From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seven of the twenty volumes of printed second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1989)
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Published	1884–1928 (first edition) 1989 (second edition) Third edition in preparation[1]

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to scholars and academic researchers, as well as describing usage in its many variations throughout the world.^[2][3] The second edition, comprising 21,728 pages in 20 volumes, was published in 1989.

Work began on the dictionary in 1857, but it was only in 1884 that it began to be published in unbound fascicles as work continued on the project, under the name of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. In 1895, the title The Oxford English Dictionary was first used unofficially on the covers of the series, and in 1928 the full dictionary was republished in ten bound volumes. In 1933, the title The Oxford English Dictionary fully replaced the former name in all occurrences in its reprinting as twelve volumes with a one-volume supplement. More supplements came over the years until 1989, when the second edition was published.^[1] Since 2000, compilation of a third edition of the dictionary has been underway, approximately half of which is complete as of 2018.^[1]

The first electronic version of the dictionary was made available in 1988. The online version has been available since 2000, and as of April 2014 was receiving over two million visits per month. The third edition of the dictionary will most likely only appear in electronic form; the Chief Executive of Oxford University Press has stated that it is unlikely that it will ever be printed.^[1][4][5]

Historical nature

As a historical dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary features entries in which the earliest ascertainable recorded sense of a word, whether current or obsolete, is presented first, and each additional sense is presented in historical order according to the date of its earliest ascertainable recorded use.^[6] Following each definition are several brief illustrating quotations presented in chronological order from the earliest ascertainable use of the word in that sense to the last ascertainable use for an obsolete sense, to indicate both its life span and the time since its desuetude, or to a relatively recent use for current ones.

The format of the OED‘s entries has influenced numerous other historical lexicography projects. The forerunners to the OED, such as the early volumes of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, had initially provided few quotations from a limited number of sources, whereas the OED editors preferred larger groups of quite short quotations from a wide selection of authors and publications. This influenced later volumes of this and other lexicographical works.^[7]

Entries and relative size

Diagram of the types of English vocabulary included in the OED, devised by James Murray, its first editor.

According to the publishers, it would take a single person 120 years to “key in” the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread them, and 540 megabytes to store them electronically.^[8] As of 30 November 2005, the Oxford English Dictionary contained approximately 301,100 main entries. Supplementing the entry headwords, there are 157,000 bold-type combinations and derivatives;^[9] 169,000 italicized-bold phrases and combinations;^[10] 616,500 word-forms in total, including 137,000 pronunciations; 249,300 etymologies; 577,000 cross-references; and 2,412,400 usage quotations. The dictionary’s latest, complete print edition (second edition, 1989) was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages. The longest entry in the OED2 was for the verb set, which required 60,000 words to describe some 430 senses. As entries began to be revised for the OED3 in sequence starting from M, the longest entry became make in 2000, then put in 2007, then run in 2011.^[11][12][13]

Despite its considerable size, the OED is neither the world’s largest nor the earliest exhaustive dictionary of a language. Another earlier large dictionary is the Grimm brothers‘ dictionary of the German language, begun in 1838 and completed in 1961. The first edition of the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca is the first great dictionary devoted to a modern European language (Italian) and was published in 1612; the first edition of Dictionnaire de l’Académie française dates from 1694. The official dictionary of Spanish is the Diccionario de la lengua española (produced, edited, and published by the Real Academia Española), and its first edition was published in 1780. The Kangxi dictionary of Chinese was published in 1716.^[14]

History

hideOxford English Dictionary Publications
Publication date	Volume range	Title	Volume
1888	A and B	A New ED	Vol. 1
1893	C	NED	Vol. 2
1897	D and E	NED	Vol. 3
1900	F and G	NED	Vol. 4
1901	H to K	NED	Vol. 5
1908	L to N	NED	Vol. 6
1909	O and P	NED	Vol. 7
1914	Q to Sh	NED	Vol. 8
1919	Si to St	NED	Vol. 9/1
1919	Su to Th	NED	Vol. 9/2
1926	Ti to U	NED	Vol. 10/1
1928	V to Z	NED	Vol. 10/2
1928	All	NED	10 vols.
1933	All	NED	Suppl..
1933	All & sup.	Oxford ED	13 vols.
1972	A	OED Sup.	Vol. 1
1976	H	OED Sup.	Vol. 2
1982	O	OED Sup.	Vol. 3
1986	Sea	OED Sup.	Vol. 4
1989	All	OED 2nd Ed.	20 vols.
1993	All	OED Add. Ser.	Vols. 1–2
1997	All	OED Add. Ser.	Vol. 3

