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©2006 |
Samantha Thomas |
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23 June 2006 |
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Who (And When) We Are |
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| We tend to think or believe that we know something about the future. We often speak of the future as something "out there," distant from us and approaching. In our inquiry, we intend to distinguish where the future is located, and if, perhaps, we can create a place to stand in it that may make a difference. | ||||||||||||||||||
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The Context of Education |
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| Education is a real challenge. Under the onslaught of hitherto unseen extrinsic forces, and with its previously undistinguished intrinsic weaknesses becoming blatantly evident, education is now fully open to question. The content of education has been continually changing -- with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the newly reauthorized Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) -- and it will continue to change at an ever-increasing rate. Any attempt to either resist or keep up with these changes in content will certainly leave even the most resourceful educators hopelessly muddled. Going forward, it will be valuable to examine our currently unexamined and unintentional context for education and possibly create a new, powerful and intentional context for teaching and learning (and perhaps unlearning). | ||||||||||||||
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The Future of Marriage |
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| Our deepest, closest, most intimate relationships -- strange as it may seem -- often become an area of dissatisfaction, sadness and disempowerment in our lives. The divorce rate in the United States is now above 50%. Cold as that fact may be, it is just the tip of a ponderous iceberg, when one considers how many people are complaining and suffering in their relationships. Perhaps it is time to take a fresh look at the Being of being married (or in any committed relationship). This inquiry began as an approach to divorce and extended back to marriage and eventually has something useful and valuable to say for any relationship. If you are interested in starting, preserving or ending a marriage or relationship, this is your inquiry. |
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The End Of Slavery |
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| Over 160 years ago, the Emancipation Proclamation became law and ended more than two centuries of slavery in the United States of America. Or did it? No more than Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation fifty years ago. No more than the Civil Rights Act or Affirmative Action have ended racial discrimination. We now inquire into the persistence of slavery, which continues in our unwillingness to free ourselves from our self-invented conversations about race, ourselves and each other. This is a conversation whose time has come. | ||||||||||||
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Samantha Thomas Is... |
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| ...a self-declared Futurist. Samantha Thomas has had the privilege of working in many diverse fields in the circuitous course of her career. Her endeavors up to now have included engineering and industrial design, medicine, higher education, illustration, cartooning, music and philosophy, but none of that is really who she is. Ultimately, she is yours to create. |
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Samantha Thomas Futurist |
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The World of War |
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| By now, we have a acquired a lot of familiarity with the World of War. It is so relentless and ubiquitous that it is now simply the World in which we live. Strange that it no longer seems strange to us. For most of us, however, the war is just something on the news -- a body count or a video clip -- and it doesn't seem to have much to do with life as we live it. Whether we realize it or not, we are neglecting Peace. By failing to inquire into who we are, we are unconsciously and unintentionally Being War. It shows up all over the place. In our relationships -- even (especially) with the people closest to us -- we relate dramatically with each other and demand validation.
Will we begin to be responsible for the World we share? If we will not, and we continue to ignore the question of who we are Being and who we could Be, the ongoing existence of Human Being in the Universe is at risk. |
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It is all up to us... |
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| Scroll down to read the entire article, or click the button at right to close this window. What are you thinking right now? Who are you Being? Please write a message about it... |  |
