In the arts, we may refer to a certain state in performance as contained and connected and that with God, nature, and the universe. — put together some observations in psychology — Ecstasy: a Study of Some Secular and Religious Experiences (1961). I happen to think our Homo sapiens sapiens is as wild a species as any but with a large brain and a phenomenal mouth, and one has proven capable of great creativity and intuition and the other of aiding the invention of languages (of which there are more than 7,000 separable extant as I type in just one) and language culture, each of the thousands embracing and entertaining one form of divinity or another.
Mine (edited lightly).
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In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to writing that was more poetic and expressive. I also wanted a more viable balance between my work with words and my work with wood, especially furniture for worship settings.
William J. Everett’s Blog | Reflections on Writing, Woodworking, and Ethics
Human life (actually for those bedding down on Siberian ledges to watch the sunset, bear life too) entails, whether we or the bears like it or not, an aesthetic and spiritual emotional and emotive experience.
That’s life.
The wonder is how many approaches have been adopted, created, discovered, embraced, invented, and modified in service to those experiences.
Betwixt and between, then and now, but then I turned a first graduate degree toward facets of the experience of leisure time — boredom, ecstasy,flow, motivation, peak experiences, self-concept, self-as-entertainer, etc. — and among the predicates were youth, mountains, and music.
Not much has changed about me, but my views have been broadened, and here in the blogland of “conflict, culture, language, and psychology”, it may be worth taking a moment while fighting rages in Syria, Iran struggles to obtain The Bomb, and terror drips into everyday life somewhere in Iraq and Pakistan on a daily to weekly basis that our humanity is of just one species and that species, about 7.124 billion in number, communicates by way of more than 7,000 languages, each addressing the aesthetic and spiritual percepts of its speakers.
We should not be fighting.
We should be awed.
Briefest Introductory Reference
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