• Oren Lyons at the UN: Opening Speech for "The Year of the Indigenous Peoples", 1993

          Indigenous science begins with an apprehension of the Whole, only very carefully and on close inspection reaching tentative conclusions about any Specificity.
          Indigenous science is based on a profound immersion in and awareness of the whole circumstance. Rather than mistrusting personal experience, Indigenous science has learned to thrive on it. . . .
          The basis of learning, the basis of the pedagogy, is to cease preventing people from learning things for themselves. This way of thinking, what goes on in here, can really be taught from the inside out. When it's taught from the outside in, someone else comes between you and yourself, and that's not considered a wise idea. That's the tradition.
          In one of your papers on Perennial Wisdom it says that the Native tradition is nature-focused. I would like to modify that a little. I would like to say that Indian traditions are nature-inclusive. You do not see man and nature as separate from each other, but you see yourself in the context of an interrelated whole instead.
          . . . The idea is that everybody learns, but you need to figure out how a child learns in order to design a learning circumstance in which each individual can teach themselves. The idea is always to teach yourself. In fact there is no word "teach," or there didn't used to be, in the fundamental language.

"It took me a long time to accept that the smiles I saw were real," [Helena Norberg-Hodge] remembers. "Then, in my second year there, while at a wedding, I sat back and observed the guests enjoying themselves. Suddenly I heard myself saying, 'Aha, they really are that happy.' Only then did I recognize that I had been walking around with cultural blinders on, convinced that hidden behind the jokes and laughter had to be the same frustration, jealousy, and inadequacy as in my own society."
          As soon as she dropped her cultural preconceptions, she began finding evidence everywhere of an extraordinary dignity, self-respect, and joie de vivre. Most Ladakhis, she observed, derive contentedness from within and rarely allow external situations to disturb their highly prized equanimity. She tells, for example, of accompanying a traditional "thanka" painter on a trip to Kashmir. Everywhere the two visitors went, people ridiculed the man, poking fun at his "backward" dress and mimicking his language. But much to Norberg-Hodge's amazement, he remained completely unaffected by the abuse and never lost his cheerful, smiling demeanor. When she asked him why he didn't get angry, he replied, in characteristic Ladakhi fashion, "Chi choen?" ("What's the point?") -- meaning, why should I allow my precious peace of mind to be disrupted by such inconsequential circumstances?
          Eventually, Norberg-Hodge began to realize that this peace of mind in the face of life's inevitable ups and downs was based not only on the teachings of Buddhism, but on a deep sense of belonging instilled in Ladakhis from infancy. "The Ladakhis belong to their place on Earth," she explains. "They are bonded to that place through intimate daily contact, through a knowledge about their immediate environment with its changing seasons, needs, and limitations. . . .
          As people become fixated on how much money they have, they feel pressured to earn more, the pace of life accelerates -- and one of the first of the scarce natural resources to be depleted is time. In traditional Ladakh, no matter how much work there was to be done, life was lived at a human pace, time was plentiful, and everyone could afford to be patient, explains Norberg-Hodge. Now, "time-saving" technologies and the money economy have turned time into a commodity that can be bought and sold, forcing people to speed up to keep step with machines. As a result, they're spending less time just being with their families and friends, less time engaging in traditional spiritual practices or observing the slow, subtle changes of the natural world around them. As one Ladakhi told Norberg-Hodge, "Machines are dead; you have no relationship with them. When you work with machines, you become like them; you become dead yourself.

A selection of resources quoted in the above:
1. "The Post-Corporate World," by David C. Korten.    (ASCII text)
2. "Life After Capitalism," by David C. Korten.    (ASCII text)
   The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, by David C. Korten:
   3. Table of Contents/Book Excerpts    (ASCII text)
   4. Readers Comments    (ASCII text)
   5. About the Author    (ASCII text)

• 1999: Expressing Life's Wisdom: Nurturing Heart-Brain Development Starting With Infants
  It all begins with children feeling unconditionally wanted, accepted and loved. This is the key to the entire operation. You can have everything else: a high standard of living, the most expensive school system, the finest teachers in the world; but if the children are lacking that initial experience of being unconditionally loved by at least one person, and if they do not feel safe and secure in their learning environment, then nothing is going to happen very positively. This cannot be overstated.
            Television literally prevents neural growth in the developing brains of children. When young children watch too much, it suppresses the capacity of their brains to create an internal image of some thing, or some one, or some event not presented to the sensory system by the environment, which is the essence of what we call "imagination." Researchers used to think that it was only the content of the programming that was negatively affecting children. Now we have ample evidence that the technology of the device is very harmful in and of itself. In other words, the simple act of watching television has profoundly negative effects on the physiology of human beings.
  
