they go through a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream. Fewer still are able to change their behavior based on knowing and feeling the truth.

The truth, as many of us know, is harder to live than to feel or know. Knowledge is easiest. The mind is more easily changed than emotions or the body, so the mind is quicker to change. Of course, political and religious fundamentalists are the exception. For the rest of us, you can hear something and almost immediately, you know the truth of it. You might feel inspired to run around and tell others this truth. You might even write or blog about it. You can create a whole way of life based on this truth. And still not much will have changed in your life. For example, you might now the truth that exercise improves your cardiovascular fitness and still sit on your butt.

After your mind has understood a truth, the next to change are your emotions. It often takes years of suffering before the truth of something sinks in deep enough for your tears to flow and enthusiasm to grow in response to a truth. Yet even your capacity to feel truth with great sensitivity -- your emotional intelligence -- is not enough for real transformation.

The last part of you to be touched by the truth is your body. Being more solid than your mind or emotions, your body changes last. You can know what you are supposed to do, and you can feel the truth of it, long before you are willing to live it with your body. You may know that you shouldn’t date that asshole, you may feel the truth sending you messages from the pit of your stomach, but you may not be ready to live that truth, so you go through the guilt-ridden motions for yet another bout of suffering.

Your body’s habits, the motions you go through, are the least open to accept truth and last to change.

Because your body is the densest part of your self-process, sex is often the last part of your life to be transformed by the truth. For example, you might know that love could be the foundation for sex. Eventually, you learn to feel your lover emotionally during the clinch of passion. Finally, you learn to live your motions as love during sex.

Even during the most intensely erotic, pleasurable, or painful sexual moments, you can learn to breathe as love, thrash as love, thrust as love, receive as love, and speak as love with your entire body. Sexually, and in every moment throughout the day, you can be love by opening up, feeling, breathing in the moment whether it be pain or pleasure, and exhaling love from the deepest part of your heart as you go through the motions as love. Sex can become the doing of love with your entire being.

You can train your body, like an athlete, to reach the farther reaches of love -- to go the distance as love. And when you feel you are about to collapse from exhaustion, you can give love through your breath and through your actions just a little bit more. Something as simple as the offer of a smile, the invitation of an open hand, or a caress, for just a moment more than your habit would allow you. What happens is that over time your life blossoms as love’s doing stretched -- again and again.

Today, and throughout your days, try to slow down and feel your heart beating. Go in and feel deeply the source of the stream of love flowing through you. Let you body open as love, soften your belly, and imagine breathing in and out through your heart. Offer that. Offer the deepest part of your heart and allow more love to move your body every conscious moment.

Ask yourself, "How would love walk down the street?" Walking, breathing love in and out of your heart, feeling the outer edge of your carnally fashioned form, how do your hips sway as you walk down the street?

How can you make a gift of the truth of your heart to your co-workers, even when you find them disagreeable? Should you smile, tell a joke, act kindly, touch, or walk away to give them space? Every day, practice opening as love as your body’s offering. From deep in your heart out to a moments infinite possibilities.

Knowing truth, of it self, is pretty much useless; feeling it is profound; but living it makes all the difference in the world.

Love,

Eddie

Honoring my Teachers...

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m rambling a bit here, but bear with me...

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-=[ Heroes ]=-

... but to labor in season and out of season, under every discouragement, by the power of truth... that requires a heroism which is transcendent.

-- Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887)

As many of you know, I love to read. Yes, I am a “squint,” an elitist. LOL! Over the years, I have come to look upon some authors as mentors, as teachers, even friends. In the past year, I have lost three such mentors/ friends -- all warriors in the battle for truth, creative and fearless voices, all three historians: John Hope Franklin, Ivan Van Sertima, and Howard Zinn.

Each taught me through the power of their example, their challenges the bigoted status quo that has passed for history in our schools and universities, in academia, and the media. Each created works that in turn made history by introducing millions to a new multitude of heroic men and women whose fearless contributions had been shamefully ignored.