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The Perfect Language A Fable About Us, and How We Got This Way Long ago, when Man came into Being, we spoke the Perfect Human Language. It was much like Loony, the perfect Loon language, Duckish, the perfect Duck language, Cricketese, the perfect Cricket language or Froggic, the perfect Frog language, which we have all heard and are familiar with, as Loons and Ducks and Crickets and Frogs continue to speak these languages to this very day. We, on the other hand, abandoned our Perfect Human Language many, many generations ago. In fact, there is now no one left alive who remembers this ancient language. No one knows exactly what it sounded like, but it must have been somewhat like, "Hello! Hello! Hello!" It was a very simple language with just a few words, all of which meaning the same thing. These words were completely sufficient, however. There was nothing significant to talk about, since we had not yet signified anything. Our Perfect Language was perfectly suited to communicating nothing, which was perfect, as there was nothing to communicate. There was nothing wrong and there were no complaints, for there was no word, "wrong" nor any other words by which to complain. Only, "Hello! Hello! Hello!" The Perfect Language is all the language that one needs for life in Eden, which is what the whole world was at that time (and still is for Everyone except Us). The world worked for everybody and everything, and nothing was left out, neglected, misplaced, excluded or forgotten. All of the creatures in the world are naturally creative. Most birds have created that air can support their bodies, and it does. They fly right through it. Penguins (who speak fluent Penguinese, by the way) create that they can fly through water, and they do, with beautiful grace and ease. Bears create that they can goof off all winter long and get away with it. Hyenas create that everything is a laughing matter, and no one gets offended or takes it personally. Like all the other critters, Humans are creative critters. Of all the wondrous possibilities we could have created, we created that we were important, and especially, that our personal survival was important. And we take almost everything personally. We created our own importance, as a rather smug self-assessment of our "superior intellect." This intellect seems to be utilized primarily to verify that we really are as smart and important as we think we are, and somehow, that makes sense to us! After we made up that our survival was important, it wasn't long before we also made up that signifying things in the world could have an impact on our survival. We found that "Excuse me, but there seems to be a saber-toothed tiger behind you" was much more effective in surviving saber-toothed tigers than "Hello! Hello! Hello!" Unfortunately, Humans, unlike other critters, are easily distracted from our purpose. We became so deeply involved in developing and refining our survival-oriented, signification language that we forgot our original Perfect Language. Then we forgot that our importance and our quest to secure our survival were just ideas we made up. We began to believe they were the Absolute Truth. We even began to believe that we have a divine right to survival. We know, because God said so! When we forgot our Perfect Language, we also forgot that we could create. Ironically, it is forgetting our Perfect Language, in favor of all that we consider to be significant, that has been the most serious threat to our worthiness and suitability for survival. A bird does not need to name a tree, "willow" or "maple" to build a nest in its branches. A human believes that it is necessary to know that it is a tree - this particular tree - that is scheduled to be cut down. We really started to cause trouble in the world when we invented slippery, shifty words like mine, yours, theirs and the difference between us and them. If one is to bulldoze the world, fix it, own it and make it "more comfortable," then, by all means, one must name and define and categorize everything. Then the human needs to devise a system of relative values - a self-invented ratio - along with a plausible explanation and reasons for these values that make sense (if only to oneself). This ratio and its rationale are made up wholly from past experiences. A frog's life is in no way constrained by the suffering it endured as a tadpole. Humans develop strategies for survival out of what we have survived so far. This, of course limits, the range and scope of our possibilities for survival, and eliminates any possibilities for a life or way of being beyond survival. All the possibilities that were possibilities before we forgot we were in Eden died as possibilities. These dead possibilities continue to live on as ideals, such as "People must be free," or "There should be peace." Ideals never inspire or empower anyone. Ideals are just more of the burden of life, more of the struggle. In fact, there is little chance that an ordinary human being can have any awareness of a possibility of life, or being in life, beyond the struggle to survive. It takes something extraordinary. When humans are reminded that we can create, we may deny or disbelieve or dismiss it as nonsense. We people are remarkably attached to our constraints. Extraordinary humans - a notable few have shown up, scattered throughout history, in every culture and land - actually create that they can create. When they do, they create amazing creations. They take the imperfect language into which they were born, and create something entirely unpredictable with it. It is as though they took paper and folded it and produced, not a paper origami bird (that would be ordinary), but a real muscle and bone and beak and feathers bird. These extraordinary people have created things like freedom, when only more bondage was available; abundance, when only more hunger was available; peace, when only more war was available. Up to now, they have been few and seldom. In recent times, however, more and more people are taking on being extraordinary. So far, we haven't been able to return to the Perfect Language. We have distinguished, however, that we can restore our current language to the power of the Perfect Language. We can do this when we recognize that all these words still mean the same thing. (Nothing.) In fact, there is current evidence that we are returning to the Perfect Language. Perhaps soon. With further technological advances, such as email and text-messaging, we will no longer be able to communicate anything significant at all. It is possible. Every day, more and more people are heard in public places, shouting into cellular telephones, "Hello! Hello! Hello!" |
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