The Joy of Life
The Magic of the Atlantic Coast
The Tancook Ferry
Saving the Angel Within
Diana Sandberg on home schooling
M.Thomas -- The Language of the Heart
The Depth of Despair
Quote from Laurens van der Post
Gifts from Hurricane Floyd
Poetry from Shirley Hartman
Pain
Depression
Suicide
Greed
Hope
Quote from E.O.Wilson
Editorial: The content of this issue differs from that of all other ones insofar as emphasis is placed on the human element directly, the most valuable product of evolution, rather than on the rational framework that supports it and makes its existence possible. What is the human element? It may best be described as that which is left if humans are compared with computers.
* * * * *
Whenever I have met true humanness, and it has happened often, I have been moved, often to the point of tears. Each time it has been a revelation to see it in a mere gesture or a glance, to hear it in a word spoken at the right moment.
Frederick Franck
When I think of the quality of being truly human, Dr. Frederick Franck is the one who comes first to my mind, and with whose unpretentious attitudes I am identifying myself. Now about 90 years old, he created over 30 years ago -- after having worked with Albert Schweitzer -- an Oasis of Culture, called Pacem in Terris, from an old broken down, garbage strewn, property near New York, which he and his wife turned into a paradise. His gift as a sculpturer helped to turn his gardens into an exquisite art exhibit, and his love of classical music attracts many weary and rat-race-tired persons from New York and other parts of the world, to his simple, but meaningful festivals. These festivals, which also include plays, such as the wellknown medieval "Everyman," take place several times each summer and are announced in Frederick Franck's ultra-parsimonious Shoestring, a delightful handwritten newsletter, filled to the brim with heartwarming humor, contained esp. in his gentle nudges to contribute at the end, which differ ingeniously in each issue. E.g. in May 96 he wrote after listing his first-class cultural events: "Meanwhile do not forget to renew your Renewal:The Aristrocrat Edition of the Shoestring at $20.- and up, is crafted from the finest ingredients available, guaranteed to upgrade any coffee table. The $5.99 Super-chic edition is adequate, but hardly a status symbol. The no-frill Barefoot Edition at $3.99 is practical, plain, full of information and ideal for recycling. Pacem is studying 25% Frekwent Fliar discount, but only applicable to the Aristrocrat String, and with certain restrictions (see small print, for which space is lacking)." (The latter words are squeezed into the last inch of his small, four-page newsletter which has, of course, only 1 edition.) -- The quote above is from his book To Be Human Against All Odds. --
But Frederick Franck's humor is mingled with, and elevated through, a deep compassion with humankind and its struggles. --
Excerpts from The Shoestring, Vol. 30!, May 1996:
Reportage on a Busy Hibernation: This Shoestring should actually be printed on 14 Kt. goldfoil! Who could have predicted in 1966, when Pacem opened its door, that either it or its founder-builders would last another 30 years, not only stay alive, but become more intensely alive. That moreover it should manage to remain marginal and rejoice this marginality of being beholden to no foundation, no institution, of having survived without membership drives, PRexperts, fundraisers, for there are no "members," just plenty of friends. Also the Shoestring survived in its 2000 copies limited edition, limited only because of the limited energy where literally all the work is done by an old couple of seniors and as odd a bunch of more junior volunteers. Pacem also has preserved its envied status of being more non-profit than any other non-profit in the Western Hemisphere, and still having nothing to sell, not even an ideology. So, what has it stood for this 30 years? I'd say for a "joy de vivre" which is something that cannot be sold to consumers, but is inevitably shared with friends, a basic joy in still being alive, despite all. Meanwhile we have aged a bit and found the aging process -- up till now, yes, up till now -- an immense blessing so that we have appetite for more of the same. The unforeseeable blessing consists in a deepening of the living world around one, bifocals notwithstanding, and in sensification of one's love of life and one another, a liberation from prejudices and opinionated opinions, and an ever more intensive awareness of life as Mystery, limitless preciousness in oneself and every living thing, a crescendo of one's capacity to love where a diminuendo was predicted, in the face of one's all too obvious mortality. And that is impossible in this poor world of violence and barbarity, Rwanda, Bosnia, Tibet, not evading the sadness of each day's "news" for a minute, not discounting the horrendous suffering, but realizing one's inability to save the world, at most an ability to love it in horrified compassion.
