Perception

[Jilek, Glenn]

Sally,

I don't know where I'm going with this, so hold on...

I was thinking about all the discussion about learning by being open to "listening" what your surroundings are telling you.  Native American peoples, and other primary cultures, believe that your surroundings could indeed communicate with you ... that both animate and inanimate objects had spirits associated with them.  We, of European heritage, thought that was rather primitive compared to our beliefs, and did our best to stamp it out.  It is interesting that I have spent my whole adult life in a profession that is logical, rational and precise, and now at the end of my engineering career I see the shortcomings of that way of thinking and am gravitating towards "thinking" with my heart instead of my head.  (Ironically this is called being irrational and irrationality is equated with insanity in our culture) It is, after all, rational thinking that has allowed us to eliminate or threaten many species of life in the name of progress, poison vast areas of our environment, and !
 continues to keep us at the brink of total annihilation.  It is hard to consider that very sane.

Data isn't information, and information isn't knowledge, and knowledge isn't understanding.  I believe we misunderstand this hierarchy. Rationality seems to only take us to the far borders of understanding.  I don't know where Shirley Maclain was coming from...I just skimmed over a lot of her musings in her Camino book...it seems to me she has an awfully big ego.  But your mention of letting the rocks and land "speak" to you did strike a chord in me, because I think that it is indeed possible.  Of course this communication isn't like words in English, French, or Spanish...the communication is on a much more subtle level.  I mentioned that my mom has Alzheimer's disease, so I am interested whenever I hear something related to it.  Recently on National Public Radio, they had a story about a very old oak tree on the grounds of a nursing home somewhere in the southern US.  The Alzheimer's patients, who are normally non verbal (like my mom now has become) become animate and verba!
 l when they are wheeled under the old tree.  Now maybe logical, rational, skeptics can think of scientific reasons that this happens, but the patients' caretakers (and I) believe that something special is happening there under that tree that we don't understand.  Some very rational types have written that there is no such thing as love, it is just a chemical reaction in our brain.  I guess I no longer choose to be in that rational world where reality is defined only by what can be measured and quantified.

I don't consider these things magic, unless Life is magical in an of itself.  I just feel that the only route to real understanding is by opening yourself up to more than what comes in to you through your five senses.

Have a wonderful time in Donegal...one of these days I would like to visit there also!


Glenn