Historic confusion
It's Tew's day . . . Northerlies are bringing increasing storm chances tonight to Okieland . . .
Today in 1865 General Robert E. Lee , commander of the Army of Northern Virginia of the Confederate States of America, signed a treaty of surrender at Appomattox Court House, effectively ending the American Civil War.
And, in 2003, Baghdad fell to U.S.-led forces on this day, several weeks after the start of the Iraq War, a conflict begun to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein because of his supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction.
“You have a right to be confused. . . Do not take anything on trust merely because it has passed down through tradition, or because your teachers say it, or because your elders have taught you, or because it’s written in some famous scripture. When you have seen it and experienced it for yourself to be right and true, then you can accept it.” – Bhudda 2500 years ago. True then. True today.
The philosophy of Science holds that every claim contains the possibility of error. I would claim that such claims are rooted in the symbol systems used in their utterance – written or spoken – whether derived from mathematical / statistical proofs or logical reasoning. Repeated proofs decrease but do not eliminate the possibility of error. Of course, I could be wrong.
The belief that the world is brute matter us relatively recent, dating back to the rise of the concept of sola ratio – reason alone. The 16th Century saw science dividing from an association with faith and in the process dividing humans from an animate world. Now, five centuries later, we are slowing coming to grips with a new reality.
Turns out, the world isn't dead matter after all. Under the sloppy paint job of materialism and rationalism the animate world was just asleep. What does it mean to wake up to the animacy of the world outside your front door?
We have been living in the nightmare of reason long enough. Fortunately there are better dreams to be had. Outside our own heads. Reason, it turns out, to be complete must embrace that which it is not, in the same way that probability embraces error. There is reason in what appears to be chaos. Which clearly has a mind of its own.
– after Sophie Strand in “Sleeping Beauty, Sleeping World,” The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2022.