* * * * *
What moves us?
Not Technology, it only enables us.
Peter Senge
By assigning the highest priority to speed, the power of now undermines the value of those experiences and activities that require slowness to develop: psychological maturation, the building of meaningful and lasting relationships, the doing of careful and responsible work, the creation and appreciation of the arts, and the search for answers to life's greatest problems and mysteries. At the same time, by encouraging the immediate gratification of the senses, the power of now obscures the need to cultivate those skills and virtues -- patience, commitment, self-denial, and even self-sacrifice -- without which no civilization can long endure.
Stephen Bertman
* * * * *
IN SEARCH OF THE SOURCES OF MAGIC AND WONDER
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee
The book Phantoms in the Brain deals with the sources of magic and wonder in the human brain without explaining them away. It is remarkable through its depth of scientific insight in combination with sensitivity to the innermost human sentiments. All the while, contact with the needs of the media-fed, sensation-hungry population of today is maintained -- not directly for that purpose, but because Ramachandran, a professor of neuroscience, believes that the rare and extraordinary examples of how strongly the mind can affect the body, which crowd the book, provide keys to the normal functioning of the brain during its most inaccessible, most marvellous, and least studied processes.
The book is written for everyone, but will appeal especially to the young -- the age-group Ramachandran wants to set afire for his profession. -- The authors write as if science (and especially neuroscience) is a detective story -- no, not "as if." Science is a detective story, and the authors manage to highlight that fact.
To well-established scientists, used to fact-laden papers from which every allusion to the writers personality has been carefully clipped off, Phantoms of the Brain may appear to concentrate too much on the sensational and dramatic; but it is never unscientific. In fact, Ramachandran takes great care to differenciate his flights of imagination from whatever is established knowledge -- his untestable hypotheses from testable ones -- and his unsupported insights from those that have been thoroughly examined and validated. Although brought up in the Hindu religion, and loving his motherland, India, so much that he visits it every year, he admires and transmits the core principles of the Western science that nourished him. Unfortunately, believing that they would bore and repel the general reader, many of his best scientific arguments are placed into endnotes. For instance in Note 3 to Chapter 2, he says:
"Aristotle was an astute observer of general phenomena, but it never occurred to him that you could do experiments; that you could generate conjectures and proceed to test them systematically. For instance, he believed that women had fewer teeth than men; all he needed to do to verify or refute the theory was to ask a number of men and women to open their mouths so he could count their teeth. ... (In fact, the experimental method is so alien to the human mind that many of Galileo's colleagues dismissed his experiments on falling bodies even after seeing them with their own eyes!) And even to this day, three hundred years after the scientific revolution began, people have great difficulty in understanding the need for a "control experiment" or "double-blind" studies. (A common fallacy is, I got better after I took pill A, therefore I got better because I took pill A.)" P.266.
What his Hindu religion does, however, is to provide Ramachandran with a more detached, encompassing point of view than is common among scientists. If the brain fabricates the most unbelievable stories, beliefs, and convictions, where is the border between fantasy and the discovery of new perspectives on reality? Like Nobel Laureate R.W. Sperry (of whose work he does not seem to be aware) Ramachandran rejects the belief that mind and brain are separate entities. He has also a thorough understanding of the principles of evolution. The reality we perceive is a fabrication of our brains, yes, but without that fabrication, and its similarity in all of us, humans could not exist or survive.
While promoting a more receptive attitude toward unaccustomed perspectives and new insights, he makes a sharp division between obviously implausible beliefs, such as UFO-abductions and sightings of Elvis, and new thoughts which are brought forth before all supporting evidence is in place. As an example of the latter, he cites the fate of meteorologist Alfred Wegener, whose theory of Plate Tectonics was strongly rejected as long as the earths' crust was believed immovable; but the discovery of its being a mantel floating on a molten core turned Plate Tectonics at once into a self-evident truth. -- His own insights, Ramachandran believes, are of this second kind.
