Monthly Archives: September 2009

My Journey

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My life is a journey of discovery, ever learning more; about myself, about my spirituality, about my very being. Throughout my life I have and will continue to experience situations that confront me and opportunities that lie before me.

I give blessing for my life’s experiences. For these experiences are a proving field that strengthens my spirituality. I am learning more and more of what I am capable of. With Him, I am capable of achieving life, love and wisdom.

  I treasure my life. Each day offers delightful surprises. I feel rebirthed and anew.

Love

Bill Martuge

A Better Place To Be

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“There has never been a time on Earth like we see today. What we need are more ways to experience our interconnectedness – it is a precursor to deep love. So in this quickening light, with the dawn of each new day, let us look for love. Let us no longer struggle. Let us ever become who we most want to be. As we begin to be who we truly are, the world will be a better place.”

 –John Denver

 It seems so simple that love could be the answer to so much. Most of us have spent our entire lives believing that without pain there is no gain and so even when we’re told that love is the way, we brush it aside and continue on with the fight, never realizing that it is our own persistence that struggle is the only way that keeps the world in a state of turmoil and woe. Love really is the answer. And when we finally surrender to it, on that sweet day, then love with gently and effortlessly take us to that better place we long to be.

Love

Bill Martuge

We learn to do something by doing it. — John Holt

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 “We learn to do something by doing it.  There is no other way.”
 –John Holt

While this seems to be true for most of us in that we learn by doing and do have to experience our own reality, my father also has a saying which goes like this:

“The stupid man doesn’t learn from his own experience.

The smart man learns from his experience. 

The geniuses learns from the experience of others.”

Yet what of the times when we see someone poor gasoline on themselves and set themselves on fire? 

Is the person who emulates this act of immolation a genius who has learned from another? 

Alternatively, those of us who avoid bathing in gasoline while playing with pyrotechnical devices,  are we geniuses simply because we have learned without experiencing directly?

And, what about when someone does something, and we see them get burned.  Or we do something and get burned.  And, we simply give up.  We do not try another way. 

Was Thomas Edison just stupid not to learn from his failures that it was impossible to make an electric light bulb?

Then again there is the body of research telling us that thinking is like doing.  That the mind cannot distinguish between having a thought about doing a thing and doing the thing itself.  Both are equally real.

Also, while book learning may or may not be as effective as doing, isn’t book learning worth something?  Book learning is merely mental exercise were we experience in our minds, things we learn from others who have written.  Even though we haven’t done it directly, it’s effective for something, isn’t it?

So, can we by thinking about a thing, experience the thing by proxy and thereby learn its lessons indirectly? 

Must we experience it directly?

Is Holt’s assertion a tautology?

Maybe all of these modalities are true, at least some of the time to some extent. 

I can and have sited several examples where each have been true and powerful. 

Maybe we need to take a broader view of what is the truth of how we learn through direct, mental and indirect experience.

Or, maybe one of these is more true than others?

What do you feel is true, truer, truest?

Something else perhaps?

Yours in truth,

Yucel