Origins

The dictionary began as a Philological Society project of a small group of intellectuals in London (and unconnected to Oxford University):^{[15]:103–4,112} Richard Chenevix Trench, Herbert Coleridge, and Frederick Furnivall, who were dissatisfied with the existing English dictionaries. The society expressed interest in compiling a new dictionary as early as 1844,^[16] but it was not until June 1857 that they began by forming an “Unregistered Words Committee” to search for words that were unlisted or poorly defined in current dictionaries. In November, Trench’s report was not a list of unregistered words; instead, it was the study On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, which identified seven distinct shortcomings in contemporary dictionaries:^[17]

• Incomplete coverage of obsolete words
• Inconsistent coverage of families of related words
• Incorrect dates for earliest use of words
• History of obsolete senses of words often omitted
• Inadequate distinction among synonyms
• Insufficient use of good illustrative quotations
• Space wasted on inappropriate or redundant content.

The society ultimately realized that the number of unlisted words would be far more than the number of words in the English dictionaries of the 19th century, and shifted their idea from covering only words that were not already in English dictionaries to a larger project. Trench suggested that a new, truly comprehensive dictionary was needed. On 7 January 1858, the society formally adopted the idea of a comprehensive new dictionary.^[15]:107–8 Volunteer readers would be assigned particular books, copying passages illustrating word usage onto quotation slips. Later the same year, the society agreed to the project in principle, with the title A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED).^[18]:ix–x

Early editors

Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–1886) played the key role in the project’s first months, but his appointment as Dean of Westminster meant that he could not give the dictionary project the time that it required. He withdrew and Herbert Coleridge became the first editor.^[19]:8–9Frederick Furnivall, 1825–1910

On 12 May 1860, Coleridge’s dictionary plan was published and research was started. His house was the first editorial office. He arrayed 100,000 quotation slips in a 54 pigeon-hole grid.^[19]:9 In April 1861, the group published the first sample pages; later that month, Coleridge died of tuberculosis, aged 30.^[18]😡

Thereupon Furnivall became editor; he was enthusiastic and knowledgeable, but temperamentally ill-suited for the work.^[15]:110 Many volunteer readers eventually lost interest in the project, as Furnivall failed to keep them motivated. Furthermore, many of the slips were misplaced.

Furnivall believed that, since many printed texts from earlier centuries were not readily available, it would be impossible for volunteers to efficiently locate the quotations that the dictionary needed. As a result, he founded the Early English Text Society in 1864 and the Chaucer Society in 1868 to publish old manuscripts.^[18]:xii Furnivall’s preparatory efforts lasted 21 years and provided numerous texts for the use and enjoyment of the general public, as well as crucial sources for lexicographers, but they did not actually involve compiling a dictionary. Furnivall recruited more than 800 volunteers to read these texts and record quotations. While enthusiastic, the volunteers were not well trained and often made inconsistent and arbitrary selections. Ultimately, Furnivall handed over nearly two tons of quotation slips and other materials to his successor.^[20]

In the 1870s, Furnivall unsuccessfully attempted to recruit both Henry Sweet and Henry Nicol to succeed him. He then approached James Murray, who accepted the post of editor. In the late 1870s, Furnivall and Murray met with several publishers about publishing the dictionary. In 1878, Oxford University Press agreed with Murray to proceed with the massive project; the agreement was formalized the following year.^[15]:111–2 20 years after its conception, the dictionary project finally had a publisher. It would take another 50 years to complete.

