There are 5 entries in the guestbook.
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| D.R Gedela | Signed on: Sat 10 Sep 2011 15:22:55 CDT
I would like to congratulate you for all that extraordinary effort you had put in, in bringing that work of yours alive.
Now I think it has become some kind of historical document, a strong & powerful commentary on today’s very education system & the society in which we all live.
Your life’s best of years spent in that direction, I’m sure will not go waste, may be will remain as a guiding force for the generations of people to come. |  | | | David Bruneau | Signed on: Mon 07 Feb 2011 16:16:48 CST
Feb. 7 2011 Posted by the author (with permission)
(May 25, 2010) Hello Paul,
I picked up a copy of your book at the Krishnamurti centre near Victoria and just finished reading it this morning. My main feeling in reading it and reaching the end was a fairly intense frustration, at which I'm surprised. This strong feeling seems to be pushing for some expression or feedback to you as the author of the book as well as some self-examination on my own side. I'm fairly well educated and a former English teacher at the Krishnamurti school when it existed: I was there for two years 1977-78. My problem with your book is that although you were a school drop out and could have written it in down-to-earth language for the most part you have written like a university professor of philosophy, with unusually difficult words that seem very abstract and tedious to comprehend and to extract the meaning from. I really couldn't understand much of what you were saying and felt like I had to struggle to give my own meaning to the ideas that surely could have been expressed much more simply and in a style more able to be grasped by the average person, of which I count myself one. I can't see the ordinary person having much of a clue about what you're trying to communicate. I probably shouldn't interpret but can't help but wonder if you weren't greatly overcompensating for the fact that you had been so criticized as a young man for being undereducated and shamed by your father in a way about this. So much for my psychological analysis.
I seem to be left with no concrete sense of what you are actually proposing as a solution to the fragmentation of thought that you mention and there is no help when I look at the petition itself on the website. What is the petition proposing, and to whom? I'm aware this may sound very negative on my part but somehow this is the response arising from my exposure to your book. I suppose it's not very helpful or constructive. I expect you may be familiar with David Bohm's concept of Dialogue which I believe seeks to address the very problems you are speaking of, and of course there are many "spiritual" teachers like Krishnamurti who advocate self-observation and self-knowledge as the main way to invite a greater harmony into our way of living.
So, there is my expression of frustration and having put it out I can now sense a resonance with your experiences and your searching for a way to find some resolution to the problems you have seen to exist. I guess I'll leave it at that and wish you the best of "luck" with your project, even if I'm not actually sure what it is.
Sincerely, David Bruneau
(May 26, 2010) Thank you so much David for taking the time to read the book and respond as you have. I am very appreciative of your comments, on several levels. Your letter is interesting as readers who are struck by the project as you were, seldom trouble to articulate it.
Although the book will remain available through Trafford Publishing, the current website will be temporarily/strategically removed to make way for a re-titled abridgement of the project (the website did not close). This new version moves the project back to its original concept as a live performance reading. In this case, the 'reading' will be performed by text-to-speech software and it is hoped that this presentation will render the project's purpose a little more accessible.
...It is in fact a very complex project, which was undertaken on the given that it could only be successful in a live reading environment. Do please consider the current website in light of your "frustration" and also your sense of "...resonance with your experiences and your searching for a way...”
Do please consider reading the book again, or encouraging a colleague to read it and compare reactions.
Please do keep in touch if you have any further thoughts or developments that come to mind.
I really appreciate that you have taken the time to write to me.
Very sincerely, Paul Young
(May 26, 2010) Dear Paul,
I was a little surprised to hear that you appreciated my comments and I in turn appreciate your apparent generosity of heart. I had considered writing again to apologize for my critical tone when a more supportive one would no doubt have been possible for me to access authentically but am not sure I would have actually done it. I expect a friend who is also interested in these matters will soon read the book, so I will be interested in her response and will say nothing in advance which might influence her. I would be interested myself in being kept up to date with the "project" as it unfolds but it sounds like you will be closing your website rather than offering more information by that means... (As a result of Mr. Bruneau’s and other supportive communications at the time, The Layman’s Petition website remains open.) (David Bruneau’s email moved to discuss personal contacts in the author’s region.)
All the best to you, David
(May 26, 2010) Thank you so much, David.
