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Milestone Mentors

People who impacted on me. Roughly in the order they did so. How I came to think the way I do, the intellectual & cultural biography. The juicier life story with real people is another, more personal story. The post about this post.

Bertrand Russell

I had a few pop idols when I was a teenager.  Mostly my mentors were people living around me. Then something new happened in a moment while reading Bertrand Russell that changed how I saw things.  I think the book was called “On Morals”, but that does not seem to exist. Maybe it was Marriage and Morals but I can’t find the line I recall. “Morals is the science of how to live one’s life.” That does not Google, but that is what I recall. And as a teenager how to live my life was a burning question – that there was a science for that was very appealing. Further reading did not help much in a practical way (I will add Zorba The Greek to the list), but I began to read philosophy, and loved it.

I think of Russell as of marker in the sand for humanist, atheist, positivist rationality. ““I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” I liked that. It summed up the atheism I was bought up with. (Now I think it is all a bit more mysterious. Maybe the universe forks and folds?)

And for a readers digest version of philosophy there is nothing to beat A History of Western Philosophy

And he was part of Ban the Bomb. And The Committee of 100

 

Johnny Ray

Talking of pop stars – this one was the first one I noticed.  I was about 12.

Buddy Holly

Great stuff, but really, my main heroes were not popstars.

Vincent van Gogh

We had a book of his paintings at home, I saw a movie and read a biography. Later I saw exhibitions. Loved it all. I am attracted to outsiders.

here

CMW

Peter Pinney

here

The link to an album presented in Adobe Flash no longer works

Why he’s on the list.

Led to travel, New Zealand mountains.

Zorba the Greek

Colin Wilson

His book The Outsider led to my big shift at about same time as Peter Pinney

The book is a series of essays about what he calls outsiders, but presented from Wilsons existentialist position. Again how to live life! I identified with the central theme that outsiders are those who see too much. The main thing I got from the book is that I follwed through on every writer he mentioned. Now I knew who to look for in the library.

Colin Wilson is a bit of an embarrassment. He has an elitist perspective. Outsiders are artists and gifted, but not “supermen” above the doomed masses. He has an idea that the outsider has failed on some journey to enlightenment. I don’t like that type of spiritual approach to life, and did not even as CW put it forward.

On this blog 2012

Ivan Illich

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Marshall McLuhan

Stewart Brand

Karl Marx

Moreno

Osho

James Hillman
https://www.instapaper.com/read/1464712293

Thomas Moore

Marriage dead or alive

Marshall Rosenberg

Harville Hendrix

Hedy Schleifer

Bill Doherty

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Heroes

I quoted blogger Tim Boucher back in 2010 in this blog.

The link in that post to Tims page is only available on the Wayback Machine.

I dug it up today as I was thinking of mentors and heroes. I look back and see how admired them, I fell in love with some and idolised some. I still do! They are all different, they teach different things some are enemies of the other. I’m thinking of them as people I have learned from. Mentors might be the right word.

I still like what I wrote:

“I like to think I am not into having heroes but most of these from tb are my heroes. I’d add a few: J.L. Moreno, James Hillman, Jim Rough, Karl Marx, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Pinney… of course they are all a bit flawed, but that is where the light gets in… I’ll add Leonard Cohen, and there are a lot of non-famous real people who have had a bigger impact!”

And Tim replied:

“it’s not that your heroes need to be perfect, so much as it helps to have ideal images after which to model oneself. its a lot easier to build a car if you know what a car looks like, how it feels, how it operates!”

I’ll make a list, with some quotes and links. Maybe in rough chronological order of then coming into my life. I’ve begun the list!

Later Tuesday, 16 April 2019 — still working on that list — I’ve published the perpetual draft.

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Wisdom is not Consciousness

Skills, knowledge, spontaneity, intelligence, creativity and wisdom are not consciousness.

 

Easily and often confused. Consciousness raising, so effective in the 70s brought with it the idea that learning and education developed consciousness.  Maybe the miss-use of the word began with Marx?  Class consciousness, does he even use that word?  If he did he did not mean that it could be developed by reading books or classes alone.  Learning comes through experience. Why is using the word consciousness now in the 2010’s a problem?

Hmmm, bear with me…  I’m exploring something.

People do not have higher or lower levels of consciousness. People have skills and abilities including the ability to warm up to spontaneity and creativity. People learn things in practice.  Experience and relationships build ethical wisdom. Discrimination can be taught. Spontaneity can be trained.

To learn, people need relationships, access to teachers and books and crazy people ( typo) I meant craft people.  Being around people who can sing, converse, act, make things, helps people learn. Generous people who share what they know are real teachers.

Action, involvement, engagement, immersion and courage to act and to make mistakes is how people enrich themselves and others. Out of action we get knowledge and ideas. Action first reflection second. Collaboration and interaction before contemplation.  All of this makes us wiser.

Wisdom is not consciousness, it is attained through practice and living. Consciousness is a mysterious quality of knowing we are alive and exist. We just know it, but it is a mystery.

