Being found
“We do not find our own center. It finds us. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
— Richard Rohr
via whiskey river
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“We do not find our own center. It finds us. We do not think ourselves into new ways of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”
— Richard Rohr
via whiskey river
Comments are closed.
Don’t we do both? It sounds like a false dichotomy.
I think there’s a kernel of truth there…but it’s bending my brain a bit. Perhaps we can do both, but spend too much time/effort on the thinking part.
I like Rohr’s last senetence especially. Makes me think of MacLuhan for some reason. I’ll have to go find out why.
This quote stuck with me because it is such a good example of one of those quotes that sounds good but doesn’t even pass casual inspection. It belonds in something like “The Secret”.
Blogs are a waste of time if we only learn by living and not thinking. It reminds me of those people that say “… but I learn by making mistakes”. In that case, there is no place for education and the engineers that build your bridges are wasting their time.
Seems like solely thinking ourselves into new ways of being is pure utopia (or pure chamos). It’s only when you put your thinking into practice that you begin to learn whether or not it represents a true way of living.
As for learning from mistakes, engineering is full of these. Engineers design things all the time that fail. If they DIDN’T learn from these mistakes, we’d have bridges like these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBxQCvVykRE
Look at those engineers learning from their mistakes!
The quote stuck with me because it certainly invites more than casual inspection.
As for The Secret – not a fan here. Have you read it?
I agree completely that solely thinking ourselves into utopia is not likely to happen. But nor is solely living ourselves into utopia, and that was my point. It is a false dichotomy because it forces you to choose. If we don’t think ourselves into new ways of living then we can’t improve our diet to save ourselves from heart disease and instead have to wait for the heart disease before we change.
As for engineers… well, there are so many examples of things that they’ve built that work — our entire lives depend on successful engineering at this point — that I’m willing to accept a few failures (and engineered products are not necessarily meant to last indefinitely — it is a price/quality tradeoff, though they should not fail prematurely).
My point with respec to engineers is that you get a much greater head start in the engineering profession by being educated in it (obviously combined with practice — and more and more practice as your mind becomes acquainted with the concepts). But thinking comes first.
Also, ideas are powerful in changing behaviour and, for this to happen, you need to be able to think about them. Solely living traps you into a stream of anecdotes unless you’re willing to think yourself a common thread.
“The Secret”… I read it as a joke. They say you can avoid the flu by willing it not to come near you with positive thought. You can do the same with money, by attracting money with positive thought and living like you are rich so that money knows where to find you. Oprah endorsed it. It is taken legitimately by many as a “self-help book”. As far as toilet paper goes, it is very expensive.
There was a great show on community cable in Ottawa back in the early 1990s when I lived there. Every year, the graduating engineering class at Carleton had a competition to see who could contruct a bridge out of a limited number of toothpicks. The winner was the one that held the greatest weight for five seconds without breaking. The prof was very entertaining and the show was watched by thousands of people every year.
Almost without exception, the bridges “failed.” There is no substitute for the experience of prototyping a design and watching it reach its limits. Failure is just thinking.
As for The Secret, you have to be careful with stuff like that. Here you read the book as a joke and you’re STILL talking about it, despite your better judgement! 🙂 You see what can be attracted to conscious intention…