Late in his editorship, Murray learned that a prolific reader named W. C. Minor was a criminal lunatic.^[15]:xiii Minor was a Yale University-trained surgeon and military officer in the American Civil War, and was confined to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane after killing a man in London. Minor invented his own quotation-tracking system, allowing him to submit slips on specific words in response to editors’ requests. The story of Murray and Minor later served as the central focus of The Surgeon of Crowthorne (US title: The Professor and the Madman^[15]), a popular book about the creation of the OED. This book was then the basis for the 2019 film The Professor and the Madman, starring Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.

Oxford editors

James Murray in the Scriptorium at Banbury Road

During the 1870s, the Philological Society was concerned with the process of publishing a dictionary with such an immense scope.^[1] They had pages printed by publishers, but no publication agreement was reached; both the Cambridge University Press and the Oxford University Press were approached. The OUP finally agreed in 1879 (after two years of negotiating by Sweet, Furnivall, and Murray) to publish the dictionary and to pay Murray, who was both the editor and the Philological Society president. The dictionary was to be published as interval fascicles, with the final form in four volumes, totalling 6,400 pages. They hoped to finish the project in ten years.^[19]:1A quotation slip as used in the compilation of the OED, illustrating the word flood.

Murray started the project, working in a corrugated iron outbuilding called the “Scriptorium” which was lined with wooden planks, book shelves, and 1,029 pigeon-holes for the quotation slips.^[18]:xiii He tracked and regathered Furnivall’s collection of quotation slips, which were found to concentrate on rare, interesting words rather than common usages. For instance, there were ten times as many quotations for abusion as for abuse.^[21] He appealed, through newspapers distributed to bookshops and libraries, for readers who would report “as many quotations as you can for ordinary words” and for words that were “rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar or used in a peculiar way”.^[21] Murray had American philologist and liberal arts college professor Francis March manage the collection in North America; 1,000 quotation slips arrived daily to the Scriptorium and, by 1880, there were 2,500,000.^[19]:15

The first dictionary fascicle was published on 1 February 1884—twenty-three years after Coleridge’s sample pages. The full title was A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society; the 352-page volume, words from A to Ant, cost 12s 6d.^[19]:251 (or about $668.24 in 2013) The total sales were only 4,000 copies.^[22]:169

The OUP saw that it would take too long to complete the work with unrevised editorial arrangements. Accordingly, new assistants were hired and two new demands were made on Murray.^[19]:32–33 The first was that he move from Mill Hill to Oxford, which he did in 1885. Murray had his Scriptorium re-erected on his new property.^[18]:xviiThe 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, house, erstwhile residence of James Murray, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary

Murray resisted the second demand: that if he could not meet schedule, he must hire a second, senior editor to work in parallel to him, outside his supervision, on words from elsewhere in the alphabet. Murray did not want to share the work, feeling that he would accelerate his work pace with experience. That turned out not to be so, and Philip Gell of the OUP forced the promotion of Murray’s assistant Henry Bradley (hired by Murray in 1884), who worked independently in the British Museum in London beginning in 1888. In 1896, Bradley moved to Oxford University.^[19]

Gell continued harassing Murray and Bradley with his business concerns—containing costs and speeding production—to the point where the project’s collapse seemed likely. Newspapers reported the harassment, particularly the Saturday Review, and public opinion backed the editors.^{[22]:182–83} Gell was fired, and the university reversed his cost policies. If the editors felt that the dictionary would have to grow larger, it would; it was an important work, and worth the time and money to properly finish.

Neither Murray nor Bradley lived to see it. Murray died in 1915, having been responsible for words starting with A–D, H–K, O–P, and T, nearly half the finished dictionary; Bradley died in 1923, having completed E–G, L–M, S–Sh, St, and W–We. By then, two additional editors had been promoted from assistant work to independent work, continuing without much trouble. William Craigie started in 1901 and was responsible for N, Q–R, Si–Sq, U–V, and Wo–Wy.^[18]:xix The OUP had previously thought London too far from Oxford but, after 1925, Craigie worked on the dictionary in Chicago, where he was a professor.^[18]:xix[19] The fourth editor was Charles Talbut Onions, who compiled the remaining ranges starting in 1914: Su–Sz, Wh–Wo, and X–Z.^[23]

