A vision for today : from detachment into aliveness

What follows is my effort at making sense of the world in which I find myself living. It is thus, essentially, a position paper. As I have thought through the issues that confront me as a teacher and parent I have come to the realisation that it is not what I know or think that is important. It has become increasingly clear to me that it is the way I know and the way I think that is of most importance. While I acknowledge the value of the natural sciences model of viewing my world, I find my culture's over-dependence on this paradigm most affrontive. The great paradox of this model is that, by its very nature, it makes assumptions about itself that are not only patently false but also are very dangerous. The least acceptable I find of these is the notion that it provides the only way to truly see, know and understand ourselves and our world. Proponents claiming that by reducing the piece of our world that we might happen to be studying at the time, to a small enough bit for it to be managed, controlled or manipulated, we are somehow in a superior position to it. Leading us to the fallacious assumption that from this management position we are able to detach ourselves from our object of study and objectively make decisions about its value and usage.