Replying to LO25086 --
Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes:
>"See them, the last wrinkled Bushmen filing in from the
>wilderness - lured by the creaking farm windmill and its
>message of an easier life. ......
Greetings Andrew,
What a shocking sentence. Likewise too we are lured to an easier life by
our creaking technology. See my reply to Winfried on the same topic.
Perhaps you could also read Jeremiah chapter 10 in which he gave an
alarming message to the House of Israel during its very last days. He had
to tell them that the things which they relied upon for their existence
would bring an end to their existence. Why? Ordinate bifurcations have a
decisive outcome.
>"......The Bushman could have something important, to tell us."
> "....."The coming decade may well provide human biologists,
>social anthropologists, sociologists, demographers and
>nutritionists with their last opportunity on earth for studying the
>mechanics and dynamics that mark the transfiguration of a
>branch of the human species from hunter status to pastoralism
>and agriculture, from a food-gathering to a food-producing
>economy."
>
>Professor P. V.'Tobias
Please note his time restriction "the coming decade" and thus the extreme
urgency of it.
Our dearest professor Tobias is actually emminent for establishing the
craddle of Homo sapiens. It is the Sterkfontein region -- 60 km south-west
of Pretoria and 40km west-north-west of Johannesburg as the crow flies.
Yes, this is where humankind as we know it today began its life to spread
all all over the world and now finally is bringing the whole world into
turmoil.
Should you or any fellow learner come to visit Gauteng (the smallest
province in the New South Africa in which the cities Johannesburg and
Pretoria are situated -- the economic heartland of South Africa), feel
welcome to contact me. I would very much like to take you in the morning
before dawn on a high hill of the Witwatersrand ("white waters ridge")
overlooking the Sterkfontein ("strong fountain") region. We will pray
silently to our Creator to help us opening our souls so that we can shift
our paradigms. We will sit there in silent contemplation, waiting for dawn
and day break. We will use our mentalness to tune our genes to become
responsive to the ancient aurora of this region -- breathing it in with
our spirituality. We will ponder with the question of our becoming -- from
where did we come as a living species and where will our final destination
be?
>One of the groups of Bushmen that became isolated during
>the expansion of the Black people and the invasion of the
>Whites settled at Lake Chrissie in the Eastern Transvaal.
Lake Chrissie is on the Highveld region, some 150km south-east of Pretoria
as the crow flies.
Lake Chrissie became an enclave (pocket) for the San (Bushmen) on the
Highveld. It is a high rainfall region, temperate in summer and icy cold
in winter. A few thousand other San people manage to migrate to the
Bushmanland desert while some ten thousand managed to reach the Kalahari
desert.
>Through disease and inter- marriage the remnants of these
>South African Bushmen have steadily dwindled and today
>(1975) there are but two individuals left, Job (left) and Kwaaiman
>who both still speak Bushman but due to their lack of offspring
>are destined to be the last of their kind.
Obviously, the remnant on the Highveld. But they are also a good
indication of what will soon be happening to the other remnants of San
people in the deserts.
"Kwaaiman" means "kwaai"=bad-tempered, "man"=man. This is most unusual for
a San person. I think it is his fate that did this to him.
The biblical name Job is extraordinarily fitting to the majority of San
people. The rest of humankind are behaving very much like the three
friends of Job.
>Een van die groepe Boesmans wat met die ekspansie van die
>Swartes en die indringing van die Wittes geisoleer geraak het
>en hulle by Chrissiemeer in die Oos-Transvaal gevestig het....
Thank you Rick for allowing this piece in Afrikaans. I think fellow
learners who can understand Dutch, Flemish and perhaps even Low German
will be able to follow it. Afrikaans is my mothertongue. It, rather than
English, is also the lingua franca to many other peoples in South Africa.
It is the lingua franca of perhaps 99% of the remaining San people. So
when you visit South Africa and find a San person, do not try to
communicate in English -- it will merely frighten them.
>At, I have a dream;-) it goes like this; two brothers are in
>the landscape of the Bushman with an older man and we
>are playing an improvised lullaby on a seven-string harp
>made from sticks, a wooden resonator and strings of gut.
>Then a fourth man appears from the horizon beyond that
>which we can see, he is exactly five feet tall, his eyes are
>deep brown, a depth not seen in any other living thing save
>those of the antelope. They shone like the brown of day on
>a rare dewy African morning; his eyes are unbelievably
>penetrating and accurate. His hearing no less astonishing.
>Before he leaves us he gives us two things. An ***apron***
>and a ***cloak***. We are safe and he has gone. I wake up
>sweating.
Aha, were it not for that "seven-string harp" to explore octave beyond
octave in the music of creativity, what would life had been?
The apron ought to have been a tiny thing, barely covering
the necessary at the loins. Getting a thorn or a scorpion going
at the "family jewels" is not exactly fun. The cloak ought to be
just large enough to cover the whole body when squatting. It
protects the body against chilling winds. Both the apron and
the cloak ought to have been made from skin. The San people
had also four other artifacts --
shells of ostrich eggs serving as containers
sharpened bone as knife
bow and arrow as hunting weapon.
primitive percussion instruments for music
This constitued the whole of their technology with which they managed to
survive for dozens of millenia in a continent famous for its deadly
predators as well its bifurcating events. As for their spiritual
belongings, their main directive has been "one for all and all for one".
How could they ever imagine that their demise would come from those who
have dropped the "one for all" (the one-to-many-mapping), thus setting up
the "all for one" syndrome.
Andrew, I wonder why you were sweating? Was it because of the dream or the
high summer presently for you? If the dream, was it the message which you
recognised by your own tacit knowledge? Did you sweat because you knew it
had to remain tacit knowledge or because you knew it had to be
articulated? Let me be the ass once again in articulating what we all
ought to know tacitly. Once again I myself will sweat on what I should not
articulate.
My desert wanderings taught me that when exploring a vast pristine region,
the less my baggage is, the more I have to rely on my creativity and thus
the more enjoyable the exploration becomes.
Exploring the complexity of reality is and will forever be for every
learner much like exploring a pristine desert. It does not matter
how much the rest of humankind have learned and eventually
articulated complexity. We do not need a vast collection of things,
but should rather rely on our "deep creativity". With the guidance
of the Spirit of the Creator it is able to evolve to match any
complexity.
Furthermore we need a "spiritual apron" to protect the jewels of
our spirituality from pestilence which may torment us. We will also
need a "spiritual cloak" to protect the whole of our spirituality from
the chilly winds which may freeze our creativity into death.
What do you think will this "spiritual apron" and "spiritual cloak" be
for you? Do they have any bearing on Learning Organisations? Try to
combine the five disciplines of Peter Senge for a LO into two
"hyper-disciplines" -- perhaps this will help you to spot the "apron" and
"cloak" of a LO.
With care 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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