Although I must confess that I felt repelled by the overabundance of rare and sensational case histories in the book, by the authors' acceptance of self-deception as a common device in all persons to cover up the darker sides of their nature -- a belief that leaves no room for truth, goodness, and beauty on earth -- and so on, I was strongly attracted by the gentle understanding of human emotional needs, even while probing their sources with the sharp tools of science.
After describing his studies of temporal lobe syndromes, Ramachandran states: "I hasten to add that as far as the patient is concerned, whatever changes have occurred are authentic -- sometimes even desirable -- and the physician has no right, really, to attribute a value label to such esoteric embellishments of personality. On what basis does one decide whether a mystical experience is normal or abnormal? There is a common tendency to equate "unusual" or "rare" with abnormal, but this is a logical fallacy. Genius is a rare but highly valued trait, whereas tooth decay is common but obviously undesirable. Which one of these categories does mystical experience fall into? Why is the revealed truth of such transcendent experiences in any way "inferior" to the more mundane truths that we scientists dabble in? Indeed, if you are tempted to jump to this conclusion, just bear in mind that one could use exactly the same evidence -- the involvement of the temporal lobes in religion -- to argue for, rather than against, the existence of God. By way of analogy, consider the fact that most animals don't have the receptors or neural machinery for color vision. Only a privileged few do, yet would you want to conclude from this that color wasn't real? Obviously not, but if not, then why doesn't the same argument apply to God? Perhaps only the "chosen" ones have the required neural connections. .... My goal as a scientist, in other words, is to discover how and why religious sentiments originate in the brain, but this has no bearing one way or the other on whether God really exists or not." (Pp.184/185)
Of major importance, however, are the new perspectives Ramachandran uses as well as elicits. Long established thinking loses its dogmatic rigidity and as yet unperceived avenues into the future are opened.
--------------------------
V.S.Ramachandran, MD., PhD., is professor and director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego, and is adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California. One of the world's foremost brain researchers, he has received many scientific honors. -- Sandra Blakeslee is an award-winning science writer for The New York Times. For the last ten years, her reporting specialty has been neuroscience.
* * * * *
Response of a Nobel Laureate to criticism of his article "Search for Beliefs to Live by Consistent With Science":
...I purposely avoided in my title and elsewhere terms such as "based on" or "based in" science, using the phrase "consistent with" instead. I did this to ensure that facts and knowledge from nonscientific sources qualify as part of this continuum* (including abstract inferences and other "things of the mind," along with verified facts and lessons of history, and so on, provided, of course, they are not in conflict with science.)
*[between the world of science and that of the humanities]
R.W.Sperry
* * *
In response to my reflections in the April 2000 issue, which questioned the need for a new religion, Dr. Hanna Newcombe, Director of the Peace Research Institute-Dundas, Ontario, Canada, wrote: "Rather than a new religion we need a strong interfaith dialogue between existing religions. They have not been well behaved through history, but they all believe in the Golden Rule, expressed in different words. I belong to a local interfaith group..."
To encourage mutual understanding on earth, such groups deserve to be copied. For persons interested in the task, I obtained its address: Hamilton Wentworth Interfaith Group, c/o Josephine d'Amico, # 412, 270 Mohawk Road East, Hamilton, ON L9A 2H9, Canada
* * * * *
THE JOY OF LIFE
The Magic of the Atlantic Coast. (E-mail from Halifax, Sept. 1999) ....Before my trip to Montreal, I spent two days with Judy and Fred (Dr. A....) on little Tancook Island where they had rented a cottage for four days. It's a wonderful magical place. Isolated and yet connected to the mainland at least four times a day by ferry. It is so quiet and pristine (only 30 families live there). Any open land not turned into garden or lawn is covered with giant wild roses (the rose hips are the size of small crab apples and taste sweet and delicious), goldenrod and tansy -- fields and fields of it. You can see the houses on the main land (including the house I sold on East River Point), but you can't hear any cars. It's eerie in its silence. Just the lapping of the waves and the songs of birds. Pheasants roam on lawns by the dozen. Even the cats don't bother to chase them anymore.