In 1919–1920, J. R. R. Tolkien was employed by the OED, researching etymologies of the Waggle to Warlock range;^[24] later he parodied the principal editors as “The Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford” in the story Farmer Giles of Ham.^[25]

By early 1894, a total of 11 fascicles had been published, or about one per year: four for A–B, five for C, and two for E.^[18] Of these, eight were 352 pages long, while the last one in each group was shorter to end at the letter break (which eventually became a volume break). At this point, it was decided to publish the work in smaller and more frequent instalments; once every three months beginning in 1895 there would be a fascicle of 64 pages, priced at 2s 6d. If enough material was ready, 128 or even 192 pages would be published together. This pace was maintained until World War I forced reductions in staff.^[18]:xx Each time enough consecutive pages were available, the same material was also published in the original larger fascicles.^[18]:xx Also in 1895, the title Oxford English Dictionary was first used. It then appeared only on the outer covers of the fascicles; the original title was still the official one and was used everywhere else.^[18]:xx

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary#:~:text=Work%20began%20on%20the%20dictionary,Collected%20by%20The%20Philological%20Society.

Re-Mind Me

by Ole Dammegård 

‘Re-Mind Me’: The manual on how to dissolve the matrix, or how to reach enlightenment,or how to just live a better life.

Here is a simple guide that might help you unlock some of the most profound and deep secrets of your life. It is especially well suited for children, teenagers, adults, old timers and seekers of all ages.

It is a great tool to see if you are aware of what is going on in your life. What is real, and what isn’t? How do you deal with so
called good and bad? It might also help you make your life as easeful, peaceful and useful as possible.

Based on what might be universal truths, this game-manual gives you very valuable inside information that can change your life for the better – if you choose to listen.

Do you want to try out the game – or are you already playing it?
(With foreword by Nalanie Chellaram)

(Goodreads.com)

June 7, 2020 (theshiftnetwork.com) White parishioners kneel to black parishioners to apologize for generations of racism and injustice during a ‘praytest’ Sunday. Hundreds united in solidarity at the Cuney Homes basketball courts in Houston’s Third Ward where George Floyd grew up playing hoops.

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

“Knowledge sets us free… A great library is freedom,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in contemplating the sacredness of public libraries. “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be,” her contemporary James Baldwin — who had read his way from the Harlem public library to the literary pantheon — insisted in his courageous and countercultural perspective on freedom.

Ronald McNair (October 21, 1950–January 28, 1986) was nine when he took his freedom into his own small hands.

Unlike Maya Angelou, who credited a library with saving her life, McNair’s triumphant and tragic life could not have been saved even by a library — he was the age I am now when he perished aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger before the eyes of a disbelieving nation. But his life was largely made by a library — a life equal parts inspiring and improbable against the cultural constrictions of his time and place; a life of determination that rendered him the second black person to launch into space, a decade and a half after a visionary children’s book first dared imagine the possibility.

A quarter century after McNair’s untimely death, a contemporary children’s book set out to broaden the landscape of possibility for generations to come by celebrating the formative fortitude of his trailblazing life.

Ron’s Big Mission (public library) by lyricist, scriptwriter, and teacher Rose Blue and former U.S. Navy journalist Corinne J. Naden, illustrated by Don Tate — a lovely addition to these emboldening picture-book biographies of cultural heroes — tells the story of a summer day in the segregated South in 1959 when the young Ron, a voracious reader with a passion for airplanes and dreams of becoming a pilot, awakens with the daring determination to bring home a book from the library checked out under his own name. He knows this is not allowed — he has devoured countless books at the library, but he knows that only white people are allowed to check them out. He also knows, with the clarity that children have in seeing into the unalloyed heart of reality, that whatever justification the grownups in power might have for this rule, there is no justice and humanity in it.

On the wings of his purehearted enthusiasm to dismantle the hypocrisies of the system, Ron races past the local baker offering him a fresh-baked donut, past his fried Carl shooting hoops, and into the library as the day’s first visitor.

