Eastern and Western attitudes toward nature

A seventeenth-century Japanese haiku by Basho:

When I look carefully

I see the nazuna blooming

By the hedge!

A nineteenth-century poem by Alfred Tennyson:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower--but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

The Buddhist philosopher Suzuki (1960) observes that the Japanese poet does not pluck the nazuna but is content to admire it from a respectful distance; his feelings are "too full, too deep, and he has no desire to conceptualize it" (3). Tennyson, in contrast, is active and analytical. He rips the plant by its roots, destroying it in the very act of admiring it. "He does not apparently care for its destiny. His curiosity must be satisfied. As some medical scientists do, he would vivisect the flower" (3).

Tennyson's violent imagery is reminiscent of Francis Bacon's description of the natural scientist as one who must "torture nature's secrets from her" and make her a "slave" to mankind (Merchant 1980: 169). Principles of monism, holism, and balanced complementarity in nature, which can temper perceptions of opposition and conflict, have largely given way to the analytic urge in the recent history of Western culture.

(from "A Critical-Interpretive Approach in Medical Anthropology: Rituals and Routines of Discipline and Dissent" by Margaret Lock and Nancy Scheper-Hughes, 1990)

Being one with life

I feel pressure within myself to become what I am not yet. I have a constant feeling of failure as I don't seem to achieve the status of who I should be. I feel guilt for not being all that I could be. I fear wasted potential in the use of my time and in the amount of energy invested. I dream of how much I could accomplish if, only if, I would do more and be more.

But the truth is that right now I am who I am, and that's all that I can be now. There's nothing wrong with that. Accepting such truth seems to be the first step to being one with life.

I don't need to be anyone else--I couldn't be anyone else! If I see the need of changing my deeds and beliefs then I should do so without fear of lagging behind. Who sets the standard anyway?

Today, I'll be one with myself; I'll be one with life.

(yep, that's a dialog with myself but you're welcome to comment on it ;)

Participatory Research

"This implies breaking the monopoly of knowledge in the hands of the elites--i.e. giving the people their right to assert their existing knowledge to start with, giving them the opportunity and assistance, if needed, to advance their self-knowledge through self-enquiry as the basis of their action, and to review themselves and their experiences from action to further advance their self-knowledge. In this reflection-action-reflection of the people, professional knowledge can be useful only in a dialogue with people's knowledge on an equal footing through which both can be enriched, and not in the arrogance of assumed superior wisdom. Altering thus the relations of knowledge ... is a central commitment of what is being termed as 'participatory research'."

(Breaking the Monopoly of Knowledge, Anisur Rahman)