http://scottmacleod.com/daltonletter.htm ...
can be helpful ...
& enjoyable
*
Friends
Dear Friends,
While in Scotland (June – July 2003) I learned about John Dalton, a Quaker and a scientist who, when he died, was so appreciated (beloved) for his kindness (I read somewhere) that around 40,000 people and 100 carriages passed by his coffin in Manchester to pay their respects, - a worthwhile kind of fame.
While his scientific accomplishments at that time (late 1700s - early 1800s) were impressive (in meteorology, vision, atmosphere, and considered the 'father' of the atom – that matter is composed of the atomic weights of different elements - among other ideas; induction then into the French Academy of Sciences as one of eight foreign representatives), I'm attracted to the effects of his Quaker interests and upbringing - the cultural practices, ways of doing and thinking (analytically & compassion-wise), the traditions, and the shared understandings which inform the Society of Friends (unprogrammed Quakers) at their best.
What thinking about the Quaker and scientist John Dalton brings to mind for me about Quaker ways are the very open-ended and organic practices or leadings (remarkably sensitive and caring?) - that I sometimes liken to a kind of musical or theatrical improvisation - (waiting in silence with Friends ~ a kind of relaxation response {Benson 1972} vis-à-vis Quaker processes) and which can lead to inward and outward, indirect and straightforward realizations of love in its best sense - empathy; delight; sympathy; centered caring; tenderness; sensitivity; ineffable ecstasy; incredibly positive - potentially lifelong - feelings of connectedness; sublimity; kindness; “love in the air;” gentleness; an understanding of developing, mutual otherness; friendship; mirthful, playful freedom in mind, words and gestures; thoughtfulness; dating; cuddling/physical intimacy/sensuality (1-2 hours per day); making love (intimate and warm)~coitus; a delightful, “glowing” party; ongoing smile / sincere and charming affection / “flow” experiences (for “flow,” see Csikszentmihalyi’s “Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience” - 1993) with a community / network across generations; openness; generosity; coming closely in tune with good friends; fulsome trust; anticipatory, beneficial surprises; sweetness; nurture; receptivity {to love}; sharing; hail gladdening love; non-harming, altruistic engagement; acts of kindness ~ voluntarism; considerateness; cordiality; congeniality; collegiality; flourishing (viz. eudaimonia); warm, radiant fun; sociable, flirtatious, and gleeful inner and outer movement, which some people experience while dancing (e.g. unconditional~free-form dancing, New England contra-dancing, Scottish Country Dancing, Dances of Universal Peace~Sufi dancing, contact improvisational dance jams, etc.); having a ball with you; euphoric merriment; cherishing as well as feeling / being cherished; (love-related) passion; the numinous; a loving bliss economy~loving bliss indices {a way of measuring groups' affective neurophysiology, as a whole, linked with socially conscious, index, mutual funds}; old friends; an unburdened feeling of lightness of being; falling in love; the fun of raising / being with kids; cheeriness; positive psychology (viz. Seligman's “Authentic Happiness”); following your bliss; well-received, intense, salutary interest; the deep, inward release that comes in remarkable / easing moments and which is cultivatable; deeply exuberant, beneficent pleasure with another ~ a partner ~ a love; best friends; understanding; reverie; friendliness; what gives you joy?; imagination to love profoundly, and then to love; wholesomeness; well-being; peace, peace of mind, and at peace-ness; being in love; ahimsa {non-harming}; a good connection; virtue, esp. of transcendent, jubilant love; helpfulness; doing good; loving touch (e.g. a gentle hand, hugs, massage, Watsu*Waterdance {Wassertanz} & more); singing "I love you;" the inspiration for the creation of great, loving art; rich, bountiful inventiveness / imagination in amity; Harbin Hot Springs ~ harbin.org; heart consciousness; harmony; the neurochemistry of romantic love~heightened levels of four neurotrophins, - i.e. NGF, BDNF, NT-3, and NT-4 (Emanuele et al., 2005); loving bliss ~*MMmmm ~ loving bliss and practices for this*~ (naturally, and with