2. Turtles

I wish to praise a certain type of knowledge without using the same tired and sagging architectural metaphors for describing where our minds live. Let me describe a heaven for ideas. Here knowledge is crafted responsibly. Rather than praising it for it's height, we always praise it for it's weight. We are searching in the ground for something worthwhile. We are always playing in the sand. Cities consist of short structures with low ceilings and wide doors. It is here that philosophy lives. It resemble a city built by turtles.
With this ideal in mind, I find it responsible to first praise the sand in which I currently find myself playing. Here I make the following assumptions:

a. I assume the existence of a process within my being which seeks to defend and often conceal things from me. This we can call ego.

b. A being is able to conceptualize it's self. It can have a self-image, a representation of it's self, a sense of identity.

c. A being has no inherent purpose.

d. Meaninglessness is scary. The purposelessness of a being is also scary.

e. Finding oneself stripped of a self-concept can lead one to being anxious, to feel meaningless.

The incorrectness of any of these assumptions shatters the rest of the perspective.

We may now begin observing the two states of being. In the first, the being's self-concept is rigid. In this state he learns nothing, but acts and bends the world to his will. We will call this state 'imposing'. In the second state, his self-concept is vulnerable to change. Here he can learn and absorb from whatever is at hand. We will call this a state of 'exposure'.

Glass Man

and when you pass it, it looks at your back with ferocious lust, and wants you only to look again upon it. and like all art, pottery, glass, it would shatter before you rather than be ignored.
Oh driven man, why do you want to be made of glass?

1. Granted

So obvious are the things I will be talking about, that we may call the subject matter 'commonness' or even 'the readily visible'. It is therefore something accessible, and perceivable through everything we do. And this kind of observation of what is seen and already visible we may call perspective.

Perhaps you've recently experienced a moment of significant growth, where you saw something you didn't before, or in blissful perfection, grasped a thing so well that it altered you. The altering realization was one of attention, of noticing something. In that noticing, the previously unknown is realized, it is moved into something no longer taken for granted. This is un-granted, it is wisdom.
By this definition, wisdom finds itself already mired. Aphorisms are king of grantedness, providing the one considering it with near immediate 'understanding' of the topic 'in question'. This form of understanding is often shallow. As it is understood, it is now moved back from consideration into grantedness. Our challenge is to prolong the state of 'in question' regarding our topic before resigning ourselves to understanding it.

The topic in question is teaching. The teaching done before obvious constructs of academics. One often chooses to be taught when pursuing academic goals or careers, but we certainly are not always choosing to be taught about death, loneliness, and general incorrectness. Perhaps one has a choice whether or not to learn from these experiences, but we cannot say we always have a choice about the teacher in question. Furthermore, it is absurd to think that one always has the ability to teach willfully or accurately. Certainly one reason for living is not teaching the ones we love about our death, and certainly we will be forced to teach our loved ones of this in time.
Verily the things we teach to others and will be taught are partly out of our control. This influencing of each other is largely an invisible thing.  But we see new things with new perspectives. As we see the invisible, such things are moved out of being taken for granted. This is an essay on my perspective of the disposition of teaching and that of learning. Something I call 'to be imposing' and 'to be exposed'. I'll begin with the assumptions of such a perspective and follow with the dispositions themselves.

Influentials

I'll place a thingy I wrote up here in a little while. </vague>
It's got five parts and it's on it's third of infinite drafts. I doubt it's a thing I'll ever be able to 'finish'. 'll put the first three parts up sometime soon.

Here are the people that have influenced me greatly over this last year while I was writing the thing.

Abraham Maslow - Motivation and Personality

Devin Townsend - and the song 'Heaven Send' in particular.

Martin Heidegger - 'To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.'

Friedrich Nietzsche - On Reading and Writing.

(Self Overcoming) Overcoming

I've created this blog to record things of wonder that I've found useful, and things that I've found useless and beautiful. Ideally, I'll post things that I've found useful and beautiful, such as the act of wondering.

Shamelessness is what I'm going for. First, because shame is a stifling emotion. Second, because I've no reason to be thus far. Given that shaming will come from carelessness which invites criticism, I should either avoid criticism, or be stiflingly careful.
If I have no readers, then I have no criticism (other than my own).
If I have no criticism, then I have no reason to be careful.
If I have no reason to be careful, then I can say what I want freely.
I have no readers.
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: )