I am so pleased that you have made contact.
There are a number of Paul Youngs in the region so there might be some confusion on that front. (I do not know the individuals you mention.)
I will certainly keep you up to date with the project, although you are quite right in concluding that my objective is to dramatically restrict access to the project's history for the time being.
As an English teacher, you must have found the project pure torture to get through. Thank you so much for your patience.
I look forward to the day where the project is secure enough to place in the hands of a suitable editor.
Yours very sincerely, Paul Young
(May 26, 2010) One last comment for now.
I didn't find your English usage anything to be criticized but rather found it to be somewhat over my head and more sophisticated than I'm used to, the language of a person functioning at a level that only the highly educated elite would be capable of! It seems you have in this area carried out your father's wish to "continue the conversation" in a way that would have more than pleased him.
David | | | | Javier Gómez Rodríguez | Signed on: Tue 07 Sep 2010 14:13:14 CDT
An extraordinary letter from Javier Gómez Rodríguez of The Netherlands (posted with permission)
Wednesday 21 April 2010
Dear Paul,
First of all my thanks for having sent me your book The Layman’s Petition and my apologies for taking so long to get back to you on it. I was not able to follow your recommendation to read your work in one straight sitting. I am not a fast reader, in any case, and the density of meaning in some of the chapters slowed me down even more. I felt I had to take my time to savour it fully and to give it as complete a hearing and understanding as I might be able. I hope that the comments that follow do some justice to your very personal and significant writing.
In the first place I want to express my appreciation for this work of yours. I was touched by it. Although I don’t know you personally and can only read somewhat between the lines concerning your actual situation, I feel you are hitting a rather universal note that is, to my mind, eminently worth sharing and which cannot help but be well received by sympathetic and similarly disposed people, whoever they may be and wherever they may be found. In other words, you may be pleasantly surprised to discover that you are not alone in this reflection, in this call for a broader sense of collective interaction, dialogue and meaning. So I want to thank you for that.
You touch on many issues and I am not going to be able to reflect along with you on all of them in this letter, as it would threaten to become just as long as your book. (That, by the way, might give you a quantitative measure of how inspiring I found it.) For now it shall have to suffice to sketch a few general impressions.
The relationship with our parents, the educational system and the whole issue of social adaptation runs through this piece like a unifying thread. Implicitly and explicitly you address yourself to an abiding sense of distance, a misunderstanding, a loss of contact, a very real alienation that leads to an almost total sense of isolation from which you seem to have been rescued, at least in part, by a certain style of music that was, significantly, your father’s favourite. Every generation has revolted against its predecessors and then has come round to seeing their essential identity. We are our parents, even if we rejected their seemingly conformist attitudes towards the society of their times. They wore in their faces, as you indicate at some point, the marks of experience, an experience that told them that such a conformist course of action was the best they could take to provide a modicum of security and welfare for themselves and their children. This has been one of the survivalist lessons of history and its endemic struggles for power.
Deeper than that struggle of conformity versus freedom on account of the survival lessons of history lies a more painful sense of personal estrangement, namely the feeling that our parents, in the name of their responsibility, were not able or willing to see and value us for ourselves. It is this traditional inability to meet as persons independently of our occupations, incomes and social standing that is at the heart of this long chain of generational sorrow. We are given to understand that we are cogs in the social machine and we’d better be smart about it so we don’t end up too low on the food chain. Education is there to maintain and improve the social standards of living, to keep the engines of progress turning and to ensure the continuity of the socioeconomic and cultural structures already in place. All this has its good reasons but in this process the balance between the individual and society can easily become lopsided. Society says that the individual exists for it and the individual insists that society exists for him. Maybe they exist for one another because they are, in essence, one and the same?
You describe a specific swing in this pendulum of individualism-collectivism in your country after WWII. It would seem that the generation who fought in that war understood the dangers of collectivism, turning so many millions into cannon fodder on account of such mad ideas as technological, racial and ideological supremacy. As a result, all those grand collective schemes became suspect and individualism took its place. Of course there is never a total individualistic way of life nor a totally collective way, as neither one is possible without relationship. But one would have to say that the balance can be easily lost and it was certainly lost in our parents’ generation, when a series of collective movements unleashed such unprecedented destruction in the world. And yet the good old Greek saying that man is a social animal remains just as true. The art, however, may be to keep the social dimension while letting go of the animal, meaning the destructive patterns of the sexual, territorial and hierarchical drives that have caused and continue to cause such havoc in human affairs. And this art applies not only to the collective or group dimension but to each and every one of us, as it is a matter of our universal human conditioning, which now constitutes the basic psychological programming informing the very movement of thought.
