economies of scale

( here )

(no subject)

We gain knowledge by following the track of our anger.

I often phrase things in ways that don't express my real feelings and frequently go against them (because a good host, as Rumi says, offers the general kinds of dishes that the guests will like), but my annoyance with the word "holistic" was clearly genuine, as well as excessive and unfair.

I suspect it arises because I feel that we indeed have such a desperate need to grasp the whole condition of human beings on this planet, situated in this cosmos...and the teachers who have seemed to grasp that condition most fully have been so exactly not touchy-feely sentimentalists, though they have not been pointlessly grouchy either: have known the essential idiocy of human self-delusion and known that it has to be gotten round before anything useful can be accomplished.

The amazing thing, as I wrote a day or two ago, is that human society usually finds ways to get round its limitations in spite of our selves, without benefit of spiritual mastery of any sort.

But in general the invisible hand of our collective groping in the dark does not have a very good grasp on things. We are quite good at getting the territory mapped out in all directions, but not always very good at figuring out the actual lay of the land, much less how to make our way across it. Fill in your own third metaphor to end this meditation.

The original end of it was overly annoying, even to me.