Tonight at any rate we’ve got to go through some theoretical material, so we’re on a head trip. I don’t know where the trip will end up, it depends on you! But in order to lay the foundation for this, we’ve got to examine ideas that are basics to our common sense.
We’ll begin with one very common idea, that’s built into our common sense, which is that the World, the physical World consists of two aspects, respectively form and matter. What are we made of?
Now look here, a carpenter makes a table out of wood, and a potter makes pots out of clay. But I ask you, is a tree made of wood? Obviously not, a tree is wood. It’s not made of it. Is a mountain made of rock?
Obviously not, it is rock. See our language contains innumerable ghosts. It is raining. What is this ‘it’ that is raining? The rain.
So we populate the World with ghosts, which arise out of the structure of our language, and thus therefore of the structure of our thinking because we think in language, or in figurine, and numbers.
So therefore we have a basic picture of the World in which everything is being pushed around, because our common sense doesn’t allow that things shape themselves. Very odd.
In Chinese, the word for nature is zìrán (自然), which is ‘that which is so of itself’ – the spontaneous. The Chinese have no difficulty in thinking about nature as self-shaping. A Chinese child would not ask its mother ‘How was I made?’ It would ask its mother ‘How did I grow?’
So, then, when our physicists started to find out what stuff was, they went into it, and into it, and examined it with ever more minute instruments.
They first started cutting up things with knives, and cutting them smaller and smaller and smaller until the particle they wanted to dissect was exactly the same width as the edge of the knife.
Well, they weren’t satisfied with that. And they saw that it was – [it] seemed to be composed of more, small particles. They thought they had come to certain ultimate wavicles, called electrons.
But then, unfortunately, everything fell apart and they found protons, mesons, and many other extraordinary things. Because what is happening in all these investigations is: through us, and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking at itself.
You see? It runs away. You never get at it. You can’t bite your own teeth. You can’t touch the tip of this finger with the tip of this finger. This is the principle.
Saint John Bosco (16 August 1815 – 31 January 1888), popularly known as Dom Bosco, was an Italian Roman Catholic priest, educator and writer of the 19th century.
While working in Turin, where the population suffered many of the effects of industrialization and urbanization, he dedicated his life to the education of street children, juvenile delinquents, and other disadvantaged youth.
He developed teaching methods based on Love rather than punishment, a method that became known as the Salesian Preventive System.
He believed education to be a ‘matter of the heart’ and said that children must not only be loved, but know that they are loved.
He also pointed to three components of the Salesian Preventive System: reason, religion and kindness.
In 1845 Dom Bosco opened a night school for boys in Valdocco, near Turin. In the following years, he opened several more schools and in 1873 gained recognition by pope Pius.
Salesians expanded into Austria, Britain, Spain, and several countries in South America. The death of Dom Bosco in 1888 did not slow the Society‘s growth.
By 1911 the Salesians were established throughout the world, including Colombia, China, India, South Africa, Tunisia, Venezuela and the United States.
The Society continues to operate worldwide; in 2000, it counted more than 17,000 members in 2,711 houses. It is the third-largest missionary organization in the World.
Dom Bosco was a dreamer. a collection of his dreams are in the book ‘Above and Beyond – The dreams of Dom Bosco’
Above and Beyond is an English progressive trance group formed in 2000 ranked among DJ Magazine’s Top 100 at #6 in 2007, #4 in 2008 and 2009, #5 in 2010 and 2011.