This sense of individualism and its implicit negation of the collective or social dimension, and therefore of our full humanity, has been one of the most important themes of our times. People have traced it back to the advent of the Industrial Revolution towards the middle of the XIX century, the development of a much more competitive and cognitive way of living, etc. In fact those collective movements that subsequently sprung up and that led to such massive bloodshed were intended to counter this very sense of deepening alienation. They evidently did not succeed; on the contrary. But be that as it may, the fact is that many of us have felt it as a living reality challenging our very sense of a meaningful existence. This has taken the form of a struggle to find our place in society, a struggle that in a more basic sense was that of a living being for the preservation of its innate love of life and freedom against the seemingly necessary and unstoppable forces of an increasingly mechanized form of existence.
In this regard, I remark the significance that nature had and continues to have in your own sense of meaning beyond the confines of social value. Nature stands on its own and is a constant source of wonder in terms of its self-generated quality of beauty and order, an order and beauty that are beyond what we ourselves seem able to create. And this is in itself a significant metaphor, if that’s the word, in terms of what our true longing actually is, i.e. to live with that same quality of wholeness and beauty that nature so effortlessly seems to possess. And that’s something that as a species we are now confronted with like never before, namely with finding a way of life that is not destructive of nature. Every education that takes its task seriously must address itself to this issue, as it is one area in which the traditional divisions of individual and collective self-interest no longer have a place. This love of nature not only marks the beginning and the end of your book but also reconciles nature and history, as nature incorporates the remains of past human activity into its own living structures. So the labours of man become part of the beauty of the landscape and there is no reason why such activity should have to be a contribution to the war effort. A water tower should do.
When one lives on the margins of society one can easily become bitter, cynical and violently opposed to the whole thing. And there is plenty to oppose. One can start down the slippery road of degeneration, become not just a recluse but an enemy of society, assume an apocalyptic outlook and adopt a survivalist stance, stocking one’s bunker with the needful supplies, etc. One can join the homeless and worse. It is an extraordinary challenge to remain true to one’s sense of social meaninglessness and not go down some other road of meaninglessness oneself. After all, the seeds of what society has become are in all of us, in our consciousness; it has not come out of anywhere else. And yet, it seems to me, this sense of being an outsider is an important part of the needful reflection or inquiry that we human beings are necessarily engaged in, for we have become a question to ourselves, a question that society, whether we like it or not, continues to pose for us. That is the beauty, I find, of that little episode you tell at the end of the encounter between the art student, the businessman and yourself by the sea. Those whose lives and achievements might grant them the wisdom and generosity to become staunch defenders of peace turned out to be the advocates of war and the one who might be more inclined to favour the blowing up of the whole thing turned out to stand instead for total sanity. And that is what I mean: that whatever one’s condition in life or rang on the ladder what matter is that one stand for goodness, for sanity, for friendship and peace. Here perspective makes all the difference, whether it is the view from the level of the water or from the bluff above. And right now we need, and we have always needed, the broadest possible perspective on our human condition and its total universality. I’ve always valued this element of perspective as an important aspect in liberating us from the narrow viewpoints imposed on us by circumstance and which are responsible for so much division and conflict. And, once again, this is what education has to take on board, not the perpetuation of those narrow affiliations of place and time, name and tradition, of self versus ‘the other’.
