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December 16, 2012

Seekers should keep an open mind

The Norman Transcript

NORMAN — Editor, The Transcript:

Are we humans thinking less and being less discerning and more emotional? As I read Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolution,” Fisk’s “The Great War for Civilization,” Deutsch’s “The Beginning of Infinity” and Phipps’ “Evolutionaries” I can myself sense why this might be. Don’t you think we humans might tend to be too influenced by what we “want” or “need,” especially as in to “win,” rather than by the common good, the good for one and all? I can see how some of religion has “evolved” from need, imagination and circumstance, but the same can be said of the politics of the citizen.

So how do we fix it so we might each learn from the whole context? Who are the shamans who are aware of the dangers of limiting ourselves to our own ideas and opinions rather than being open to learn a lot from one another wherever we come from in our own politics. Political ideation can be a questionable as religious ideation and yet we fail to ask or to see the answers to those questions from ourselves or others or perhaps to even ask them of ourselves or listen to them from others.

Ha! I could ask what is the Higgs Boson’s more minute energy wave in the field from which the “matter” of opinions come from! What gives them their “sub-stance”? What “stands” (“stance”) under (“sub”) those opinions? Is that originating “Adam” (ground, “humus”) of human-ity conserving and growing its originating fertility or is it becoming polluted? OK, OK, I am saying what pops into my mind and not meaning to wax eloquent! But I mean it!

As I listen to some expressing news and vies I wonder what “rituals of understanding” they are participating in that seem to fail to give them the optimism they need to criticize themselves in order to innovate their own ideas and their actions that flow from those ideas. On the other hand some seem to have learned a lot from their embedded listening to all sides and feeling all the dimensions of what each person “perceives” as the issues.

Who can free us and our fellow “humans” from giving into the seeds of “the Single Story”, -biases and prejudices that limit one to a “single” view of others and what we perceive them to stand for or emerge from? Perhaps it is each of us as we seek to get to the bottom of it all!

JOE TED MILLER

Norman

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