many qualities, but ecstasy is a reference experience ~> oxytocins~dopamine); practicing loving bliss vis-à-vis a musical instrument; balance; wonderful, oceanic wholeness; free love; happiness; contentment; the joy / rapport / 'reading' of minds that goes on between two (or more) skillful musicians / listeners, who are improvising; love letters; harmony love fests; love is the answer; loving bliss as friends; the thought, experience, and generation of love; quiet wisdom ~ love of wisdom; and sophisticated, intuitive caritas - (e.g., see Tolstoy’s “The Three Questions”) - (what are other positive characteristics / expressions of love that you can add, besides the American Friends' Service Committee, the Friends' Committee on National Legislation, and others like them? And how can we develop them together? How can we move toward world peace & love?), - and this somehow in conjunction with pulls from (a love of?) evolutionary biology~naturalism~nature~the physical~the material~the neurophysiological~the symbolic; knowledge / knowing something / different ways of knowing; data / hypothesizing - experimentation - empirical findings/evidence - phenomenology; DNA {deoxyribonucleic acid} / genes / evolution/ primatology (Sapolsky) {writing has existed only for about 5500 years, and each of us represents an unbroken line of life ~ DNA about 3.5 billion years old} and the sciences (all understanding/ideas are shaped by evolutionary biology~neurophysiology and making meaning vis-à-vis an earth-centric life?); the earth's sun; stars; mathematics~proofs; quantum mechanics/physics; cooperation and lessening the pain of competition; “Concepts of Determinism” (Money 1988: 114 ff.) - pairbondage, troopbondage, abidance, ycleptance, foredoomance, with these coping strategies: adhibition (engagement), inhibition & explication; some people's ideas of the 'emotional' mind / human “nature/mind,” – biological, psychological and socioculturally anthropological ({linguistic- } practices in context?), etc.; sensibleness/common sense; creative social practices, norms and their benefits / limitations / innovations; moving from the emergence of life to single-celled organisms, the Cambrian explosion & later speciation (viz. dinosaurs & the K-T extinction), to neural activity about love, expressed in language; significantly limiting military/war-oriented institutions like departments of 'defense'/the U.S. Pentagon; lessening, letting go and/or easing discontent / frustration / worry / procrastination / anger / fear / hate, etc.; anti-nuclearism; lessening problems associated with social striving; ambivalence (letting a decision emerge, processually, to focus, in part, on generating love?); great work ~ the contingencies / exigencies of making a living wage/money ~ artisans; socially responsible prosperity; polyamory; individual autonomy / space; Renaissance ~ individualism; humor; time; significantly lessening the negative impact of consumerism and profit-driven corporations and capitalism, for all (Latouche); cooperatives / collectives / credit unions; not making others vulnerable; de-centering power-seeking (see Lao Tzu’s “Tao Te Ching”~ *); {warm} water; critical thinking {esp. reason / rational discourse – see “The Oxford Companion to Philosophy” – 2005, the philosopher C.D.C. Reeve’s essay “Ionian Thinkers” – 1999, or U.C. Berkeley philosopher Bert Dreyfus’s 15 online papers in the web archive -- (on the myth of the mental, being, nihilism, art, politics, agency, subjectivity, the Internet, skills, existentialism, etc.)}; metaphysical / epistemological / ontological inquiries~curiosity; an alternative, complex, dynamic, maximally flexible, nonviolent code / argument / explanation / language; unique constellations or series of events / ideas (history? or 'karma'? or a "kula ring"? or an 'ecology' of actions / energies?, or a 'matrix'?, or fabric of life, or a feedback system, or a far-reaching systems' theory?); a positive alternative to a default, evolutionary biologically-based, moral skepticism ~ sweet, love-life nihilism; symbols / symbolic representation (can we combine symbols together in infinite ways with infinite referents?:) / the symbolic species (Deacon); metaphors, such as humans are experiential, feeling, thinking, remembering, imagining, sentient, networking, idiosyncratic, embodied, procreating computers {conscious, sociocultural, distributed, input-think/feel-output bodymind systems that can have babies and can self-program (“add/remove programs?”;) / learn / plan and which also have been 'selected for' / “encoded” in ancestral environments via Darwinian natural selection, and by family and community (acculturation)}, musicians, the yoga tree of life, sail boat (e.g. Nate Herreshoff's or catamaran) {or cyber-?} navigators/pilots/captains, or, have fun-to-explore 'inner bodies' (or are
