Adversaria (42)
‘…the contemporary academy is the scene of an epistemological battle, albeit a battle of snails (one has to look very closely and patiently in order to see it)’ —Donald A. Schön (‘The Theory of Inquiry: Dewey’s Legacy to Education’, p. 120)
‘History since the French Revolution has changed its role. Once it was the guardian of the past: now it has become the midwife of the future’ —John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 21%)
‘The higher consciousness advances in the process of evolution, the more it moves out of succession. To be fully conscious is to escape from time, from expansion, from separateness, from contradictories. Growth, movement, and change dissolve in permanence, stillness, and completeness’ —F.C. Happold (Mysticism, p. 120)
‘Machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings are with human beings. This situation is ironical. More and more concern about communication, less and less to communicate’ —R.D. Laing (The Politics of Experience, p. 34)
‘Contemporary events are not what we fear—it’s the unending reverberations we’ll have to endure that scare us. We dread any incident that confirms our worst fears about ourselves’ —Richard C. Schwartz (Introduction to Internal Family Systems, 26%)
‘…in practice, the reservation was a place of crisis, not civilization, education, or improvement. […] Indian culture was to an extent preserved, but it was placed in a museum, where it could no longer meet the problems of the moment or evolve to meet those of the future’ —Mahmood Mamdani (Neither Settler nor Native, p. 65)
‘Clothe thyself with the garment of nothingness and drink the cup of annihilation. Cover thy breast with a nothingness, and draw over thy head the robe of non-existence. Set they foot in the stirrup of complete renunciation and, looking straight before thee, ride the steed of non-being to the place where nothing is’ —Farid al-din ‘Attar (Conference of the Birds, trans. Margaret Smith, quoted in F.C. Happold (Mysticism, p. 258)
‘To the underprivileged, home is represented, not by a house, but by a practice or set of practices. Everyone has his own. These practices, chosen and not imposed, offer in their repetition, transient as they may be in themselves, more permanence, more shelter than any lodging. Home is no longer a dwelling but the untold story of a life being lived. At its most brutal, home is no more than one’s name—whilst to most people one is nameless’ —John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 65%)
‘Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline: and through discipline, only too often, to the betrayal of self’ —R.D. Laing (The Politics of Experience, p. 60)
‘Autocracy is a delicate balancing act, requiring the support of other power centers, which themselves seek power and may have incommensurable agendas’ —Mahmood Mamdani (Neither Settler nor Native, p. 221f.)
‘…for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls ona. ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as to the body to be always in one placed and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows around the mind, the pores are choked, little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk’ —Richard Jeffries (The Story of My Heart, quoted in F.C. Happold (Mysticism, p. 385)
‘It was there too that I discovered that I wanted as little as possible to do in this world with those who wield power. This has turned out to be a lifelong aversion’ —John Berger (And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, 79%)