About A New Education Essay

If mathematics is the basis for all concreteness in Western thought, can we ask what is more real and concrete that we may find beyond that? Is it not striking that we are no more able to say why the laws of karma, or reincarnation are true in these times? We do not stop to question the laws which hold for the reality of mathematics. Mathematics itself is a science, not the basis of it. It offers one way of looking at the material world. There can be 'deeper' sciences, or parallel in the power of projecting facts as mathematics does. Why have we discounted the possibility of even the existence of these ?

Mathematics has become the cage of our minds. The enclosure for where we will allow it to wander to. Yet, our real concern is in searching for the causes, of events, of outcomes. Mathematics has been a useful tool for such explorations. Whatever we could line up within its laws, pretty much holds correct. But is that the absolute and last word on looking into, and for laws, that determine how nature will reveal itself? We are limiting ourselves by thinking so.

Our minds become conditioned thinking 'rationally'. Logic and rationality were good, as other things in the course of human evolution have been. We can at least acknowledge that we wear these as fetters now.

We fear that we might only regress by letting go of these structures in our mental lives, and our real ones. That everything other than them is cloud-like, empty beliefs, old wives tales and superstitions. We can acknowledge this fear too!

Were that it was in our own hands to determine where we will be next! And if only, could we have looked into, and explained, how our life has moved on its path in the past.

We have memories of places we were in, as we grew, and what took us there we have vague recollections of. Things that we heard of from our brethren and closer kin. The actual cause lies in the minds of those who cared for us that time and what they could do with the resources they had. But more than anything else, it is their deepest wishes for themselves and their children. This was the greater force for our lives turning out as they did and where we found ourselves, and also what we took up in our minds to accomplish.

Do you not acknowledge this as the greater and determining force in your life? Not the distance to the nearest city. Not the climate in your town. Not its population, its dirtiness. Not the many other things which define the social conditions of the town or village, or the country you come from.

But there it is ..in the faces of those who cared for you. Can you measure that with science at this time? No. But you can speak long and eloquently of your feelings of gratitude for their sufferings and sacrifice only by looking upon their faces. Is that from memory that these words come forward? They would be a little empty then. No, you read them; like an infant who gazes into the eyes of his mother. These are more than just emotions, and as concrete as causes that determine events.

How much more meaningful to know what these really are, or where are they formed. They are not clearly visible or understood, is certain. Determination, shrewdness, intensity, perseverance - how much more significant the science which looks beyond these basics to say accurately where one is heading !

Education has relegated these matters to our psychological make up. As if these are some blunt forces, only vaguely determining the future for us. But look to your past, these same made your parent go through all kinds of weather to drop you off to your class. Your mother to hold all her other expenses at bay and direct them to your needs. And as a child, you perhaps communicated silently with them, when the lights went out in your small house and you saw your father push out the water pouring in from the cracks. And when he saw you looking at him, too young to help, he may have smiled at you. What did you read in his eyes and actions, but your future? What did he communicate but something more real than hours and hours of college work will do in determining the future for you?

Because we act as though all this is real! To me, that seems like the answer to this question of why we favor positivism over intuition and inductive reasoning. I've only read your first para; i'll read the rest to see if that is what you think, too...

Yes, I would disagree with you if it weren't for the impermanence of things. The fact that things apear and disappear is why I agree with you. The consistency of material reality is not so consistent, because everything is already fading away.


Many people would make fun of this essay for this very reason; they would say that tangible and measurable things are on a higher level of credibility than any concepts, and that mythological concepts are silly to believe. However, our lore and mythology reflect what we collectively envision... and what we collectively envision may be what drives reality as we know it! (i.e. that is what Deepak Chopra says, he is my hero).

This part seemed messed up:
But look to your past, these same made your parent go through all kinds of ...---seems unclear.

I like the ending, had to read it twice. Yes, if we let go of all that seems rational we can be at a deeper level. It is practical to swim up to the rational level, though!

I am saying .. it is only possible to think of another line of thought as being real, if we will first allow that we ourself put our sense of truth in mathematics. In that sense it is not objective and independent of us. I do not imply that it is wrong to believe in the power of math, but that, had we another system of explaining natural phenomenon which revealed more of nature, then why would we not want to learn more about that.

This ' more powerful than math' science can solve the problem of determining the past and future, only if in the first place we even allow for any such mechanism as 'existing' in our lives. In the manner that we accept potential or kinetic energies in mechanical systems.

To that end I am pointing to the kind of experience we all have, but due lack of a sufficiently complex and articulated science are unable to comprehend as a whole. We say we only 'feel' these things - as in the example between a child and its parents.

This reality also exists as the self-talk we constantly have with ourselves. How meaningful that is, and how necessary to a sense of our feeling centered and whole!

.. Are we then not only being led by that voice ?

As though we have a contract with our care givers that they read in our minds, of what we are asking of them. Often, whoever is caring for us is surprised that he or she even had it in them to do what we as thoughhad asked for. Most people only discover this innate ability, and at times as a consummate skill even, doing what is appropriate. The child's mind connects with the adult's, and without anything spoken aloud, they share in the experience. This isn't a learned skill but instinct.. and its basis is the connection between them..

When you write, "I do not imply that it is wrong to believe in the power of math, but that, had we another system of explaining natural phenomenon which revealed more of nature, then why would we not want to learn more about that," it helped me to overcome a misconception about your essay. I think you are talking about something that is like the sudden enlightenment that can come from overcoming rational thought.

