Dear Prufrock @dearprufrock-blog - Tumblr Blog

Sara is referring to the fact that extreme postmodernism has now slipped into a rather sad essentialism: you have to be a woman to know anything about women; you have to be an Indian to say anything about Indians; you have to be gay before you can explain anything about homosexuality. In other words, there is a regression from worldcentric to ethnocentric—identity politics alone rule, and extreme pluralism means none of us have anything in common anymore. It’s not that such action is bad. It’s just that, taken in and by itself, it is alienating and fragmenting, a type of pathological pluralism that astonishingly believes that acceptance of my group can be accomplished by aggressively blaming and condemning exactly the group from which I seek the acceptance. White males are no longer a single group that can be blamed for oppression, because most of them now claim to belong to an oppressed or marginalized group themselves: they are drug addicts, physically handicapped, alcoholics, were sexually abused as a child, victims of an absent father, abducted by aliens, or turned into “success objects” by women. They can’t oppress anybody because they are too busy being oppressed themselves.

One Taste, Ken Wilbur

#postmodernism

We have a huge war now raging between the first-person or introspective accounts (which emphasize the immediate introspection of the mind’s contents as they display themselves to your own awareness) and the third-person or objective/scientific accounts (which seek to translate all of consciousness into objective entities or “its” disclosed by. Both of them overlook the importance of second-person accounts—the intersubjective domain of linguistic structures, moral contexts, shared semantics, and cultural backgrounds,

One Taste, Ken Wilbur

#point of view

A good rule of thumb is that people are not going to expand their present views or outlooks by much more than 5% at any given time

One Taste, Ken Wilbur

#development

The problem with much of postmodernism is that it has initially been so taken with diversity, it has forgotten the unity, and so it simply falls into fragmented pieces, jerking and choking in their own isolated little worlds.

One Taste, Ken Wilbur

#postmoderism

Especially for the last five or six years, I have become fascinated with aesthetics, with beauty in any domain, which I attribute directly to meditative awareness. The great contemplative traditions did not hate this world, they strove mightily to bring beauty into it (along with compassion, clarity, and care). Think of the great Zen gardens, the exquisite illumined manuscripts of medieval mysticism, the stunning architectural beauty of everything from the Taj Mahal to Angkor Wat. Grace, said St. Thomas, perfects nature, it does not obliterate it. Physical aesthetic beauty is simply one of the ways that Spirit shines in and through the sensorimotor world. And for many people—this was Thomas Mann’s point—for many people, seeing something physically beautiful is the closest they will ever get to the Beauty of the Divine.

One Taste, Ken Wilbur

#aesthetic

And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout from the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity. Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: Those who are allowed see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must. And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaardso rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery—either way—and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.

One Taste, Ken Wilbur

#spritualism

And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all. In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood. heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.