Franklin, Van Sertima, and Zinn exemplified how research could be used to confront a Eurocentric, male-dominated establishment comfortable with racism, economic injustice, and imperialism, and willing to frame such practices as a form of progress. The works of these innovative scholar/ warriors amounted to what can only be termed as a vast underground railroad of subversive knowledge.

Ivan Van Sertima, a linguist, anthropologist, historian, and a poet with a powerful sense of irony, wrote during a time when the world’s leading scholars, led by Arnold Toynbee, claimed Africans made no contribution to civilization, its science or art, none, nada, zilch. Van Sertima cited sources beginning with Columbus to prove an African presence in America before 1492 -- exploding a core Eurocentric myth. Then he went on to detail African contributions to global science. Sertima’s work was revolutionary and at the time regarded as academic heresy, compelling a leading British critic to call Sertima's They Came before Columbus “ignorant rubbish.” Sertima’s impeccable scholarship struck at the Achilles Heel of racist scholarship -- who discovered the Americas? Who contributed to science? Who created civilization? Unwilling to address his documented challenges, many of his critics scampered. Others still lurk.

John Hope Franklin wrote during a time when noted historians described slavery hideously apathetic terms: “As for Sambo... he suffered less than any other class in the South from its ‘peculiar institution’.” This was how Pulitzer Prize winning historians Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison described slavery in their extensively used college text, The Growth of the American Republic.

Franklin confronted a nation schooled on the thinking that people of African descent really benefited from slavery and had no history worth recounting. His response was to detail painstakingly how people of African descent contributed substantially to each stage of America's economic and democratic growth. He too was excoriated by his peers.

And Howard Zinn... Zinn forced the discipline of history to look at itself when he claimed conventional U.S. texts and school courses failed us by celebrating wars, Presidents, generals and captains of industry. He stood on its head when he recounted how masses of American women and men, people of color and poor whites, built the country first as slaves and indentured servants, and then as mill hands, assembly-line workers and maids. Zinn further antagonized traditional scholars by celebrating the disobedience of slave rebels, union organizers, and radical civil rights and anti-war agitators. He framed dissidents as America’s real patriots and democrats -- not the George Washingtons, Thomas Jeffersons, and Andrew Jacksons who talked of liberty while they traded in slaves, and sent posses after those who escaped.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. once said of Zinn: “I know he regards me as a dangerous reactionary. And I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” This last item was repeated in the mainstream media across the globe -- in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the leading American wire services in the obituaries that followed Zinn’s death. It is worth noting that Mr. Schlesinger, as a top advisor to President John F. Kennedy, played a key role in the overthrow of Cheddi Jagan, the democratically-elected progressive prime minister of British Guiana (now Guyana). Like virtually all the American historians granted validity and respect by the mainstream media, Schlesinger was a cold war hawk. Those like Zinn who questioned the basic assumptions of the Cold War on the global stage, and capitalism at home, were regarded as polemicists.

Attacking from diverse angles, Franklin, Van Sertima, and Zinn helped establish the notion that much history is a bogus tale, a false patriotism designed to whitewash past crimes, prop up traditional heroes, and promote conformity. Each joined demonstrations for causes dear to their historical understanding.

The research contributed by Franklin, Van Sertima, and Zinn brought a light to the world, moved mountains, and lifted people who had been told their ancestors never amounted to much.

I will miss my teachers, and I despair that their likes will not appear anytime soon. The one consolation is in knowing their deep love of humanity and astonishing works will live as long as people seek to examine the past as a way to chart the future.

I submit here, however, that their absence makes us all poorer...

-- Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog (The Heart's Truth]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I’m going to disappear this weekend...

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-=[ Knowing, Feeling & Living ]=-

Go through the motions and look as if...

My father loved telling us to “go through the motions” and appear as if we knew what we were doing. I don’t think he meant it as a way of life, but as a way to adapt temporarily to a strange situation. I think what he meant was that sometimes taking your cue from keen observation was necessary before knowing the truth.