  
• 1998: Waking Up To The Holographic Heart - Starting Over With Education
  . . . neurocardiology . . . is the general title of the newest field of medicine. Oxford University brought out a huge, thick volume of medical studies from all over the world entitled, Neurocardiology, which includes studies that haven't worked their way into the journals yet. Discoveries in the field of neurocardiology are, believe me, far more awesome then the discovery of non-locality in quantum mechanics. It is the biggest issue of the whole century, but it's so far out and so beyond the ordinary, conceptual grasp, that a lot of the people doing the actual research are yet to be fully aware of the implications.
            Close to a century ago, Rudolph Steiner said the greatest discovery of 20th century science would be that the heart is not a pump but vastly more, and that the great challenge of the coming ages of humanity would be, in effect, to allow the heart to teach us to think in a new way. Now, that sounds extremely occult, but we find it's directly, biologically the case.

There is an old joke that the typical Zuni household consists of a mother, father, children, and an anthropologist. In fact, the Zunis are one of the most written-about tribes in the world. . . . It was with genuine disappointment, then, that I came to realize how often the impact of these outsiders on the objects of their fascination has been disruptive and detrimental. Despite their admiration of the Pueblos, early anthropologists more often bolstered the image of the vanishing Indian than challenged it. . . .
          Early observers were convinced that the cause of science and the immenent disappearance of tribal cultures justified their actions. . . . Such predictions enact what James Clifford has termed the redemptive allegory of anthropology -- the assumption that the "primitive" cultures are doomed to disappear except for those artifacts "rescued" by Western scientists. Such predictions are not only self-serving -- since they inflate the importance of the fieldworkers's reports -- they can also be self-fulfilling. They sustain and foster the idea of Indians as a vanishing race by referring only to their past.
          The alternative view, however, challenges many comfortable assumptions: that there are neither primitive nor civilized, inferior nor superior, simple nor advanced societies -- only different ones. This view requires learning to think in "plurals" -- imagining the multiple histories and cultural stories of human societies in every part of the world as parallel, equal developments intersecting without necessarily merging, and associating non-Western societies such as Zuni with the future of the planet instead of its past. We must question the assumption that change means the loss of something essential and find ways to discuss cultural differences without encasing them in value-ladened descriptions.

A wide range of ground is covered here by an extremely dynamic and glib raconteur. Of special interest is the section on octopi and the seeing of meaning communicated as pure intent without ambiguity.   (ASCII text)

Where does "music" "come from"? Salieri defined it thru Mozart as "taking dictation from gaud." As difficult as it is for thought (the response of memory) to grasp or understand the ineffable fact of human consciousness, there appears to be some sort of capacity to `pluck an infinitude of beats out of the sea of rhythm we are all immersed' in. The following provides a glimpse of something the mind balks at seeing.

"Now something has happened. If these children can go into each other's minds completely--then they will have a single memory, which is the memory of all of them. All experience will be common to all of them, all knowledge, all dreams--and they will be immortal. For as one dies, another child is linked to the whole, and another and another. Death will lose all meaning, all of its dark horror. Mankind will begin, here in this place, to fulfill a part of its intended destiny--to become a single, wonderful unit, a whole--almost in the old words of your poet, John Donne, who sensed what we have all sensed at one time, that no man is an island unto himself. Has any thoughtful man lived without having a sense of that singleness of mankind? I don't think so. We have been living in darkness, in the night, struggling each of us with his own poor brain and then dying with all the memories of a lifetime. It is no wonder that we have achieved so little. The wonder is that we have achieved so much. Yet all that we know, all that we have done will be nothing compared to what these children will know and do and create--" [1]