On the way back, I wrote a short poem about the ferry -- its nighttime voyage was so different from the trip over during the foggy grey morning on the day before. It seemed as if she were gliding on its own beam of light. Everything around us was black and stars (even the lights of Chester looked like stars), except for the golden light created by the ferry.
Love, Eva
The Tancook Ferry
The Ferry cuts a foamy path
On steel-grey morning cloth
Of liquid silver
As white crests and swirling spume
Rustle by speechlessly
In long and ruffled wakes
At night the ferry's light
Spins black to liquid gold
With Midas-fingers
Where stern meets indigo seas
And laps out lullabies
Afloat on gilt brocade
For water whispers to us all
In global language
When we listen
With the ears of the soul
Eva-Maria Phillips
* * * * *
SAVING THE ANGEL WITHIN
From my youngest daughter in Vancouver, who home-schools her children -- a task called "saving the angel within" by Barbara Gaughen-Muller (wife of former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, Robert Muller) -- I recently received a letter containing informational material on home-schooling, from which I selected a paper written by one of her friends for special attention in this issue.
They Don't Have to Go
by Diana Sandberg.
The main argument for home schooling in this MENSA article is that public schools suppress and inhibit the natural urge to learn and to know, which exists in every child -- unless the child encounters an especially inspiring teacher. "Kids like to learn. Given freedom, encouragement and access to information, they will learn as much as their minds will hold, as fast as they perceive a need to know."
Furthermore, the prevalence of mature adults around the child leads to the development of a far better social sensitivity than the stunted one produced by intense peer pressure.
The question to which this article (one of hundreds written on home schooling information) addresses itself is whether home schooling is legal. The answer is "yes," at least in British-Columbia.
A large proportion of home-schooling parents are teachers, but "academic studies show no significant correlation between the educational background of homeschooling parents and the test scores of their children." In fact, though freedom to be guided by its own impulse does not lead to the child's acquisition of knowledge in the order one might expect, a recent analysis of 2911 tests (Stanford Achievement series) written by home schooled children showed that they perform better than average.
The main advantage, of course, is the attention each child receives, which benefits the disabled as well as the unusually talented, and which encourages each child's special abilities to fully develop and blossom. Even the best teacher with the best intention is unable to provide that climate in an overcrowded class room. -- It has been found that no correlation exists between highly structured lessons at home or a maximum amount of freedom for each child to pursue its own interests. "THE most important thing you have to teach him or her: How to find out what you need to know, how to pursue knowledge. This is more vital than any particular subject, and any subject can be used to discover it. Once your child has some experience, you'll find that she/he will forge ahead of you. Think back -- many people have told me that the brightests parts of their childhoods was when they got completely absorbed in some subject -- dinosaurs, cars, ham radio, the middle ages, whatever -- and knew more about it than any of the adults around them." -- Learning together is encouraged, as are visits to the library, Science World, the swimming pool, etc. -- The author reports of one of her children's ingenious Christmas presents for her grandfather: to do multiplication problems for him in her head!
"Generally speaking, the parent's role in home schooling is not to be the fount of all knowledge, cramming quantities of facts into blanc and passive heads; we're not stuffing sausages here. Our role is to be enthusiastic and experienced learners, role models for our children, providing support and advice -- and transportation to the library."
The questions whether home-schooled children would have trouble to enter university, find work, or lack social experience and be overprotected are also answered negatively. 31% of them are self-employed; many use their initiative to become apprentices to persons in their field of interest. Adjustment to university life is much easier for home-schooled children than for those who were always told what to do. In fact, "some prestigeous universities, such as UC Berkeley, have actively recruited homeschoolers, having found them to be excellent students."
The strongest argument is against growing up isolated from the real world. Home schooling does not exclude friends in one's own age-group, while brutalization in the school yard is compared to letting toddlers play in the traffic to learn about cars. (Elsewhere,* peer pressure is described as as teaching "popularity, conformity, bullying, teasing," etc. in contrast to "kindness, patience, generosity," and so on.) Brutalized children become either victims or brutes; the quality of social sensitivity, desperately needed if our species is to have a future, is better learned if the influence of immature peers is less pervasive.