Everybody knows at least some truth. For example, most people know it’s unhealthy to overeat. Of those who know this truth, less feel the truth as they go through a gallon of Rocky Road ice cream. Fewer still are able to change their behavior based on knowing and feeling the truth.

The truth, as many of us know, is harder to live than to feel or know it. Knowledge is easiest. The mind is more easily changed than emotions or the body, so the mind is swift to change. Of course, political and religious fundamentalists are the exception. You can hear something and almost immediately, you know the truth of it. You might feel inspired to run around and tell others this truth. You might even write or blog about it. You can create a whole way of life based on this truth. And still not much will have changed in your life. For example, you might now the truth that exercise improves your cardiovascular fitness and still sit on your butt.

After your mind has understood a truth, the next to change are your emotions. It often takes years of suffering before the truth of something sinks in deep enough for your tears to flow and enthusiasm to grow in response to a truth. Yet even your capacity to feel truth with great sensitivity -- your emotional intelligence -- is not enough for real growth.

The last part of you to be touched by the truth is your body. Being more solid than your mind or emotions, your body changes last. You can know what you are supposed to do, and you can feel the truth of it, long before you are willing to live it with your body. You may know that you shouldn’t date that asshole, you may feel the truth sending you messages from the pit of your stomach, but you may not be ready to live that truth, so you go through the guilt-ridden motions for yet another bout of suffering.

Your body’s habits, the motions you go through, are the hardest to accept truth and last to change.

Because your body is the densest part of your self-process, sex is often the last part of your life to be transformed by the truth. For example, you might know that love could be the foundation for sex. Eventually, you learn to feel your lover emotionally during the clinch of passion. Finally, you learn to live your motions as love during sex.

Even during the most intensely erotic, pleasurable, or painful sexual moments, you can learn to breathe as love, thrash as love, thrust as love, receive as love, and speak as love with your entire body. Sexually, and in every moment throughout the day, you can be love by opening up, feeling, breathing in the moment whether it be pain or pleasure, and exhaling love from the deepest part of your heart as you go through the motions as love. Sex can become the doing of love with your entire being.

You can train your body, like an athlete, to reach the further reaches of love -- to go the distance as love. And when you feel you are about to collapse from exhaustion, you can give love through your breath and through your actions just a little bit more. Something as simple as the offer of a smile, the invitation of an open hand, or a caress, for just a moment more than your habit would allow you. What happens is that over time your life blossoms as love’s doing stretched -- again and again.

Today, and throughout your days, try to slow down and feel your heart beating. Go in and feel deeply the source of the stream of love flowing through you. Let you body open as love, soften your belly, and imagine breathing in and out through your heart. Offer that -- the deepest part of your heart -- through your breath, and allow more love to move your body every conscious moment.

How would love walk down the street? Walking, breathing love in and out of your heart, feeling the outer edge of your carnally fashioned form, how do your hips sway as you walk down the street?

How can you make a gift of the truth of your heart to your co-workers, even when you find them disagreeable? Should you smile, tell a joke, act kindly, touch, or walk away to give them space? Every day, practice opening as love as your body’s offering. From deep in your heart out to a moments infinite possibilities.

Knowing truth, of it self, is pretty much useless; feeling it is profound; but living it makes all the difference in the world.

Love,

Eddie

The Teachings of a Free Man

¡Hola! Everybody...
Whatever happened to the art of the question? Whatever happened to why? These past two days have been very hectic, leaving me little time to write...

I have a series of blogs on the racist roots of the modern neoconservative movement half done. Those I will post next week... stayed tuned.

* * *

Freeman, 1959

-=[ Freeman ]=-

... Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-- Langston Hughes, A Dream Deferred

My father’s best friend for a long time was a man named Freeman. Freemeng (as my Puerto Rican relatives pronounced his name) was an African American man from an upper middle class family. He was what we would call back then a bohemian -- a free spirit/ thinker. I often wonder if Freeman was his real name, or if he chose that name for himself. Or maybe his parents chose to name him so in order to emphasize the inherent right to freedom we all are entitled to as human beings. I never knew...