So many of the ways one experiences life and the not-yet-clearly-understood processes of consciousness ^ thinking {or loving bliss viz. MDMA} (in an analytical, philosophical, knowledge-based sense) are shaped by the variable ways one sees and thinks about life (I think) (conceived of here as distinct from biological, economic, political, social, cultural and linguistic processes, and scientific methods) and aren't always under the control (agency) of the thinker / bodymind (viz. John Money 1988: 116, 118), but not totally out of control of the agent, either. (Philosophically and biologically, how does free, human agency {choice} – esp. intention - work causally in relation to consciousness / genius?) Sometimes I think to myself, why not focus on freeing love and center oneself / be present and wait in silence (when one isn't feeling or acting lovingly, for things change - or talk in a way which cultivates 'love' with friends) or sing, make music / art, write {poetry}, read, have a great deal of fun, do what you like & want, think, do fundamental research, dance with friends {honey}, or write a great book with friends or alone when one is 'in love,' which is what I'd like to do (in conjunction with taking care of making a living which, for hunter-gatherers, for example, might take 2 - 3 hours per day depending on the biogregion and which thus might represent the time needed today to make a living, given a change in economic conditions)? Quaker processes (among many) allow for the possibility to contemplate such opportunities and ways (and love), and then to realize them. I suppose there’s a method of dry, philosophical / analytical / hermeneutical (see Gadamer) / anthropological / phenomenological inquiry implicit here that I would like to follow logically in a number of directions, but in a way which gets to an experience of love as touched on above, and doesn’t get into the more negative aspects of love. How to produce / generate love (the embodied, neural correlates of the above, realized naturally) in large measure over time is a question that interests me. Generating mutual love is something I would not only like to think about but also do.
While one’s life can go in many directions (and few as well), the degree that one can shape these love~life processes allows the possibility that people, with friendly support, can cultivate, at least in some kind of artistic sense, some or all of these aspects of love. John Dalton’s thinking represents a far-reaching, scientific, paradigm shift, and his life moved in a number of interesting directions, - and people loved him.
I’m not sure whether I should share this with you, but I'll place it here anyway as they are interesting ideas / words and you might enjoy them. ;-)
:)))
Warmly & affectionately, Scott
P.S. I find inspiring this Nobel Peace Prize Address (1947) on behalf of Quakers in general … :)
www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1947/press.html
http://www2.gol.com/users/quakers/nobel_prize_speech.htm
Friends' Dalton Letter Bibliography
Henri Matisse's “Life of Joy”
Print Friends' Dalton Letter (.doc)
home: scottmacleod.com
http://scottmacleod.com/daltonletter.htm
Copyright Scott MacLeod's Arts 1998 -2020
scott@scottmacleod.com
Loving Bliss Letters
Friends' Dalton Letter
scottmacleod.com/daltonletter.htm
Loving Bliss and Practices to Elicit This
scottmacleod.com/LovingBlissPractices.htm
Loving Bliss as Friends
scottmacleod.com/LovingBlissFriends.htm
Eudaimonia is Flow and Bliss
scottmacleod.com/EudaimoniaFlow.htm
Guidelines for Practicing Loving Bliss vis-à-vis Practicing a Musical Instrument
scottmacleod.com/GuidelinesPracticingLovingBlissvavMusicalInstrument.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson's_bird-of-paradise
(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2011/04/friends-dalton-letter.html - April 24, 2011)
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