Complexity of Experience
Complexity in Human Experience
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Complexity in Human Experience
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Today’s thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach to feminism is boring and reductive. It is time to embrace complexity: Helen Lewis
“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me… There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul.”
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
The problem with systems of reality is that they are political, they must of necessity establish judges, leaders, people delegated with the responsibility and authority of declaring what is real and what is not, what is wise and what is foolish, what is orthodoxy and what is heresy, what is sacred and what is secular or even blasphemy. But on close examination, the lives of the people so authorized are laced with human frailties and their qualifications are subject to being questioned and obliterated? How in fact was this judgment arrived at? Is it not like the making of sausage that is a closer metaphor for the actual activity of legislatures? In fascism, laws are dictated by enlightened leaders—but history has shown also that those who are imagined as saints and fuhrers are themselves often far worse than the ordinary, because they had to be morally cruel and ruthless to attain their position of authority. So who can we idealize?
“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.”
On Being, as it has evolved, takes up the great questions of meaning in 21st-century lives and at the intersection of spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and the arts. What does it mean to be human, how do we want to live, and who will we be to each other?
Whales and Elephants - Communication
We were made and set here, the writer Annie Dillard once wrote, “to give voice to our astonishments.” Katy Payne is a renowned acoustic biologist with a Quaker sensibility. She’s found her astonishment — and many life lessons — in listening to two of the world’s largest creatures. From the wild coast of Argentina to the rainforests of Africa, she discovered that humpback whales compose ever-changing songs and that elephants communicate across long distances by infrasound.