I did know he was a nice man, always kind and gentle. He and my father would engage in deep topics. Everything from Marxism to Castro, education to jazz -- nothing was beyond their reach. My music teacher, Mr. White, often joined them. Shoot, the poet Allen Ginsberg lived in our building, but I think my mother didn’t like him because he had a penchant for walking around naked Howling his poetry. LOL!

Sometimes my mother, not having enough to feed them, would feed them pegao. Pegao (literally meaning, “stuck”) is the rice that -- yup! -- gets stuck to the bottom of the pot. It more financially stable homes, pegao was usually thrown away. For Nuyoricans, it was part of our staple -- nothing was thrown out! Feeling somewhat embarrassed at not having enough, my mother would tell Freeman and Mr. White that it was Puerto Rican fried rice and they loved it! It got so they wouldn’t eat my mother’s real rice -- they would insist on the pegao. LOL!

I would learn a lot from these men even as a little boy, as I would sit on my fathers lap with my ear to his chest, so that I could feel the vibrations of his voice through my ear. This was the 60s and everything was fodder for questioning. Blacks and Latino/as were asserting themselves, challenging the racist status quo; women were questioning gender roles, gays and lesbians were beginning to implement the strategies learned from the civil rights movement and using it for their own cause; an unpopular war fought under false pretext was raging -- it was a heady time. Our ramshackle apartment was always filled with thinkers, artists, activists, my elementary school teachers, and all kinds of characters.

Yes, I am a radical progressive. I am left of anyone you know... those days, and men like Freeman and my father, shaped my worldview. Here’s something I learned from Freeman. And perhaps this explains why he was called Freeman...

The history of black Americans and other people of color is often presented in contrast to general (white) American history. Blacks are too often portrayed as passive victims in an otherwise brilliant display of democracy and American expertise.

Slavery, Jim Crow, and racism are issues that beg to be swept under a rug in Mississippi somewhere. It those crackers, the history books seem to be saying, or (better yet) it was the ignorance of a long time ago, but that’s old news, this is post racial America.

It was Freeman’s point that this compulsion to deny or marginalize the black American experience did harm to everyone in our society. To begin with, he explained, the black American experience was not an aberration. American Indians were slaughtered for their lands. Landless citizens (even white ones) along with all women were denied the right to vote for many years. Homosexuality is still a black mark against many of our citizens.

Freeman taught that the black American experience is the history of America. His position was that the struggle of the marginalized to survive in the face of blinding hatred is in part the key to the understanding how we all can escape the chains of modern America.

I think if Freeman were alive today he would say that white Americans are learning today what the black race learned long ago the hard way: not to believe the corporate hype. People of color have been hearing those lies for hundreds of years. We take the media with a pinch of salt, and we know that many of our social institutions serve the more fortunate. We know the word retirement means getting old means you’re going to get tired of trying to make ends meet.

After World War II ended, there descended an extended period of prosperity for the middle class. Poor people and people of color suffered more because there were few opportunities for us to rise above the level of manual labor. And so we were forced to keep the historical memories of survival alive while others got along with a newfound confidence in the value of the dollar and the fact of perpetual labor. While others looked forward to comfortable retirement and brighter tomorrows, the ghettos were busy studying survival and revolution.

These studies can benefit almost everyone today. At least I believe that’s what Freeman would say.

Love,

Eddie

Intellectual Etiquette

¡Hola! Everybody...
So, if a single mother finds herself in a bad way (after being fired by, let us say Citigroup) and applies for welfare, she's ridiculed, called immoral, and she definitely has a cap on what monetary assistance she can expect. Why is it, then, that when a Wall St. CEO or corporate entity suckles on the public teat, we are not applying the same standards?

::blank stare::

I am gone all day...

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-=[Intellectual Etiquette ]=-

“Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.”