The head librarian greets him warmly, delighted to see the young reader who has become “her best customer.” Ron waves back and heads straight for the shelves. After the usual disappointment of finding hardly any books with children who look like him, he opts for the impersonal consolation of machines, pulling out a few books about airplanes.

When another regular patron of the library — a kindly older white lady — offers to check the books out for him, Ron thanks her but declines. He heads to the front desk and lays the books on the counter. The desk clerk doesn’t even look at him.

With a child’s benevolence of interpretation, he thinks at first that she simply hasn’t heard him. But when she continues to disregard him, he does the most logical thing, by the undiluted logic we adults have relinquished in favor of the polite pretensions we call propriety: He jumps on the counter, then calmly restates his wish to check out the books.

Everyone is aghast.

Ron is reminded of the rule.

Still polite but still standing on the counter, he simply restates his wish — a small boy’s enormous act that would have made Thoreau proud as America’s premier champion of civil disobedience and ardent lover of public libraries.

Other patrons are staring. The library staff are stumped. Finally, they call the police. Two policemen arrive immediately. “Let someone check out the books for you, son,” one of them pleads with Ron. Ron refuses.

The head librarian then turns to the ultimate authority — Ron’s mother.

When Mrs. McNair arrives, she too reminds Ron of the rule — the rule he has known all along, the rule that is not a matter of reminding but of resisting. When this nine-year-old revolutionary states simply that the rule is wrong and unfair, and asks why he can’t check out books like everyone else, all the adults look at each other and grow silent.

The head librarian stares into the empty space as pandemonium enfolds the empty rule, then looks at Ron — this largehearted, hardheaded, hungry-brained boy, her very best customer. And she knows instantly what she must do.

In a testament to Hannah Arendt’s superb contemporaneous inquiry into the only effective antidote to the normalization of evil and her insistence that “under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not [and] no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation,” the librarian disappears into her office as Mrs. McNair and the policemen continue trying to sway Ron.

When she emerges a few minutes later, she hands Ron a library card with his very own name on it. Beaming with his triumph and with gratitude to his sole ally in this act of resistance on the small scale of the personal, with the colossal stakes of the political, he hands the card to the desk clerk as he politely restates his wish to check out the books.

She stamps it.

The rest is history, and it is the making of a future — Ron’s own future as a trailblazer who devoted his life to the ultimate unifying force, our shared cosmic belonging, and the futures of generations for whom he modeled the courage of rewriting the dominant narrative of permission and possibility. Today, a Space Shuttle graces the mural on the walls of the children’s room at the Lake City public library in South Carolina, where all children are allowed to check out any book they wish, including books starring children who look a lot like them.

Complement Ron’s Big Mission with What Miss Mitchell Saw — a lyrical picture-book about astronomer Maria Mitchell, who blazed the way for women in science — and a moving remembrance of Ronald McNair by his brother, then revisit astronaut Leland Melvin — the thirteenth black astronaut to leave Earth’s atmosphere, and among the fraction of a fraction of one percent of our species to have seen the splendor of our planet’s canopy from space — reading Pablo Neruda’s love letter to the forest.

For other picture-book biographies of visionaries who have changed the way we understand and live life, savor the illustrated stories of Wangari Maathai, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, John Lewis, Frida Kahlo, E.E. Cummings, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, and Nellie Bly.

Bayard Rustin at a news briefing on the Civil Rights March on Washington in the Statler Hotel, August 27, 1963. Photo by Warren K. Leffler courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsc-01272.

Episode Notes

Making Gay History stands with the countless Americans protesting systemic racism and the deaths of black and brown people at the hands of the police. And we draw inspiration from civil rights heroes like Bayard Rustin, an out and proud black gay man who dedicated his life to fighting injustice.

To understand the country, one must first understand its culture.

Benjamin Ra (TMFhurrah) June 5, 2020 (fool.com)

A civilizational gap, it seems is a difficult thing for Americans to admit. When Kiron Skinner, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, floated the idea that China hailed from a different civilization and that their principles are not our principles, she was promptly attacked. Dangerous idea, said The Washington Post, notwithstanding that Skinner was expressing a “kind of respect” for China in doing so, failing to understand that this is exactly how the Chinese would see things.