The enlightenment traditions are based on this. Zen practitioners meditate on a nonsense riddle (koan) in order to get beyond rational thought.

Eco-feminism is also related to this. Some feminists point out that rationality is part of what leads to aggression, destruction, the depletion of resources, and so forth. Men have been rational in their ambition -- because ambition is rational -- but as you implied there is more to life than rationality. There is something to be said for sensitivity in a world being destroyed by ambitious, rational people.

So rather than being trapped in that enclosure you write about, we consider the idea that there is more to life than what is within the scope of mathematics (what is rational).

You write about profound subject matter. I think the way to improve your writing might be to lower your standards for the reader. Use the first sentence of each paragraph to express an idea very simply, and use the whole paragraph for that single idea. This is how you can get the reader to actually receive the meaning you intend when you write about complex subject matter.

Yu start a paragraph talking about memories:
We have memories of places...
And it ends with:
This was the greater force for our lives turning out as they did and where we found ourselves, and also what we took up in our minds to accomplish.

I can understand it now after spending some time and seeing this whole thread, but this material is still difficult reading material to understand.

There is nothing wrong with that, unless you want to really persuade people of something. In order to persuade people, you have to make things easy to follow. It helps if you write each paragraph with the same method used in advertising: say it, explain it, say it again.

.. how important a capable critic is to help one grow!. For me, this is so specially true.

No, I am not attempting to persuade anyone, rather I want to make use of my correspondent's own sensibilities to help me reach greater depths. The matter you see written is like a snapshot, of momentary lucidity, sometimes, of creativity.. it's not the way I find myself thinking most of the other times..

Thank you, you understood what I wished to communicate, besides providing so much supporting thoughts of your own.

In this essay, I was expanding on the discussion in the thread -
https://essayforum.com/research-papers-11/research-paper-reincarnat ion-10475/#msg56425

and working on the following:

.. our consciousness is a stream. Like white light combines other colors, and as ever shortening wave-lengths in light are the different colors we see - our conciousness can be thought of as similarly constituted. In it, past the band of rational thoughts are intuitions. Here, we apprehend directly and do not need facts linked to be sure that something is correct, or follow from other things we were looking at.

On the coarser side are our emotional thoughts, and at the far end, this stream of consciousness activates our senses. This light falling upon objects, or events in this case, picks up all of their colors. That is, we apprehend with our senses, but the accompanying emotions, rational thoughts and intuitions, also all happen - these intuitions, rational thoughts, emotions and sense inputs, create a sense as though we exist independently. Actually, its all happening on its own out there, and you, as you think yourself, are not there at all !

The ultimate sense of identity, a sense of uniqueness which we all yet have, is the imperishble light within - the same in all of us.

There are objects of emotions, of rational thoughts and of intuition, just as there are physical objects. Objects are characterized not by an independent existence, but because they are experienced similarly by different observers. In the classroom, the same concept is the 'object' of rational thought, and we may be tested on our complete 'perception' of that. A writer of a novel, a show producer, or a director and his cast, all expect to evoke similar emotions, to make us feel in a particular way watching the events they conjure for us...these are objects in our emotional space.

Now consider the containing space of objects. We think of space as a sort of complement to objects, and as tangible... that it is as much there as material things. We experience objects with our complete consciousness, yet consider their existence validated only by our sense perceptions. Looked closely, space is as much an idea of an 'absence of matter'. And ignorance is the space of rational objects, and is infinite in a manner similar to physical space.

What we intuitively grasp, we take as 'existing', its containing space is therefore non-existence. When we say an object exists, it is by this intuitive grasp, or if you will, by our intuitive sense.

Merge the idea of physical and rational space and consider looking upon a landscape, such as the surface of the earth from high above, and moving down closer. The space we are coming in from is both physical and a rational space. Neither are there objects, nor do we have any knowledge. The landscape on earth though, has physical as well as objects of knowledge. Depending on which peak or area we alight upon, our view is of a particular kind. The terrain is laid out which we will discover as we move along. Add now, the idea of intuitive space, of 'non-existence' -- of where we are coming from; and our visiting earth, is our birth here.

Your comments will be very helpful, ..thank you EF_Susan.

When kids are first taught calculus they're usually introduced to something called the 'limiting process'. Say, when we graph x-squared, we notice it's steepness too increases as we travel towards increasing x values. The idea in calculus is to capture exactly this increase in the steepness. The limiting process has an intuitive appeal, and though on the face of it, says to divide zero by zero -- a nonsense calculation, but appeals to our intuition saying, that there "has" to exist a number in this seeming vacous calculation we just made. Examine the process closely, and what we've done is, used subtraction and division to bring out the increment that still exists past the algebraic relation the variables have with each other.

Subtraction and division in mathematics is a very faithful copy of the process we employ in the real world all of the time.

You wake up in the morning -- do the morning stuff then bring yourself to your main activity. If it's the same old stuff you're dealing with, you have little enthusiasm for it. But notice, it's really what you bring to the activity that makes the difference. Are you only going to measure the predicted change, the one you projected about it the day before, or are you going to look for something which 'yet' happened, which 'exists' nevertheless, beyond the expected. If you are looking for this latter, then you have a spark in you as well, because this unpredictable is the calculus growth in your activity, the better part of it. It is also the part that livens your own mind.

When you say -- given the conditions, is when you divide by the scope; what you expect to find, the projected changes -- is what needs to be subtracted out.