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Feringer Notes - CIRCULATION OF THOUGHT - 1954 22 of 65 8.The child is not prepared to doubt, and must not be led to believe doubting acceptable.Only upon maturity does one become capable of doubting usefully. Anyone might doubt arbitrarily, stupidly, or destructively.That is not real doubting, it is mere ego operating. Emotional states, such as doubt, or cynicism, or obedience or loyalty should not be exaggerated.They are passing moods and only partly related to finding truth. You begin to be a person when you admit inside yourself this great ambition to understand what you have been told, which is very difficult; to speak up when it doesn't seem to be true; and to verify the two things - that which you have kept, and that which you have found, in your own application to your own business...p.15 9.Education and language - carriers of the spirit Education is enormously expensive in any context, at any age.The community cannot afford to educate us for our own personal use per se. It is assumed therefore that we are thus obligated to receive and circulate our thought for the benefit of the community. It is important to distinguish between "speaking" and "talk."We talk all throughout the day, about weather, about chores, etc. To speak is to need to influence others on some significant issue, to commit one's self on some issue (i.e. marriage, or in giving evidence.)Only much more occasionally do we truly speak by this definition, as compared to mere talking. Talk is less than speech! "When the president of the United States says to Russia, `We'll go to Berlin,' he speaks.In the mean time, we all have talked about the possibilities about the encounter with the Russians. (p.22) "As long as you think that your thought is just your private business, you don't see this wonderful universe of the mind in which at every moment there is either right teaching or wrong teaching.Right ruling, or wrong ruling.And your talk is the premeditation to replace anything wrong in the teaching and ruling of the world by the right.That's why it is so important that you should see that your preparation for the mind -- mental life at this moment leads into some stream that is streaming all the time, because all the time the world is ruled and taught.There's no cessation. You are the contributory stream, but you are brought up to this terrible fiction that what you think is your private business, and that it has no consequences." (p.23) 10. "Whether you decide you are (in a) blind alley (in your thoughts), or whether you decide that the world is waiting to be refreshed by your more correct and more recent, more vigorous speech makes all the difference for the treatment --for the way you will treat your own mind.If it is all just within this skull of yours, immured, then you have no reason to make any effort...If it is only your private property, then the children only must be kept happy.But if learning, as I told you, is the promise of your one day teaching, then you have to learn something. (p.23)
Feringer Notes - CIRCULATION OF THOUGHT - 1954 23 of 65 11.Just as our umbilical cord at pre-birth connects us with our physical heritage, our mind is an umbilical cord to the mental life of the community. Ultimately, we should strive to become a teacher and ruler in the most general sense (even of a small group, or of our household), and this "umbilical cord" to the community spirit is maintained. Thought is circulated to preserve the vital spirit of the community, just as our blood circulated to vitalize our physical bodies. 12.We believe that to have a mind and use it is a natural phenomenon.IT ISN'T. WE DON'T NEED LANGUAGE IN THE COMPLEX SENSE TO SURVIVE PHYSICALLY AS ANIMALS DO. WE COULD GET ALONG WITH GRUNTS AND PURRING.BUT FOR HUMANKIND TO PROGRESS MEANS THAT IT BECOMES SUPER-NATURAL, BEYOND NATURE, LEARNING FROM PAST GENERATIONS AND PASSING ON OUR KNOWLEDGE.THAT CAN ONLY BE DONE THROUGH THE SPIRIT AND THOUGHT, THROUGH SPEECH AND ITS CIRCULATION, IS THE ONLY METHOD BY WHICH WE BECOME HUMAN, "SUPERNATURAL." 13.Referring to the difference between speech and talk, we can only truly speak and expect to be listened to when the spirit moves us, which is to say, not all the time. 14.Different divisions of labor means different roles in the community.The artist is the eternal child,describing his/her emotional response to experience of the world as he finds it. He functions in the present always, but not in the future. Artists are thus untiringly plastic. They are impressed by the miraculousness of the world, accepting it as is. The soldier is untiringly protesting, resisting, contradicting and thus untiringly hard in his attempt to change the world. The priest attempts to overcome prejudices (inflexible attitudes), the plastic nature of artists,or the hard boiled rigidity of the soldier. He cares not whether what he uses is old or new. Old or new makes no difference. Prejudice is the opposite; it takes the same approach constantly. In the circulation of thought, one must see the appropriate method at the appropriate time. 15.(RF - This notion of the priest, the soldier, and artist represents condensations of not ten but what he later expanded into twelve "commandments" or "tones of the spirit" by 1961. What he called the artist represented the four qualities descriptive of both childhood and one's behavior when entering a new field. In both instances one is the novice, where the role is to listen, read, learn, and play (experiment). Then in the next stage where "idea" is merged with action; this then is what he calls the role of the soldier here, the fighter. This role combines the actions of doubter, critic, protester, and sufferer. Finally he defines the role of "priest," to combine the roles of leader or legislator, teacher, prophet, and bestower.The three primary roles then represent the main functions in the circulation of thought and spirit. Of course, any thinking person at one time or another participates in all 12 functions, but the primary roles are the most emphasized by these persons.That is, the beginning stage of new thought (represented by the image of the child), the active stage of putting into practice in the community (the adult stage) and the final stage of
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