What did they make of it, the mourners, the dignitaries, and the
merely curious at the funeral of Charles Darwin? Is the Wisdom of sci-
ence the Wisdom of Proverbs? Proverbs also describes a single-minded
human struggle which ends in the gift of ‘the knowledge of God’.7 A cen-
tury after Darwin’s death, another great English scientist, Stephen Hawk-
ing, wrote that the ultimate triumph of human reason would be to know
the Mind of God. He said science could get us almost there, but not the
whole way. Is the Knowledge of God in Proverbs the Mind of God in A
Brief History of Time? Or is Hawking’s a metaphor for our becoming
God-like in our complete knowledge? Is there a Person waiting for us at
the end of the quest, or is that Person us, reasoning humanity tri-
umphant, evolution’s masterpiece?
Ultimate reality, whatever that turns out to be, is the end of the quest.
Paradoxically, it must also be the beginning. We must ask whether there
is anything about our universe, about ourselves, that we can take for
granted—any fundamental we can use as a starting place for the explo-
ration of everything else. If it is difficult to find such a ‘still point’—and
we shall find that it is indeed difficult—then the quest for ultimate truth
must begin with a leap of faith. Not faith that we are capable of complete
understanding. Faith that we can know anything at all.
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An Eskimo showed me a movie he'd recently taken of you The poor man could hardly stop shivering, his lips and his fingers were blue I suppose that he froze when the wind tore off your clothes And I guess he just never got warm, but you stand there so nice in your blizzard of ice Oh please let me come into the storm!
"...awakening...the process of dialogue itself as a free flow of meaning among all the participants. In the beginning, people were expressing fixed positions, which they were tending to defend, but later it became clear that to maintain the feeling of friendship in the group was much more important than to hold any position. Such friendship has an impersonal quality in the sense that its establishment does not depend on a close personal relationship between participants. A new kind of mind thus beings to come into being which is based on the development of a common meaning that is constantly transforming in the process of the dialogue. People are no longer primarily in opposition, nor can they be said to be interacting, rather they are participating in this pool of common meaning which is capable of constant development and change. In this development the group has no pre-established purpose, though at each moment a purpose that is free to change may reveal itself. The group thus begins to engage in a new dynamic relationship in which no speaker is excluded, and in which no particular content is excluded. Thus far we have only begun to explore the possibilities of dialogue in the sense indicated here, but going further along these lines would open up the possibility of transforming not only the relationship between people, but even more, the very nature of consciousness in which these relationships arise." |