Practice in At's Emergent Learning (1) LO17884

d.l.dwiggins@computer.org
Sun, 26 Apr 1998 09:35:05 -0700

Replying to LO17747 --

Ben Compton writes:
> Could you please elaborate on this. Precisely, what do you mean by
> "unconditional love," and why do you believe it is "essential for a
> successful emergence"?

>> Could unconditional love be another essentiality? Or is it in a different
>> dimension? It sounds as though it's important, if not essential, for a
>> successful emergence.

That was a reply to a message of At's, containing the paragraph
> The seven essentialities also make me very afraid. Knowledge of them
> also gives me the power to destroy on a scale as never has been known
> before. It is like the knowledge of nuclear power - we can use it to
> make a nuclear generator of electricty for constructive purposes, but
> we can also use it to make a nuclear bomb for destructive purposes.
> Were it not for the flame of uncondional love within me, I would
> certainly have misused my knowledge of them - I have certainly been
> tempted to do so.

What I was doing was probing what he said there. Check out his reply to
this in LO17734. I think it's a good statement of his idea of
unconditional love and the role it plays in emergences.

As for my knowledge of it, it's somewhat less grand. As a parent, for
example, I can with sureness state that I love my children
unconditionally, that is without conditions. This is true although I've
sometimes disagreed with them, been angry with them, failed them on
occasion, etc. I'm beginning to get a vague glimmer of the power of
unconditional love on a larger scale, though. It's one of the reason's
I'm studying At's ideas.

-- 

Don Dwiggins, Beta Version 0.8 (Version 1.0 due for release Real Soon Now) SEI Information Technology d.l.dwiggins@computer.org

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