Becoming more able, relational, effective and wise is less mysterious, it takes access to good teachers.  Courage to act. Willingness to seek advice. Ask questions. Discrimination. Love

_

This is a simple ideal I’m trying to express. Dewey, Marx, Moreno all promoted action learning. Experiential learning.   Now more than ever the dominant culture works to keep us passive, ignorant, isolated.  Consciousness, higher, lower, altered, psychological, even radical, by any name is individual, private, personal.

~

One of the reasons I’m exploring this line of thinking is that there are plenty of movements that promote the idea that if 10% (or whatever) of people reached some sort of higher state of consciousness then the world would be fixed.

It is more dialectical than that.

We are in process and as the world changes, we change.  Action by action.  Not only thought by thought.

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Wisdom

Snapped that off my Kindle – it is a chapter title half way into Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral – by Mary Doria Russell –  Amazon

I thought, wow that is well worded. Google:

“So on they fought like a swirl of living fire –
You could not say if the sun and moon still stood secure,
So dense the battle-haze that engulfed the brave
Who stood their ground to defend Patroclus’ body.”

Book 17, Illiad

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Linking to a Facebook post – Roger awards

https://www.facebook.com/Waltzzz/posts/10154390921772539

 

Hmm I saved the post then clicked on my saved posts and then again on this one and copied the url.

I might like to have some posts here as I can give them tags!  Find them later.

Click the F top right to go to the post.  Unfortunately the permanence is entirely up to Facebook. There is no actual data on this page other than the link.

OK — Here it is for as long as I maintain this blog. Copied from the post on Facebook

Going through old documents. Murray Horton kindly sent me a paper newsletter about the Roger awards. So I link to it here, and on my blog, and then I can dispatch with the paper. Interesting – wikipedia needs an update – there was also a 2016 winner – see http://canterbury.cyberplace.org.nz/…/youi-wins-2016-roger-…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Award

However this “safe” data will not have any likes or comments.  We are in Mark Zuckerberg’s hands.

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Their filthy heart

“The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws.  That’s just the way it is.  This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last.  You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake.  Love is something different.  Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart.  Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate.  Love is hard.  Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.”

 

This is an internet thing, everyone quotes it.  Attributed to The Great Kamryn whoever she is.  Famous it seems for this one quote.  Or is there more to it?  Maybe in some library of physical docs?

Anyway, I like it.

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Broken

Machines break and need to be repaired. Humans break and need to be loved.

from the NYT

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/opinion/read-buber-not-the-polls.html

Read Buber, Not the Polls!
David Brooks NOV. 1, 2016

I-Thou relationships, on the other hand, are personal, direct, dialogical — nothing is held back. A Thou relationship exists when two or more people are totally immersed in their situation, when deep calls to deep, when they are offering up themselves and embracing the other in some total, unselfconscious way, when they are involved in “mutual animated describing.”

A doctor has an I-It relationship with a patient when he treats him as a machine in need of repair. But Peter DeMarco described an I-Thou relationship in a letter to the doctors and nurses who cared for his dying wife, which was published in The Times:

“How many times did you hug me and console me when I fell to pieces, or ask about Laura’s life and the person she was, taking the time to look at her photos or read the things I’d written about her? How many times did you deliver bad news with compassionate words, and sadness in your eyes?”

In our culture we use phrases like finding oneself, finding your passion, loving yourself so you can love others. But Buber argued that it’s nonsensical to think of the self in isolation. The I only exists in relation to some other.

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See Saw Jig Saw Words

Found this poem on my computer. Wrote it a few years ago.

 

In fever
I’ve been
a machine
all night

See saw
jig saw words
tumble
& fall
to make an image
as they land
on sand

Truth is that
beauty
never sleeps
alone

Beauty lies
under a cloud
in darkness
rarely seen

Truth and love
live
side by side
with romance
out of sight

While you’re
asleep
we’re awake
& see the dream’s
a joke

We left the
car & caravan
in the
flooding stream

Retuned to
find a
baby on a horse

She looked
at us with
knowing
eyes

we played
our games
online
so lost
we could not find
the tokens
for the
times

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Invisible threads

http://inthemessy.com/tag/advent/

“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”

The space between is invisible – we can only talk about it in metaphor e.g. “broken heart”, “bound together”, “muddy path” and here as “sympathetic fibers”. Not only do we use metaphor, we can use images and symbold – rings, hearts. And in psychodrama we have the simple act of concretisation: place people or objects at a distance to show where they are in your life. Distance becomes visible and conveys meaning.

The quote above from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3500800.Henry_Melvill (not the Moby Dick man) seems to be saying that our actions can live after us and multiply. Then come back as karma. And then impact everyone. Be careful what you say and do it can reverberate into the future.

I think of this as Moreno’s sociometric matrix. Sympathetic is a nice word there with its roots in symphony – all the parts of the network working together.

The network of course is a physical metaphor for something unseen, the space.

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Background

http://melvilliana.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/finest-thing-herman-melville-never-said.html

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Lenin used the concept often

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/24c.htm

All humanity is thrown into a tangled bloody heap from which no nation can extricate itself on its own. Though there are more and less advanced countries, this war has bound them all together by so many threads that escape from this tangle for any single country acting on its own is inconceivable.

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