-------------
* "An Interview with John Holt." (Exact reference to follow.)
The article by Diana Sandberg, which I saw and summarized, is a slightly adapted and shortened version of her original MENSA article cited in the reference.
Editorial Comment: I am of two minds about home-schooling. It is an excellent device to improve our society, and to grow happier and kinder persons, if guided by responsible parents. But it can be dangerous if used to prevent access to vital and essential knowledge by narrowminded fundamentalists, hate-dominated terrorists, or rebels against any kind of authority and discipline, even the minimum necessary for the functioning of civilized communities.
My three-year old grandson
has not yet learned
to read or to write
But he speaks boldly and clearly
the language of the heart
through whispers and glances
through silent gestures
and spontaneous gentle touches.
Now, he is being taught in school
to read, to write and to speak
a language, not of the heart.
He will soon know a lot,
or rather remember it all,
of whatever he will perforce, by rote
be taught by his teachers
nursery rhymes which make no sense
facts and figures dished out as knowledge,
ready-made formulae for every problem,
propriety in dress and behaviour,
and in short to do everything
the way others consider it right.
He may, like some children, rebel against
this imposed tutoring and coercion
or may soon, like most others, realize
that it is easier to go along,
than proceed along the road less travelled.
So he may slowly and steadily forget
the beautiful language of the heart
and be unable to imagine anything unfamiliar,
or to think his own thoughts and discover new ideas,
be unable to wonder and to ask questions
which do not occur to others.
He will then become a costum-built product
of the present de-humanized civilization.
His inner-most feelings and what happens within
Will remain hidden to himself and to others.
It is only through the language of the heart
That one can share openly and freely
the magnificent experiences within oneself
the ecstasy and agony of the living moments
that make us divinely human.
* * * * *
THE DEPTH OF DESPAIR
There is only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
Sir Laurens van der Post
Gifts from Hurricane Floyd. The last issue contained one of my poems, "In Search of Wisdom," which I found as result of a devastating storm that damaged our roof and flooded my study. I also found other, deeply moving poetry from a young girl, a passing acquaintance of mine, which speaks of her love and loss with a sensitivity, and of the depth of pain in her soul with a power, simplicity, and authenticity, that make most other poetry appear artificial and contrieved in comparison. -- I had completely lost touch with her, but was able to find her again after 20 years and to receive her permission to publish from her work what I had selected. -- Unfortunately, space does not permit me to publish all of it here, so that her beautiful poems about love and disappointment were left out.
Pain
What is real pain?
Do you know?
Some think they do
They say they know how you feel
God that is so artificial!
How could they possibly know?
Pain results from a lack of love
It doesn't take much to love
But they don't know how to love
I love you.
Is that so hard to say?
For some it is, but
For others it comes as natural as
I hate you.
Shirley Hartman, Dec. 3, 1980
Depression
Depression, like a heavy fog, engulfs you
You are confused
You are unhappy, but most of all
You are alone.
Words from others mean nothing
They talk,
They persuade, but finally
They give up
Your fate is left to you
You struggle
Then you slip
You fight and ...
At last you have made it back to reality.
Things are clearer now
Words have more meaning
You are yourself, but only
Until that heavy fog engulfs you again.
Shirley Hartman, Dec.3,1980
Suicide
Your life is your own
You are you
Everyone else is foreign
You hate them
You hate yourself
You hate the world
You hate everything
They don't know
They don't care
They cringe away from you
They point and stare
You talk but they don't listen
You cry but they walk away
Finally you shut them out
You are alone and isolated
Everything is bad
Nothing is good
Nothing is worth living for
You make that fatal attempt
It works
Life is over
They talk but you don't listen
They cry but you only bleed.
Shirley Hartman, Nov. 24, 1980
Greed, fat and round,
In a castle high upon a mountain,
Laughs.
Far below people lie.
Far below people argue.
Far below people cheat.
Far below people kill.
Far below ...
While greed sits on his throne
He doesn't move
He doesn't work
Greed, fat and round,
In a castle high upon a mountain,
Laughs.
Such foolish people, he says.
Why? says a voice.
Peace and honesty appear
Far below people stop
Far below people think
Far below people begin to smile
Far below people love
Far below ...
