[Dialogue] History remembered

[Janice Ulangca]

Thank you, Frank Bremmer! for sharing your take on some threads in EI/ICA history.  (Frank's message is titled Re: RS-1 Events, and was posted Feb. 24.)  One context and one methodological clue I find especially important in relation to current work I'm involved with.  I quote them below, and add another thought from Marcus Borg, that relates to patterns of thinking.  And of course much gratitude to all who have contributed to the contextual and facilitative wisdom that is a treasured part of the EI/ICA heritage.

Janice Ulangca

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Says Frank Bremmer:
In January 2005 (ToP training, Kings Cross, Sydney) 
Jeanette Stanfield made the comment about the philosophies 
underlying ToP: "The meaning of the situation is to be found 
within the situation".  That's the first time I had heard it said 
eloquently and in a form I could handle, and in a form which 
was not criticising (or "bashing over the head") other people and the 
perspectives they came from.

And so in the present situation you may draw in insights, language, symbols 
from ones tradition, culture, language etc.  But there is mystery, meaning, 
holiness (add your own words) within the present situation. ........

I remember David Zahrt, at a LENS Mk I in Adelaide in 1974 - forgive my 
elephantine memory for trivia - suggesting that the LENS method developed a 
consensus by "mapping" the opinion and ideas in a group and work on that 
map.  I always found that image useful when working with groups of secondary 
students, and teachers with a very upfront political ideology - that the 
"mapping" used all the ideologies and ideas in the room, and dug beneath 
them for common threads.

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Says Marcus Borg:
"The centuries since the Enlightenment have also generated a deeper understanding of how culture shapes consciousness and knowledge itself.  We - including the way we think and what we consider to be knowledge - are very much shaped by our location in time and space, our place in the historical and cultural process.  There is no vantage point completely outside this process.  Of course, we are not completely confined to our time and place; the study of history and other cultures enables us to some extent to transcend time and place, but we nevertheless see from where we are.  Thus there is no 'absolute' knowledge.  All knowledge (even scientific knowledge) is historically conditioned and relative.  This does not mean that all claims to knowledge are equally valid; some understandings clearly work better than others.  But it does mean that no expression of knowledge, whether religious or scientific, is absolute truth for all time.  We always have the treasure of knowledge in earthen vessels."
>From The Emerging Christian Way - Thoughts, Stories and Wisdom for a Faith of Transformation - a collection of articles by Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox and others, published 2006.


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Janice Ulangca
3413 Stratford Drive
Vestal, NY  13850
607-797-4595
aulangca at stny.rr.com
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