There are many people who masquerade belief as science. Likewise, there are many scientists who cloud their science with dogmatic beliefs. Hey, I’m guilty of it too. If I were a scientist, I would try to force myself to take into consideration the possibility that my observation of a seemingly controlled experiment, may actually be slightly altering the experiment itself, thereby stopping it from being a controlled experiment; …or is it the other way around? Ah buggers, here, watch this video. I’d challenge anyone to read Michael Talbot’s Holographic Universe and walk away without the slightest doubt about some of physics supposed “laws”

the written word has precise and specific meanings…….or at least they used to. when one gets into the scientific or legal definitions of words we start to realise the specificity

But it’s only *apparent* specificity because contracts are *always* challenged and picked apart in court. And science on the grand scale seems to be all about squabbling over the definition of things, how they work and why they do what they do. Scientific language seems almost to change daily! Just look at Pluto being demoted from being a planet!

How though are they connected.? This is the second part of the construct. How do we interpret the signs.?

I have traveled to a few of the ancient oracle sights from the ancient world. I have been to Delphi in Greece, Didama in Turkey, and Siwa in Egypt . In each of these places, words were used to try to divine, or interpret the future. Each of these places were interestingly located , in a kind of beautiful or spectacular area.

Each of these places operated for hundreds of years. I suppose you could say they were a little like magic think tanks.

i disagree.

You disagree with what?

the stone is always a stone. the words on today`s paper are different from yesterday`s.

But you’re leaving out the fact that today’s paper is going to be different tomorrow, but the paper for October 7, 2006 is going to be the same no matter where or when you read that particular issue. So I’m not sure what you mean.

we have all spent years learning the very precise code of these words and are intimate with what they mean as a consensus.

Are you really serious that you believe words are a “precise code” and that their meaning is totally consensual? Cause now I *really* don’t understand what you mean!

the shaman in the woods talking with stones and spiders has taken a different form of training and wouldn`t know the first thing about the printed word unless he had grown up in a post gutenberg society like us.

Well, right. Of course. Isn’t that self-evident? Are you challenging the value-assumption laden in that - the idea that maybe the shaman is somehow “better” because of his alternate form of training?

That may be what Abram means, but it may not be (see my point above about words not being a “precise code”). To me, what he means is that because of our post-Gutenberg training, the only kind of language we can understand intimately without other training is based on texts, media and spoken and written communication. He seems to be saying that because of our natural language faculties being filled up with this system of culturally-based language, that we consequently have a reduced capacity to apply our natural language capacity to “reading” other types of language systems which exist.

I think his point is not that the shaman’s woodland language skills are not intrinsically better than our textual ones. But that he is recognizing that humans are products of nature, products of the forest, and as such have an inherent need to be physically, emotionally and spiritually connected to that world, and that the lack of such a connection is what causes us to feel alienated, empty and desparate. I think THAT is the value judgement he is making and I would tend to agree!