Greed
High upon a mountain
Greed roars.
He reaches down and touches the people.
Peace and Honesty disappear.
Greed, fat and round,
In a castle high upon a mountain,
Laughs in victory.
Shirley Hartman, Feb. 10, 1981
* * * * *
HOPE
If even one person in a thousand survives because she had the genetic predisposition to persevere against discouraging odds, then natural selection will instal hopefuless as a hereditary quality, as a necessary companion of intelligence.
Edward O. Wilson
Review of The Ethical Humanism of Albert Schweitzer
by Pat Duffy Hutcheon
Pat Duffy Hutcheon's article on Albert Schweitzer is another example not only of her outstanding writing and thinking, but also of the similarity of her thoughts with my own. Schweitzer is widely known as a Christian humanist with the emphasis on "Christian," but he was guided only by the ethical teachings of Jesus -- in which lies the hope for our world, he believed -- rather than the miracles ascribed to him. These teachings are sign posts toward a common ground for all religions, and beyond that, for all of humanity -- but only if science is used to enlighten outdated beliefs. His fundamental respect for truth permitted no rift between science and ethics. In his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus, based on thorough studies of source material both in Greek and Hebrew, Schweitzer even came to the controversial conclusion that certain historical details, which are the source of major Christian customs and celebrations, have been added later -- though Jesus was certainly not a fiction but a real person, a human being with outstanding gifts and qualities. -- For Schweitzer, the discrepancy of his research with Bible reports about Jesus' life does, however, not diminish the value of his words, which are expressions of humanity's innermost core. "Only humanity can supply compassion into raw, brutal nature, the injection of morality into an amoral universe is the privilege and duty of our species alone." [Schweitzer] wanted humans to stop avoiding their responsibility and guilt by willfully injecting love and purpose into the cosmos." (P.25)
He also knew that "if the ethical foundation is lacking, then civilization collapses, even when in other directions creative and intellectual forces of the strongest nature are at work," (p.26) and he maintained that civilization will sink into decadence unless life is perceived as desirable, and human actions as decisive in determining its quality. In one of his last books, he traced the evolution of the "Kingdom of God" from an actual place in heaven "to a metaphor for an ethical condition to be realized in the hearts and minds of humans within nature." (P.27) The affirmation of life and the world is, in Schweitzer's view, essential for the advance of an ethical conscience, while their negation (in Indian religions, classical Greek philosophy, and early and Medieval Christianity) is an obstacle to it.
In spite of his ultimate ethical principle, "Reverence for Life," Schweitzer "recognized the necessity for destroying some forms of life in some situations in order to protect and maintain other life," (p.28) which would make guilt unavoidable -- unless no opportunity to help creatures in distress is neglected.
In summary, Schweitzer's life and work confirm that an ethical conscience is the product, not the origin, of evolution, and that our perception of ethics is still in the process of evolving.
---------------
Dr. P.D.Hutcheon is a sociologist and former professor of education in Vancouver, B.C.
Editor's comment: To end suffering is often more humane and compassionate than to prolong life. Hope for humanity lies in the advance and refinement of our ethics to include that truth.
* * * * *
If no-one responds to your call, walk alone. Walk alone!
Tagore
* * * * *
Reflections: -- The Independence of Ethics and Miracles.
P.D.Hutcheon's article on Schweitzer in last Summer's Humanist in Canada led to my recall of a two-year-old correspondence with Bill Holden's group of thinkers concerned with a global ethic. Here, I learned much about the American psyche, including the thinking of devout fundamentalists, who had typecasted me as a cold and insensitive rationalist and atheist. When I once mentioned my high regard for Jesus, they were utterly astonished and thought a wonder had occurred, and I had been converted to belief in miracles. In their belief system, Jesus' ethical teaching and his miracles were inseparable. The following is my response to one of the Holden-group members (who thought I might also be a New Ager), in which I tried to explain the difference between wisdom and wonders from within the framework of their thinking.