You spell out in no uncertain terms the limitations of our existent legal systems and institutions in addressing the total human condition: “Our charters and constitutions are not comprehensive recipes for liberation, but rather incremental reactions against the ever manifest conflict born out of the oppressive nature of our own ignorance.” (Pg. 29)This conflict and ignorance, as you indicate, are the result of incomplete and unexamined thought. And education, as the conveyor and perpetuator of this same thought, ends up in a contradiction between its stated intentions and its actual practice and results. What is missing is an examination of this very issue of the ignorance implicit in unexamined thought. This was the old Socratic call and the very ground of the culture of dialogue that was at the heart of the Academy, Plato’s famous school and one of the first real foundations of education as a liberating activity of learning encompassing the whole of man. The fact that the word ‘academic’ has by now acquired rather a derogatory meaning does not detract from the outstanding intelligence and creativity of that original school of philosophy. But such tends to be the irony of history, namely that the original meaning of any creative movement tends to become its opposite with the passage of time. In part that is due to things being accepted on the basis of authority, and therefore on an unexamined basis, and in part on the very principle of perception becoming knowledge, of seeing becoming ideas. The word ‘idea’ comes from a Greek verb meaning ‘to see’, whereas ideas have become one of our most dangerous blind spots. To me this is indicative of the essential irony involved in seeing becoming a concept and the concept taking over perception, i.e. being dominated by the time factor of previous experience, of memory. So the ignorance we are faced with and which is education’s task to dispel is not only a matter of the unexamined content of thought but, deeper still, it concerns the understanding of the very nature and movement of thought itself, thought being, in this instance, the conceptual and experiential movement of recorded time. Such ignorance is, therefore, essentially an ignorance of ourselves and we can hardly blame the legal and governmental systems for not providing adequately for our freedom from this enduring source of conflict and sorrow. Given the nature and implications of our ignorance, the freedom we are calling for can hardly be expected to come from outside. And this is one of the grounds, as I see it, of each of us recovering the full measure of his/her own responsibility, meaning that we are all responsible for our own actions and for the world as a whole, because we are the world. I find in this very universality of being, even in relation to something as ‘negative’ as ignorance, a factor of liberation, since then the key to the transformation of society is not to be found in external factors but is completely within one’s own grasp.
The question of the nature of thought is intimately bound up with the issue of identity, as our identities are the creation of thought. Our social and individual structures are generated around the notion of identity. Identity, similarity and difference are key categories of thinking and what allows us to distinguish things, classify and measure them. Without such basic tools of thinking we could hardly function in the everyday world. And yet in the realm of the psyche identity can create artificial and dangerous boundaries whose consequences are the breakdown of relationship and its destructive aftermath. The trouble with identity as separateness is its inbuilt limitation. But where can one actually draw the line concerning the nature of one’s being, the ‘I am’? The utterance of such words is made possible by the existence of sound and sound ultimately exists against a background of silence, just as matter exists against a background of empty space and space dwells in the immanence of its own creative mystery. So where can one draw the line of one’s own being and set up the sentries and the flag? This is an abiding issue affecting all relationships. You put it very nicely at one point, this issue of the separate individual identity versus relationship: “Where once we saw ourselves as infinitely unique, we now discover ourselves to be infinitely related.”(Pg. 51) We are the children of a vast, infinite network of relationships; we could say, in fact, not only that we are because of relationship but that we are relationship. We are the air we breathe, the food we eat, the light we see, the sounds we hear, the human body in which we sense ourselves to be, the neurological and psychological structures we have inherited, the million influences we have received, the very sense of awareness, the very sense of being… Our identities run deeper than gender, race, class, nationality, ideology or religious belief. They extend not just to the whole of humanity but much beyond it, down through the animal kingdom and all living things to their ground in so-called inert matter, and past matter to energy or whatever its ground might be. And that is an awesome thought that many of us had as children, namely our being the vulnerable and temporary embodiment of all that. Such an intuitive sense of our being the whole of creation is what I’ve considered to be the quintessence of human dignity. Our life is not our own and to be at one with life is the essence of the art of living. And that’s what a true education is supposed to be about.
