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Aug. 11, 2006 Dear Useless Knowledge Magazine reader: I had the intention of just writing a factual report about the late Buckminster Fuller, but I got distracted by reading about Reverend Moon and Paulo Freire and about what has come to be called "critical pedagogy." Then just a short while ago I had this intense dream about a very long teacher's meeting during which I heard a fantastic tale told by an articulate gorilla that became an object of worship in Rome. I awakened with yet another idea and decided I'd better write about that instead. The idea got me to thinking about Fourier Transforms, sums of vibrations and the sense of unity itself, and I was hit by the thought that emotional life is sometimes a roller coaster ride full of ups and downs and oooooops! as I was composing that sentence I bit into a fat juicy tomato and two whole teaspoonfulls of tomato pulp and seeds squirted out and fell onto the carpet. Excuse me. I need to fetch a napkin and clean up the mess! Time out for a quick carpet cleanup! Anyhow, now, not to change the subject, but imagine that YOU are Reverend Sun Myung Moon and you've got a hundred thousand people or more believing YOU are THE MESSIAH. Your followers look at you and adore you as if you are the RETURN of Jesus Christ in the flesh and they dote on what you say the way naive kindergarteners dote on what The Teacher says. And so when in a speech Reverend Moon says the following about unity, well, the man's English usage makes one pause: "In realizing heaven, what is the one important standard? What is the one element that can realize heaven? That is unity. If unity does not go through a principled course, heaven will not appear. Only in a unified position will heaven come. All conditions of peace and happiness that mankind desires today are fulfilled from a unified position. As we all know, in a situation where the mind and body are not united, no matter how much one tries to be happy, he cannot be. No matter how hard one tries to keep the standard of peace, he will not be able to. Hence, you have to know that unifying yourself is more important than anything else." (http://www.tparents.org/Moon-Books/SM-Peace/SMM-PhilosophyOfPeace-2b.htm) Huhhhhh? How's that again? I imagine that I might compose a letter. It would go something like this: "Dear Reverend Messiah and very successful business promoter: Financially wealthy as you are, your writing on unity isn't clear. Why not pay a professional editor to help you clarify the wording of your speeches before you present them to discriminating people? This additional effort on your part might help you win more followers. This result would help you bring the unity and world peace that you keep dreaming of and working for." I might continue: "In imagination I see you as The Messiah spending a sizeable fraction of your well-earned billions in starting new experimental communities for disadvantaged persons in which a study of Buckminster Fuller and other inspired persons plus a study of the unity of nature is part of every young person's education. This unification of creative talent and study of nature's unity gets humanity beyond the ancient Chinese idea that the unity of nature, that is to say the whole totality of everything, is based on yin-yan sex. Your own idea of unity also seems to be based on male-female unity, not the totality of everything. (All in all there isn't a lot of love and marriage going on in the universe as a whole.) One can argue that unity is best understood mathematically since unity is the first counting number and math is the language of numbers whole, rational, irrational, and otherwise. Math is also the universal language of all people, not just English or Korean. And math is the language of all the sciences." And so on. How did the young Moon ever become so fixated? Well, in a dream or a vision he saw the ghost of Jesus and heard the ghost say something like "You shall devote your life to the eradication of sin." More precisely, and I quote, "At Easter time in 1935, Jesus appeared to the young Sun Myung Moon as he was praying in the Korean mountains. In that vision, Jesus asked him to continue the work which he had begun on earth nearly 2,000 years before. Jesus asked him to complete the task of establishing God's kingdom on earth and bringing His peace to humankind." (http://www.unification.org/rev_mrs_moon.html) How many other young men have seen a similar inner ghost and heard a similar inner ghost voice? A similar call to salvation, service, and peace is felt by many persons, but on the world scene alienation is still such a devisive destructive negative force. Humanity keeps on starting wars of annihilation. Neither the individual dreaming mind nor the collective dreaming mind is strong enough to bring the new messianic consciousness that will make your dream of peace come true. Nor are trillions of dollars strong enough to bring this consciousness, even though billions of strong able-bodied humans slave each day for money. In fact most any wage slave will admit that there is as yet so very little freedom in his or her life. Straightaway this chain of sentences brings us to a brief study of critical pedagogy, Buckminster Fuller and Paulo Freire. These two men were firebrands. Reverend Sun Myung Moon is yet another firebrand. Today we witness the world burning up in popular fires ignited by human firebrands. Humanity needs more coolness to rain down and dampen the raging humanity and enable people to strike a safe and sane balance. So many different enthusiasts have so many different ideas! On the other hand, many schools remain tradition-bound but not everyone agrees that this is best. For example, critical pedagogy makes a student and a teacher confront one another in respect and question the ideas and the ideals of each. The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire introduced his critique of traditional education as in his well-known book "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" he wrote on page 58: "Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of the action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits." In a spirit of questioning and attacking traditional education, the famous American inventor Buckminster Fuller said or wrote: "Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines." (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/r_buckminster_fuller.html) hmmmmm. But I thought a solid was what water becomes when you put a capped coke bottle filled with warm coke into the freezer and the bottle cracks. Fluid water freezing and expanding makes the bottle break. Anyway. On this small issue I'll let the physical chemists debate Fuller. Here's yet another quote from Bucky Fuller: "I find the audiences very excited. But then they come and say to me, "Your optimism has brushed off on me. I didn’t know we had an option. I feel so much better." They say, "Your optimism." And I am not optimistic or pessimistic. I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don’t tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I’m talking about." (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller) and "I have to say, I think that we are in some kind of final examination as to whether human beings now, with this capability to acquire information and to communicate, whether we’re really qualified to take on the responsibility we’re designed to be entrusted with. And this is not a matter of an examination of the types of governments, nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?" (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller) Ah yes. The truth. But wasn't it engineers that said the Titanic was unsinkable? The preceding two quotes make Fuller sound pret-ty cocky. Fuller had many good ideas, though. He was a practical prophet. ------------ About the author: sixty-six years young, and vigorous in mind, body, emotions, and spirit, John L. Waters is an independent researcher on self-healing, integration, creativity, and unity. To help demonstrate the effectiveness of his research, John has created thousands of drawings, paintings, instrumental music pieces, songs, prose pieces, poems, and other inventions. John has used his research to help persons remove a mental block and solve a problem. John also gives personal presentations which illustrate his research results. Each one of these works demonstrates the effectiveness of John's research. For more information, read John's letters of recommendation: about John's self-healing and integration: about the mystical energy or yogic force and related topics: about John's independent research: about John's seeking an agent or a publisher: Email: blueguntwo@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com. Please link to this article rather than copying and pasting it onto your site (which would be unauthorized and illegal). |
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