Learning How To Be Free: An Invitation, from a painter Options

[painter]

NOTE: The original Topic Title of this thread was "Learning How To Read . . ." but I've changed it in hopes that we can begin to escape the literal associations of the word "read". If "free" suffers the same fate, I may change the Title yet again.

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Months.

Over the course of being a member of this forum, especially in the context of "Alternative Theories," I've occasionally mentioned the necessity of "knowing how to read." Of course what I mean by this isn't directly related to knowing how to read the words you see before you here. All of us know how to do that more or less. If you're not familiar with my having said anything about this, I point you specifically to this post on my pinned and closed 'esoteric' thread here: http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum//index....t&p=7894218

A few members of this forum have asked me to say more about what I mean by this "learning how to read" business and it is this that I've been contemplating for a long time now. Having given it some serious consideration I've decided to post and pin this thread here as an open "invitation."

First I am inviting you to engage with me and one another in some discussion here about this topic. However, I am very aware that discussion of this topic is by necessity limited so long as it remains nothing more than discussion. To go further requires something more of us: Specifically a willingness to engage in exercises and experiments which can begin to move us beyond mere discussion into the realm of actual experience and knowledge based upon that experience.

This invitation, therefore, is offered as a starting point in the hope that some of you may wish to go further and take all this to another level. All I will say about that at this point is that the possibility exists, although necessarily limited by this forum/text medium within which we correspond. For this purpose I'm in the process of establishing another forum, participation in which will be by invitation only and will require that users not be anonymous and have a genuine interest in coming to a more direct understanding through observation.

So, I will leave this as it is. Feel free to ask whatever questions you wish and we'll see how this goes.

[bill]

There are quite a few of us here that are of the vintage (that is to say well seasoned old coots) that actually had a real educational experience available to us

We got through the 'system' before the serious Deliberate Dumbing down of America began to really take effect (borrowing a title from Charlotte Iserbyte)

http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/pages/author.htm

But I am not sure if you are talking about simply the skill of reading comprehension or something in a deeper more semantic vein

(knowing your considerable intellect painter I am sure you are getting at something much more complex than basic decoding of symbols on a page.)

(-- an aside, I found Semantics 204 one of the toughest courses I completed, I was damn proud to squeek out a "B")

Having spent a little time in other radically different cultures/languages I am sure that language and culture are closely linked

and that language shapes the thinking of human beings and vice versa

for example the Hopi language is completely devoid of tense -- IIRC they have no word for 'time' at all

This post has been edited by bill: Oct 18 2008, 12:12 AM