I’m afraid I waxed a bit metaphysical there. There are of course many shades to be distinguished in a discussion of the relationship between the particular and the general or universal, etc. We can readily admit that we are all that and how unifying and liberating that feeling can be, but at the same time we have to deal with very concrete existential conditions needing immediate responses and the latter may end up forcing us to give priority to the limited rather than the unlimited, the known rather than the unknown, because it is in the more circumscribed domain that we place our hopes for security. Or course this is only relatively so and in the extreme it is totally self-defeating, which leads us, once more, to the consideration of the incoherent ways of our human existence. It is here where I see a need for a wide-ranging collective reflection. To me you seem to suggest as much when you say that “There is apparently no place where the common soul can stand up in an act of simple good will and call for some sort of strategic or broadly endorsed time-out.” (Pg. 34) Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I may venture to suggest that this is actually a very necessary proposal given the generalized loss of collective dialogue, a loss that threatens to dissolve both the creative and preserving bonds of culture as well as the social fabric. In the absence of such dialogue people adopt a distinctly individualistic stance and disregard the common good and its inherent responsibilities. This makes for the kind of widespread corruption that goes on nowadays at almost every level of human activity. I cannot exploit another unless I dehumanize him or her. So what we are facing is the danger of the dehumanization that comes with the spread of the individualistic approach to living. And this danger is our responsibility because it is of our own doing. The proposal of collective dialogue that has been put forward by people like David Bohm is, in my view, a significant contribution to the exploration of the needful reversal of this dangerous trend.
I was rather impressed with the quotes you included on page 40 of your book from Krishnamurti’s The Awakening of Intelligence. What these quotes suggest is very significant in the context of the dialogue proposal, since they indicate that the action of self-reflecting thinking slows down the activity of thought and thus allows for the emergence of a previously unrealized depth of relationship. This is exactly what dialogue is intended to do and I would myself confirm this to be the case from my own experimentation with Bohm’s dialogue proposal. The apparent fact that K was saying something similar is therefore of great interest to me, as I had not come across anything that explicit on this matter in his works before. And that is the reason why I sought to locate the exact quote or quotes in the referenced book, but my searches were in vain. So maybe you might be able to provide me with the exact references to the texts you quote? I’d appreciate that a lot.
Well, I’ve extended this letter to you quite a bit and maybe I’d better leave it there for now. After all, it has taken me already quite a while to get back to you and this might do as a token of my appreciation for your book and your having shared it with me. I can only hope you will continue in this deepening and widening inquiry of yours. There is much that you have uncovered and much that you keep discovering and that makes for an emerging sense of creative freedom. And I trust that the widening sense of relationship continues to sustain you in your quest.
All the very best and until next time,
Javier Gómez Rodríguez | | | | Eleanor Anderson | Signed on: Sat 16 Jan 2010 18:56:00 CST
Tue, 12 Jan 2010
Thank you for a most enjoyable three hours, give or take some minutes. I have just read your book at one sitting as recommended. Several thoughts remain with me.
1. You say you did not set out to become a writer. Congratulations. You have become one in spite of your intentions. If you have not already done so, you should investigate "My Family and other Animals" by Gerald Durrell. He's the young brother of the celebrated author Lawrence D., and went his own way with small boats and other things, cheerfully avoiding structured education. You are not alone.
2. "Education is about removing barriers, not building them up". You go quite a way toward the removal of barriers, indicating how it can sometimes be done in the simplest of ways. Often the best way is by asking questions. The best teachers still use this method in spite of the "system".
3. Music of a generation preceding one's own is often subversively attractive. Some of us "oldies" love the operettas of Gilbert & Sullivan, for example. Thanks for the loving descriptions of the Big Band events, and for your own discovery of the joys of "live" music.
4. There is definitely hope for you to emerge as a valuable Senior Citizen. Before you know it, you will be the one standing at the end of the dock remarking to younger people that "this used to be...". We all must take our turns as the generation which sits on the porch and remarks about the failings of the younger generation.
Thank you for the episode of the canoe in the ice, for the adolescent turmoil so lucidly described, for the meeting at The Point with the advocates of war, for the castigation of "commercially exploited sexual distinctions", for the Elvis concert revisited.
Now for your next book, how about a look at war as an economic activity, and how historically it has disproportionally affected civilians. Or maybe something more humorous, like Canadian politics?
Cheers, and thanks again,
Eleanor Anderson | | | | Yvonne Young | Signed on: Mon 15 Jun 2009 00:14:47 CDT
It is my pleasure to make the first signatory support of this petition and guestbook and to do so in honour of Gerald Richard Young who was the father of the author and central inspiration for the project. I urge any person who has lost a loved one or found meaning through the words of this book to sign its symbolic petition and/or make an entry into the guestbook in a similiar honour of their loved one. I invite readers to remember those taken through the effects of war, severe social and cultural isolation or illness, as in the case of the author's father. My husband would be very pleased with the ethic each one of his children has chosen. | | |
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