Human Knowing - Passion of the Scientist, Precision of the Poet

      “When we honor the hidden aquifer that feeds human knowing, we are more likely to develop a capacity for awe, wonder, & humility that deepens rather than diminishes knowledge. And we are less likely to develop the kind of hubris about our knowledge that haunts the world today. So much of the violence our culture practices at home and exports abroad is rooted in an arrogance that says, ‘We know best, and we are ready to enforce what we know politically, culturally, economically, militarily.’ In contrast, a mode of knowing steeped in awe, wonder, & humility is a mode of knowing that can serve the human cause, which is the whole point of integrative education.
     Human knowing, rightly understood, has paradoxical roots – mind & heart, hard data and soft intuition, individual insight and communal sifting and winnowing – the roots novelist Vladimir Nabokov pointed to when he told his Cornell University students that they must do their work ‘with the passion of the scientist and precision of the poet.’ Integrative education aims to ‘think the world together’ rather than ‘think it apart,’ to know the world in a way that empowers educated people to act on behalf of wholeness rather than fragmentation.”

       Palmer PJ, Zajonc A. The heart of higher education: A call to renewal. Transforming the academy through collegial conversation. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010.

Koen De Houwer   www.dpreview.com

Mentoring: Nurturing the Maturity to Embrace Life - both Suffering & Wonder!

      "The paradox is that as integral to life as suffering is, it is matched by wonder. By wonder I mean the awe and gratitude invoked in those moments when we come alive to the intricate luminosity, beauty, power, and vast grandeur of the universe (or some tiny part of it) and the amazement we feel that we are in any measure privileged to behold it. By wonder I mean also the sense of Mystery that cannot be exhausted even by our most magnificent forms of knowing, including the awe-ful ambiguity that arises from any reasonable assessment of the complex, dynamic, and confounding character of life. (By the time we reach young adulthood, we) have a readiness for soaking up such wonder, especially if it is distinguished from the various forms of artificial high that exploit this readiness. This dimension of wonder, too, is a fact that any worthy faith must be able to enfold.
     Ironically, contemporary life also offers a good many ways to be insulated from truth – both the scope of suffering and the opportunities for wonder. A good mentoring environment, however, provides an initiation into both. When ... invited into both suffering and wonder, then contradiction and dissonance proliferate, raising big questions and activating the imagination in its search for meaning and faith**. I recall how Joan Baez once said, ‘I do not know whether it is worse to bring a child into this world and submit him or her to the disease we call society, or to refuse to bring a child into this world and thus rob him or her of one glorious red sunset.’ If young adults are steeped in images that grasp both the suffering and wonder of their time, they may gain faith that can be sustained because it cannot be in a certain sense surprised. A great mentoring environment skirts neither suffering nor wonder; rather, it holds them in a dynamic paradox.”
       ** Multiculturalism and “… religious pluralism … is a fact of our common life. It has become all the more essential to honor these realities by understanding faith in its broadest, most inclusive form as the activity of making meaning that all human beings share.”

       Parks SD. “Big questions, worthy dreams. Mentoring young adults in their search for meaning, purpose, and faith.” John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, 2000.

     See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2012/11/cracks-in-armour-great-gift.html

Udayan Sankar Pal   www.facebook.com/UdayanSankarPal