-- African proverb

I have several posts almost ready to roll on white racism. I will not suffer fools easily. Fools like those who refuse to read what I write and react rather than think. Fools such as the woman who came to my blog read the term white racism and ran screaming that I was a bigot. Go to her blog. I would dare say you could probably sharpen a thin pencil with her anal sphincter.

Good riddance!

Or the other fools who react in anger because they don’t bother to understand. One guy, beside himself at the notion of white privilege, asked in a belligerent tone that I furnish some material from peer-reviewed journals and when I gave him a link to a blog I wrote in which I synthesized material from a slew of academic journals, he refused.

Good riddance!

Or the dumb twat who took a cursory look at the same material and suggested that my sources were slanted, failing to notice that I had included tons of research from what I call racial conservatives. In fact, the whole post was dedicated to a logical dismantling of their flawed methodology. I think she also stated that facts don’t matter

::listens to strains of the Twilight Zone theme song::

Good riddance!

I’m very meticulous about my reading material. When I post here, I can guarantee you that I have taken the time not only to research the material, but that I have constructed a logical argument. This is not mere personal opinion. Knowledge and opinion are not synonymous. In fact, the vast majority of opinion is worthless. If that sounds elitist, then, fuck it, call me an uppity spic -- I am an elitist if being an elitist means having some intellectual standards.

In any case, if you read me, you will note that there is a logical sequence to my writing. That, to me, is the greatest respect I can pay a reader: that I have taken the time and effort to present a coherent and logical message.

In turn, I expect for my readers, if they’re going to engage me, to show me the same respect by attempting to understand what I have written. Some people here have gotten their egos bruised because they have failed to attempt to understand before disagreeing with me. Some people apparently believe they skim my posts and then engage me. People, I hate to break this to you, but there is no Santa Claus and you cannot agree with something you have failed to understand!

Yup, life sucks. And here? I’m going to hold you to... Standards!

Honestly, I could give a flying fuck if you called me a muthafucka. You’re not that important in my life. You don’t suck my dick, nor do you give me any ass, so if you think imma muthafucka, a bastard, or an asshole, it doesn’t rally matter that much to me.

What?

If you have taken the time, however, to understand what I have written and demonstrate that understanding before you call me a muthafucka, we’re gonna be cool.

Here is what I’m going to propose. It’s called intellectual etiquette and I have adopted these from the book by Mortimer Adler, How to Read a Book. If more people observed it, the world would be a better place. For example, we wouldn’t be in the economic mess we’re in today.

First, respect (in my book) means understanding the material in such a way that you could restate the post in as briefly a manner as possible. Secondly you should be able to come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words or phrases. Know the author’s arguments preferably by constructing them out of sequences of his own sentences. Determine which of his problems he has solved and which he has not. Also, note which problems the author knew he failed to solve.

I have skimped on the first two stages of Intellectual Etiquette because the following is most important:

• You cannot say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment until you can say, “I understand.”
• Avoid disagreeing disputatiously or contentiously (doesn’t always happen, but try)
• Exhibit your recognition of the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting clear reasons for any critical judgment you make.

If you’re going to criticize and want to be taken seriously, you should adhere to these standards:

• Show where the author is uninformed.
• Show where the author is misinformed.
• Show where the author is illogical.
• Show where the author’s analysis or account is incomplete.

Please note, of these last four, the first three are necessary criteria for disagreement. Failing all of these, you must agree, at least in part, although you may choose to suspend judgment.

If you don’t use your critical faculty, you will lose it, or never really cultivate it. Act the fool and I will treat you in kind.

Love,

Eddie

Plato's Retreat

¡Hola! Everybody...
News flash to the Neocons (and Obama): Insanity is doing the same actions (tax cuts for the wealthy) and expecting different results. Go to rehab!

Repost...

* * *

“If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.”

