Replying to LO23749 --
Dear Orgalearners,
Aleksandar Raich <araic@EUnet.yu> writes:
>Last days here circulates a joke.
(Snip joke.)
Greetings Alexander,
Here in Africa at every boder post you need not even carry a big suitcase
with a picture of the president. It is part of the office's decoration.
But it works like medicine too.
>My newest personal experience indicates that the most fatal
>effect of continuous come-down during long period of sanctions
>(endless seven years), especially after bombing, is leaving
>interest for learning.
It is the same here in South Africa. But here they now use apartheid
rather than sanctions against apartheid as the reason for it. But what is
sanctions other than the internationalised form of apartheid? Apartheid is
now called a "sin against humankind". Is sanctions not also the same?
Alexander, what you now observe, is what I call "too little
free energy available for learning". It is like a car -- mechanically
in working order, yet dynamically without any fuel. What you
have to try and do, is to understand
(1) what else consumed this "free energy" so that not enough
remains for learning.
(2) how can the human spirit be refueled with "free energy"
so that more than enough is availble for learning.
>This is background of my personal problem. Against depressive
>trends around me, during last year (especially during long days
>and nights of bombing), I was learning believing that this is only
>way for preserving mental health.
Alexander, think for one moment where the fuel for cars comes from. It was
refined from fossil fuel (crude oil or coal as in South Africa). This
fossil fuel emerged as a result from geological processes acting on once
living organic material. Life itself is a profound emergence. We now
capitalise in a few years the "free energy" which living nature had
provided through hundreds of thousands of years.
Is wonderland not the land of excessive bifurcations? Too much
constructive emergences or too much destructive immergences require too
much entropy production.
Wonderland or horrorland? When does learning itself becomes a wonder or a
horror?
A swarm of locusts destroy in a few hours what took a desert many months
and even years to produce. Then they lay their eggs. These eggs wait
patiently in the sand for another exceptional high rainfall season --
often waiting decades for the right time.
South Africa had its golden era from 1960 to 1965. Then the locusts came
-- first the lighter coloured ones and now the their darker counterparts.
"Locusts have to act as locusts" one my friends of the desert says. This
gives them power, but also makes them vulnerable. You cannot prevent them
from breeding out, but you can prevent them from getting wings.
>In this endeavor my participation in the stream of ideas in
>LO-community helped me very much. Thanks to Internet,
>I understood that science, as common knowledge creation
>through permanent learning, becomes real community. But,
>how I can really participate in this community? How I can
>develop further and disseminate learning results in above
>described environment? Is it possible to participate collaboratively
>in some research or teaching project in real world (not
>wonderland)? Instead of prayer, I address my hope that
>somebody of you, dear LO-colleagues, perhaps will accept
>my offer for such a collaboration.
Among other things, please tell us how you experience YU and how you make
sense out of it.
The word science comes from the Latin "scio" which means "to know". A most
extraordinary word is concience. The "con" means together so that
conscience means eymologically "to know together".
How much are LOs necessary for a person's conscience to evolve? What can
we learn from the history of YU in this regard?
South Africans experience an intense wave of crime. Most notorious of
these criminals are their lack of "conscience". A few days ago a woman
was beaten into unconsciousness so as to rape her. When she prayed to God
to save her, the violent robber retorted with "I am the God".
After the dismantling of apartheid, we learnt through the TRC (Truth and
Reconcilliation Commission) hearings how many of those who did devious
things to serve their masters in the apartheid regime, had to quench their
own conscience with drugs or sex.
The story on business and conscience still needs to be told.
Conscience is to know, among other things, that neither I nor any of you
fellow learners should ever try to act as we perceive God. Our perceptions
are imperfect and often wrong. God, who told us that He is perfect, is
love. He also commands us to love Him, one another and the rest of His
Creation so that we can become friends of Him. To do so so, he gave us
godlike properties like our creativity. We should not misuse them, but
continiously reform them so that love can emerge.
With caring and best wishes!
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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