[MD] Intuitive Reasoning?

[Heather Perella]

gav,

     [gav]
how would i characterise the difference...probably
along the lines of.... sophiscation of language

      The chinese language has A, thus singular word
hence singular concept, for what American-English
translates as 'heart-mind'.  We have to add the
hyphen.  In the chinese language this is one word, but
in our language we have to combine two of our words
with this hyphen.  If our usual habitual thinking can
overcome these being two words, then we can move
closer to how the chinese view this specifically.

     [gav]
> i dunno ian: getting into pretty mystical territory
> when we start thinking about what its like to be a
> redwood. i suppose ayahuasca might help us get in
> touch with the spirit (=intelligence) of a tree. but
> then it would probably be very difficult to
> conceptualise the experience anyway.

     gav and Ian, have either one of you read, "The
Way of the Human Being", by Calvin Luther Martin.  
      Here's some quotes from the book as follows:
  
      "So begins the sociology of creation:  outward
forms blurred in the time of origin, where 'all
things... crouched in eagerness to become something
else' - a reality that Heckewelder, trained in the
Christian and classical Greek tradition, had
difficulty comprehending.  Boundaries between human
and animal quite simply did not exist."

     A quote from the book that includes a quote of N.
Scott Momaday as follows:  
     "Momaday writes that there was once a boy,

     who took up a terrapin in his hands and looked at
it 
     for a long time, as hard as he could look.  He
succeeded
     in memorizing the terrapin's face, but he failed
to see
     how it was that the terrapin knew anything at
all. 
                             (The Gourd Dancer)

     Compare this last quote with these quotes as
follows, where the boy in this last quote "failed to
see" and then you have another boy:

      "...the boy swims through 'the ocean with his
host, viewing human hunters from the seals'
perspective.'  The seals are deliberately giving
themselves to the hunters, but only to the 'good'
ones, who know to treat the seal people with respect."
 Similar to Dusenberry and others asking the
Amerindian about the dog that the Amerindian said, 'A
good dog.'

      Referring to the same boy that is a seal the
story went on until as follows:  "When hit by the
hunter's spear, the boy lost consciousness and was
taken back to his village..." and "...following the
end of the Bladder Festival, he becomes visible once
more in human form...  When he became a man, he was
indeed a great hunter.  From his accounts of his
experiences, people came to understand how the seals
saw humans and how humans must act to please them...
Frederick Turner suggests that they were, unknowingly,
'beyond geography'; they had reached the 'mythic
zones.'  I agree (says the author), though I think
that it goes even further than he suspected.  I think
they were at the furthest limit of their conception of
the real... (they) were fingering the 'skin of the
world."  

     Another quote as follows:
     "I am interested in the way that a man looks at a
given landscape and takes possession of it in his
blood and brain,' declares N. Scott Momaday.  'We
Americans need now more than ever before - and indeed
more than we know - to imagine who and what we are
with respect to the earth and sky.  I am talking about
an act of the imagination essentially, and the concept
of an American land ethic."

     
     It is not SOM.  I do notice MOQ fitting into this
mindset though.

SA

P.S.  Martin also has another book called, "In the
Spirit of the Earth:  Rethinking History and Time".  I
haven't read it, though, I'm waiting for the local
library to hopefully find it somewhere nationally,
since the local counties don't have it on their shelves.

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