-- Plato (c.427–347 BC)

To paraphrase a great man, I believe that the unexamined life – a life in which nothing is questioned or examined – is a life not worth living. Life is the most precious gift we have and we all take it for granted to varying degrees. I was fortunate in that my father instilled within me a love for knowledge. I have an insatiable curiosity that has been the source of constant enjoyment in my life. This love for knowledge is a value I have attempted to instill in my son.

One day, when he was about eight years of age, we were watching some martial arts movie and I mentioned to him that Steven Seagall couldn’t hold a candle to Bruce Lee. We rented some Bruce Lee movies and he got the “Kung Fu bug.” At various times during my life (beginning at age 12), I have studied the martial arts under several teachers, mostly in the Wing Chun style (which was Bruce Lee’s first art). So I made a pact with my son: we would study together under a sifu (teacher) I knew, but he had to commit to be come a “scholar-warrior.”

The “Scholar-Warrior” is an archetype that appears in most cultures throughout history: the samurais, the knights, the Buddhist monks, and nuns of China, etc. The Scholar-Warrior learned not only the martial arts, but also the fine arts of poetry and painting, and music; and they learned the healing arts. Scholar-Warriors were well-rounded individuals who represented the best of their culture.

My son fell for it, hook, line, and sinker… LOL! He and I (along with my wife at the time) studied the martial art of Wing Chun for several years. As part of that training, we learned many things: reiki, chi exercises, knowledge of herbs, healing arts, etc.

The following is one of the first lessons I taught my son after he took the “Vow of the Scholar-Warrior”...

-=[ Plato’s Allegory of the Cave ]=-

Plato is considered one of the most important intellectual figures in Western history. He was the founder of the first university, “The Academy,” where students read the Socratic dialogues. The essence of Plato’s philosophy is demonstrated in the allegory of the Myth of the Cave, which appears in his work, The Republic.

In this myth, Plato proposes the following vision: Imagine prisoners chained in such a way that they face the back wall of a cave. They have been there for life and can see nothing of themselves or of each other. They see only shadows on the wall of the cave.

The shadows are caused by a fire that burns on a ledge above and behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners is a path lined with a wall along which people carrying vases, statues, and other artifacts on their heads. The prisoners hear the echoes of voices and see the shadows of the artifacts, and they mistake those echoes and shadows for reality.

The point of the allegory is that our purpose in life is break free of those chains and venture out of the cave into the open in order to experience reality. That “steep and rugged ascent” is Plato’s allegory of education and leads us out into the real world of sunlight and knowledge where we can truly gaze upon the sun (the sun being the allegory of enlightenment).

Plato suggests that if such a man were to attempt to return to the cave and liberate the other prisoners, they would set upon him and kill him. The allegory of the cave, with its story of the liberation of the prisoner from darkness, deceit, and untruth and the ensuing hard journey into the light and warmth of the Truth has inspired many philosophers and social leaders. But Plato meant this allegory as more than mere poetic vision. He used this work, to give it a precise, technical application. Within this application, he was able to offer a map in which opinion and knowledge are clearly marked.

However, that would take too long right now and I need to get dressed and go to work! LOL!

Love,

Eddie

Monday Madness [Knowing]

¡Hola! Everybody…
It’s mother dear’s birthday!

Sorry I didn’t call yesterday, but I didn’t have my phone with me and I got home late. When I was a kid, a salesman came to our door selling Brittanica Encyclopedias. I begged and cried and begged some more and my mother, a single parent of four, barely keeping it together financially, bought the set on a lay-away plan that probably made the price of the st double. But she bought it because she cared about my intellectual development. I went through that set like a kid in a candy store. Some things you never forget...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMS!!

* * *

-=[ Knowing ]=-

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
-- Socrates, in Plato, Dialogues, Apology (469 BCE - 399 BCE)

I agree with our friend Socrates up there, but I’ll take it one step further by adding that it’s how we examine life that determines its worth. This is no small matter. Since before the days of Socrates humans mostly lived within one culture, never having to confront the belief systems and meaning making of other cultures. Today, you can no longer depend on the society they live for obtaining meaning and value.

