From: Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Date: Tue Oct 19 1999 - 13:34:33 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 03:40 AM 18/10/99 -0400, Bob Owen wrote:
>
> [standard cognitive glitch analysis nicely summarised - then: ]
>
> >Occidentals rest their sense of ego-integrity on the belief that the
> >World is, beneath all appearances to the contrary, really logical --
> >things DO make sense after all.
>
> Oh. So it's only staid two-valued whitebread westerners who laugh at jokes
> and pratfalls? Not!
I don't understand the Oriental "sense of humor" Damien, so I did not
want to overgeneralize Kierkegaard's nor my own analysis. This may
be purely idiosyncratic. For example, the Zen Koan:
Nothing will do. What do you do?
strikes me as extremely funny. But in a Japanese home I would suppress
an overt response. And that is just the difficulty for me -- a culture that
to an extent much greater than our own tends to conventionalize all
behavior. This is deep conditioning, and I am inclined to believe it does
succeed in extinguishing some responses which are to us spontaneous.
Bob
======================
Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA
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