as atomized knowledge by dividing it into disciplines, subdisciplines, and sub-subdisciplines—breaking it up into smaller and smaller unconnected fragments of academic specialization, even as the world looks to colleges for help in integrating and synthesizing the exponential increases in information brought about by technological advances. The trend has serious ramifications. Understanding the nature of knowledge, its unity, its varieties, its limitations, and its uses and abuses is necessary for the success of democracy… We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of knowledge.[15]
This is not a problem isolated in the ivy towers of universities. It is an acute problem also for all of us, who have personbyte and firmbyte limits, but who also need to understand a world that is rapidly changing due to science, technology, and globalization.
The bio-social-physical you and me are never outside the matrix, but in this scientific and philosophical exercise we seem to stand away, looking down on the matrix from above. So far as we know, no other entity in the universe has achieved this capacity, and it is in this domain that humans are no longer middling creatures of the matrix. Our self-transcendence, realized especially through the progress in science and economics, art and culture, is a super and completely natural emergent phenomena. We come to understand the matrix from the inside out, though the matrix knows nothing of us.[15] V. Gregorian, V., “Colleges Must Reconstruct the Unity of Knowledge.” Chronicle of Higher Education 50(39): B12. 2004.
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of disaster... To want control is the pathology! Not that a person can get control, because of course you never do... Man is only a part of larger systems, and the part can never control the whole"
The Global Vision project was greatly inspired by Gregory Bateson, the late anthropologist, biological philosopher, and author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred. Bateson developed Systems Theory and Cybernetics to investigate the self-organising aspects of biological and social systems, and he showed how most of the threats to our survival and well-being are the direct result of misguided attempts to apply linear control to biological and social systems whose mode of organisation is essentially non-linear. He may yet be regarded as the most important thinker of the 20th century.
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ns of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication. As well as engaging personally in dialogue with Western scientists and encouraging scientific research into Buddhist meditative practices, he has led a campaign to introduce basic science education in Tibetan Buddhist monastic colleges and academic centers, and has encouraged Tibetan scholars to engage with science as a way of revitalizing the Tibetan philosophical tradition. His Holiness believes that science and Buddhism share a common objective: to serve humanity and create a better understanding of the world. He feels that science offers powerful tools for understanding the interconnectedness of all life, and that such understanding provides an essential rationale for ethical behavior and the protection of the environment.
His Holiness summarized these ideas in his Nobel prize acceptance speech:
"With the ever growing impact of science on our lives, religion and spirituality have a greater role to play reminding us of our humanity. There is no contradiction between the two. Each gives us valuable insights into the other. Both science and the teachings of the Buddha tell us of the fundamental unity of all things. This understanding is crucial if we are to take positive and decisive action on the pressing global concern with the environment."
A complete biography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama is available on the website of the Tibetan government-in-exile.…
A day will come when all nations on our continent will form
a European brotherhood ... A day will come when we shall
see ...the United States of America and the United States of
Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the
seas." ...which now [RE]presents a vision of a status quo that DOES
NOT ADDRESS the urgently required NEED for a GLOBAL
VISION of UNITY of the ALL THE PEOPLES of EVERY LAST
ONE of the NATION of PLANET EARTH in their role as
custodians of ALL THE PASSENGERS of Spaceship Earth !!!
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