I believe this is a good thing.

One of the first beliefs that has been shattered (but that people still cling to nonetheless), is the myth of the individual standing outside of cultural context as an objective observer. This notion has been shattered in almost all areas of knowledge. In the hardest of sciences, physics, The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (measurement), and the observer effect demonstrated that the tools we use affect what we measure and observe. In that way a quanta, the most essential building block of matter, can be seen as both a wave and a particle, according to which instruments are used to measure it. Additionally, the observer effect impacts all other sciences from psychology to information systems.

Cognitive neuroscientists have shown that we do not much as observe reality, but create it. I’ll give you a good example. Right now, you’re reading the pixels on the screen that turn out to be letters (in actuality they are codes). Are you aware of other objects within your awareness? The area beyond your screen, for example. The wall behind you. Even now, you’re “deciding” what data to observe and what data to omit. Much of what we pay attention is decided by our cultural views. Culture is a very human concept – it’s the major way we create meaning. Your language, for example, is a product of your culture and every language omits and includes certain data. There are concepts for example, in Sanskrit, that are almost impossible to translate into English. The reason being that English tends toward categorizing things while Sanskrit was better suited to describe pre-verbal, spiritual concepts.

Even better, let’s take Spanish and English. I remember a particularly interesting study whose aim was to study language and childhood development. Specifically, the researcher wanted to study the impact of Spanish-speaking parents on children in Boston. What she discovered was extremely interesting to me, as I am bilingual. When the Spanish-speaking parents spoke to their children, they often used open-ended questions. English-dominant parents used closed questions. For example, a Spanish dominant parent would ask her child questions about a trip that led to qualitative thinking/ responses. They would ask, for example, “So you went to the zoo?!! How did you like it?” Open-ended questions are question that can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, and Spanish-dominant relied more heavily on getting the child to describe the quality of their experience. English-dominant parents relied more heavily on close-ended questions, such as, “So, you went to the zoo! Did you enjoy it?!!” They would go on to ask questions that helped their children describe quantify – or categorize – their experience.

Note that I’m not saying one is better than the other, just pointing out the difference. Moreover, as a bilingual individual, I can understand the difference because the two languages emphasize different aspects of reality.

Scientists are no different, though they do try to control for these effects. Still, it’s only recently that the western medical community is beginning to understand traditional Chinese medicine. Modern medical practitioners scoffed at acupuncture until research began to show that there was something to the practice. Even today, with more and more western practitioners accepting eastern medicine, they still do not completely understand why acupuncture works. As one basic scientist Candace Pert, put it, “We just don’t have the geography” to understand why it works. That’s just another way of saying that we don’t have the language. We still do not understand the meridian system and today, westerners are taught acupuncture in a way I find unethical. In the East, you have to study for at least 10-15 years before you’re even allowed to pick up a needle and much of the training (calligraphy, qi-gong practice, etc.) is considered extraneous to acupuncture.

Another great example is the now more commonplace practice of attending the mind as well as the body. Medical doctors are trained to view the body as a mechanism, divorced from its mental state. They are trained to treat the “symptom” or the “disease.” What modern western medical science never acknowledged was that the mind – the mental state – of the patient was attached to the body. In this way, people were reduced to symptoms and diseases, their humanity sacrificed on the altar of scientism.

Today, we have proof that mental state holds an enormous influence on the outcomes of any treatment, so western medicine has taken a turn toward a more holistic approach, though I think there’s more lip service than actual practice practice.

I say all this to show that we’re not just individuals living outside of the culture in which we are embedded. If you were to attempt to change the meaning of one word, for example, it wouldn’t be too successful until a significant portion of the population began accepting that meaning. The meaning may change for you (to a small extent), but it hasn’t changed really. It still has a larger cultural meaning and that meaning still has an influence on you.

That you don’t notice this influence doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Rather, it means that you’re not aware of it. The purpose of life, as Socrates woiuld have it, is to make the unconscious conscious through examination.

Love,

Eddie