Direktlänk till inlägg 6 juni 2008

educating the whole mind

Av dennis hägglund - 6 juni 2008 15:24

As long as education is directed at the consciously accessible memory, which is the only memory most people recognise as such, it (education) is actually disturbing. Hopefully we all want education to be fulfilling, not disturbing; we want it to ease as well as facilitate the transition from the natural or paradisiacal creature we are born as to modern man.


The reason it disturbs us to have things directed at the memory is that the past and the memory are incompatible (as is demonstrated below). There is a past, and there is a memory, and these are two completely contradictory things, which is easy enough to understand from an example:

Let us say you are a woman with a small baby, and the baby torments you with his traumatic episodes, sometimes lasting for days on end. You use every device you can imagine, like earplugs, the ipod, Valium, and so on. When the child finally becomes old enough to understand a fairly complex sentence you tell him that he was a serene baby, that you were so devoted to him that he never shed a tear throughout his whole infancy. His actual past, which is an unassertive natural, and hence fragile, accumulation phenomenon --a phenomenon cultivated in harmony so that it never needed defending, and so, has no armour, like an orchid or a hummingbird-- evaporates (as the intelligence behind action and behaviour) in the face of this message and you become his idol; he puts you on a pedestal next to the virgin in the Nativity myth. This pedestal is a conscious phenomenon. This past is an unnatural and aggressive memory in the child’s psychology.

(And how could a mother resist exploiting this innate weakness? Why should she suffer a child’s discontent with her when she can conjure his affection, make him an Oedipus? It is immoral, but appears so practical to her, and what is man consistently if not immorally practical?)


Now, how should the child treat you after the neglect or incompetence you, as this mother, inflicted on him? How should he relate to his new brother or sister a few years later, when this new baby starts having traumatic episodes? He should side with the baby against you (as far as the real past is concerned, a past he can not consciously or "on-demand” access, a meek past), but his memory tells him to side with you against the baby. And as he lives a life of similar mistakes (helping his enemies and thwarting his friends) through having had his memory filled to substitute for the real world and a real life, his life spirals downward emotionally until it finally crashes and he must apply for a pharmaceutical solution.


If you are a careful reader following this as clearly as it is written, maybe you are thinking: why can’t the memory be filled with reality as well as deceptions? Actually it can if the reality is simple enough, which means taking it out of context. If you are given as a project to find a way to put something real into memory you just find something real that is very very simple. But if you are asked to find a way to put an algebraic equation into the memory, then you have an equation that falls far short of co-invention. Perhaps the student co-invented all the math up to algebra, but algebra was not simple enough. The only way to understand an equation is to co-invent it. As its co-inventor you never get a wrong answer, and this equation is not in the memory we are looking at here. This equation is an acquired gift.


Since the memory is limited it is also emotionally limited. What is a wild bird? A wild bird is someone who can’t talk to us, and can’t understand us when we talk. That is an adult memory’s reply. Emotionally close to freezing. Birds cease to draw our eyes. But to a small child, who also can’t talk, a bird is people, another innocent and a playmate who can do great tricks, besides having the profound gift of having become independent of parents, and even becoming parents themselves, in a world without human order.


Love, in other words, comes from reality including a real past, and emotional freeze-out comes from conscious, which is memory as "entity” or self. The emotion of real complexity versus that of contrived simplicity.

 

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Kommentar

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