Suddenly I'm getting a laugh outta this credentials challenge. In the book "Stranger In A Strange Land," the "not yet enlightened" character, Valentine Michael Smith, human but raised by an invisible society of enlightened Martians, is watching monkeys at a zoo who are beating up on each other. The concept was "shit rolls down hill," and the big monkey's abuse on a lesser monkey would cause that lesser monkey to beat up a still smaller monkey, and so on.
Michael suddenly "got something -- a clarity about suffering" and began to laugh, and from then on, he was a Kirky badass mofo who done popped hiz goodsef and wuz a gunna take a run at the world. Well, I laugh something like the reverse of that when I considered the issue of Doc Pete's credentials. Odd, but truthish. There's no big monkeys here. We're all the same exact size. See? There is not a single person here whose opinions have been taken as gospel by any other person here. Every word seems to have a magnifying glass on it, and the faintest taint of ego is sniffed out almost instantly. And, everyone here has this opportunity to have 15 minutes of fame pretending to be THE BIGGEST MONKEY if they can knock anyone else off any pedestal of pretense. An ashram with no big monkey? Funny, eh? But here's my point: why be concerned about Doc Pete's accomplishments if it would not make any more intense the "light of examination" that every post is subjected to? Maharishi himself could not post here without the likes of me taking shots at interpreting and criticizing and using my POV to batter his POV. Would I be chiding him on his pretensions of being a gorilla or be laughing at his use of his banana? Yeah, and you too, right? If Doc Pete did get his degrees by sending in $20 to a Divinity Institute, would his words here be any less inspected by us? The impact of his words on us will always be up to us. We interpret his words based on our immediate understanding of them and whether or not we resonate with the POV -- not a single one of us would say, "Well, he's got the credentials, so I must believe his words." He could be Professor Emeritus at Harvard, and we'd be taking pot shots at his concepts, right? We don respect no stinkeenk bahges. If someone is touting credentials as a reason for why we should just accept his POV, then I think that that issue is something that can be looked at, but I don't get that Doc Pete is "handing down from on high" so much as he's shooting from the hip with his life-wisdom gun. You know, like ALL OF US ARE DOING. I don't see him beating anyone on the head with his credentials. He's not even rubbing our noses in our opinions that go directly against established truths of psychology as academia "know it." We're not scholarly enough to deserve him doing a serious workup of a concept when we'd be unwilling to educate ourselves enough to be in the debate. If he goes to his bookshelf and starts citing chapter and verse about any psychological phenomenon, look out! -- home work will be required. Which is to say, we're got a wild west shoot 'em up here, and no sheriff in sight. I'm tellin' ya, it's funny here! Edg --- In [email protected], Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Aug 26, 2007, at 7:59 AM, Alex Stanley wrote: > > > > > I think it means he's professional in his capacity as a > > psychotherapy ass. > > > ...and therapeutic use the of the Aneros stimulator for the > clinically tight-assed. >
