Showing posts with label Education versus Understanding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Education versus Understanding. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Day 107: The Cause

207:8-209:4

In these two pages Mary Baker Eddy spends most of the length of the passages discussing Mind as the only cause and creator. Then she moves (at the bottom of page 208) to discussing material body and mortal mind.

You embrace your body in your thought, and you should delineate upon it thoughts of health, not of sickness. You should banish all thoughts of disease and sin and of other beliefs included in matter.
These two pages read like a treatment so I'm still pondering the details but the last paragraph seems the densest and I'm still working on it. 

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Day 101: Another kind of Kaspar Hauser

194:6-196:10

In these two pages, Mary Baker Eddy discusses the case of Kasper Hauser and the barbarisms of learning. The part of Kasper's story that MBE is interested in is his time and acclimation to his dark, quiet living space of his youth and his inability to adapt to normal life in the physical world.

All that gives pleasure to our educated senses gave him pain through those very senses, trained in an opposite direction.
She goes on to discuss how education doesn't necessarily make us more spiritual.

If materialistic knowledge is power, it is not wisdom.
I purpose that Kasper, in essence, is the normal material man. And that an analogy can be drawn from the rest of society in Kasper's story to the rest of Spiritual life in mine. Let me explain. Kasper was a mental infant Mortal man is a spiritual infant. The physical world, which Kasper had little or no experience in is analogous to my spiritual world, which on most days I feel I have little understanding of.

But I'm not really that much of a spiritual infant. I know the spiritual world, I just have trouble ignoring the physical one. Ignoring might be the right word for me, but the wrong intent. To grasp the spiritual world more, I need to do something with the material, but what? Ignore isn't right but it's close.

Ideas?