August 22, 1998. To R.P. -- Responding to the end of my letter to P.J., you wonder whether I am a New Ager myself. Yes, I am, as far as a life of simplicity, rejection of material wealth, and preference of inner wealth and a meaningful life are concerned. No, I am not if it means that I therefore also have to reject science and accept paranormal claims. One of these views does not imply the other one.
You are right, the gospels don't mention concern for the environment and future generations. Why? Thousands of years ago, when the Bible was written, there was not yet any reason for that concern. Population density was small in comparison to nature's bounty. -- My passage to J. does not refer to the words of the gospel, but to their meaning -- to Christianity's message of love and mutual consideration among human beings. (Incidentally, I read the Bible from beginning to end years ago.)
Your last paragraph permitted a valuable insight into your thinking and probably that of most Christians in America and perhaps on earth: the love of Jesus because he performed miracles. I love Jesus in spite of the miracles attributed to him. Nor do I see any indication that he "demonstrated the independence of consciousness from the brain." -- No, there wasn't any revolution in my thinking! -- I loved Jesus from the first moments of my childhood, and I still love him. I prayed to him as soon as my little hands could be folded, and I still do. Not only do I pray to him, I also feel that he answers me. -- I see his eyes in infinite sadness under his crown of thorns as he carries his cross up to Golgatha, sadness not for his own fate, but for that of the people who misunderstood him -- who demanded his crucifixion because he disappointed their wrong expectation that he was a political leader who would liberate them from Roman domination. -- And I see that the sadness in his eyes does not fade; he is still being misunderstood. I love Jesus because of his character, not his miracles.
The Independence of Spirituality and Mutual Concern. It is commonly assumed that spirituality and mutual concern are interdependent, and that one cannot exist without the other one. I could never share this assumption. Highly spiritual cults or religions may permit, or even encourage, unspeakable cruelties. But even in ordinary decisions of private lives, spirituality can impede compassion.
For instance, on February 23, 2000, at 9:50 a.m., at the CBC-Halifax-Radio program "This Morning," a young women, pregnant and with a small child, was interviewed. She spoke in a soft, pleasing voice about her young husband's unexpected passing away, about the gentleness with which her doctor had asked her to donate his organs to the saving of other lives, and about her decision to say "No!" The reason for her refusal was her spirituality. She believed that part of her husband's spirit lived on in his organs, and that he would never be completely dead and at peace if his organs were transplanted into someone else!!! Her decision was accepted, as the law demands, and the lives of valuable persons were sacrificed. -- Had she understood that her husband's spirit existed nowhere else but in his living brain, she would have avoided such a cruelty with the same passion she now defended it. She was kind-hearted and full of concern for the man she loved, but she was misinformed about the nature of life and death.
* * * * *
Acknowledgments: I wish to thank Frederick Franck for sending me and permitting me to quote from his rays of Sunshine he calls "Shoestrings", Hanna Newcombe for permission to quote from her letter, my daughters Tini and Eva for information on "Saving the Angel within" and for permission to use extracts from an e-mail on the beauty of the Atlantic coast, M. Thomas for his permission to quote from Making Things Happen, but most of all Shirley Hartman for her permission to reprint her poetry. Additional information on Eliane Lacroix-Hopson's professional career: After reading her occupations listed in the January 2000 issue of Humankind Advancing as airplane engineer and designer, designer of Paris clothing, publisher of Yachay Wasip `Simin' (promoting the Inka culture), promoter of the Bahai religion, of Teilhard de Chardin, and of the cause of the United Nations, E. Lacroix-Hopson wrote me that (after her Boeing engineering and dress designing, and before working full time for the United Nations) she had also worked for 17 years in nuclear/electrical engineering. REFERENCES
Bertman, S. -- Hyper Culture. The Futurist, Dec. 98, pp.18-23. [P.21]
Franck, F. -- To Be Human Against All Odds. Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press. 1991.
Franck, F. -- The Shoestring. May 1996. Pacem in Terris, 96 Covered Bridge Road, Warwick, NY 10990, U.S.A.,
Hartman, S. -- Four poems. Original contributions.
Hutcheon, P.D. -- The Ethical Humanism of Albert Schweitzer. Humanist in Canada, Vol.32, #2, (Summer 1999), Pp.24-28.
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