But a civilizational gap exists nonetheless. Between the U.S. and China, the differences go far beyond tastes and customs and enter the realm of values, morality, and even something as basic as the nature of truth. It is almost as if the brains of the two societies are wired differently, and therefore each side must painfully reorient itself and question its most fundamental assumptions, to gain even a glimpse into the workings of the other. That is also why a mutual understanding — society to society — is impossible. But perhaps we can, singly, achieve what is impossible collectively.

IMAGE SOURCE: GETTY IMAGES.

The virus, truth, and untruth

The recent kerfuffle over China’s handling of the coronavirus — its transparency, or lack thereof — is only the latest illustration of the civilizational gap between the U.S. and China.

Early on, the Chinese denied that there was human-to-human transmission of the virus. Only on Jan. 20 did a government scientist admit that such a thing was taking place. In the American mind, the Chinese did a bad thing  — they knew the reality of the virus and hid it from the world. Let us assume for the sake of argument that this is indeed what transpired.

As Americans , we believe in a right and a wrong, a truth and an untruth, and we assume these beliefs to be universal. Therefore, we think the Chinese, deep inside, know. They know they did a bad thing. They must.

But what if I told you that, from the Chinese perspective, they not only did not do anything wrong, but they are actually the heroes of this story, being punished like heroes often are for having done a good thing? Let me explain.

In the West, truth is a moral quality. Truth is good. Lying is bad. But in the East, truth is not so much a moral achievement as it is a resource, like money. It is something to be shared liberally with one’s compatriots, sparingly with outsiders, and rarely with foreigners, who, if anything, must be deceived.

From the Chinese point of view, they actually did a very humane thing. They didn’t reveal everything, didn’t share all of their truth-money, but they gave the world enough to let them know that this thing was serious. Must we spell it out to you? they would say. We shut down the country during the Lunar New Year. What other clue do you need?

I was not surprised to see South Korea and Singapore responding with alacrity to the challenge. They saw through the obfuscation. All of these countries, remember, hail from the same civilization, one that centers on China, and though their cultures differ, they share a language that goes beyond words.

As the Western world demands complete transparency from the Chinese, the Chinese are befuddled. It is beyond their conception to believe that Americans are attacking them purely out of principle, out of rage over being deceived. In their mind, they shared more than enough of their truth-money, and if the Americans are demanding all of it, complete transparency, then it can only be that they want to embarrass China. This is obviously a political ploy, they would say. How can it be otherwise?

China’s approach to truth confuses, perhaps even appalls the Westerner, and yet, it is an approach that is as much Asian as it is Chinese. It is shared by countries like Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, who all derive from that particular mix of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism that make up Chinese civilization.

In that tradition, the concept of an absolute, objective truth is almost irrelevant. The only truth, one can say, is that there is no truth. Instead, there is your truth and there is my truth, and both are as true to us as they may be untrue to the other. Leave it to the Westerners, they would say, to search for that fleeting elixir called Truth. Instead of Truth, Asian philosophy seeks Wisdom, a way to live.

A different morality

Truth isn’t the only thing our civilizations see differently. Even the concept of good and evil is different in the East.

Long ago, Christianity infused into the bones of the West an almost instinctual belief in an absolute good and an absolute evil. In the Western mind, the two are distinct. Good is by definition not evil, and evil is by definition not good. Moreover, it is our common duty to uphold the good and eliminate the evil.

In the East, such a goal would be overambitious, counterproductive. In place of good and evil, there is yin and yang. Yang, the active force; yin, the passive force. And within both yin and yang, there is both good and evil. In the Eastern mind, good and evil exist, but the goal is not for one to defeat the other but for each to coexist in harmony. One can say that in the East good must find a way to harmonize with evil — a viewpoint, I am sure, that would horrify a clergyman.

The Western mind, over the course of centuries, has developed a unique ability to categorize, and in so doing ruthlessly obey the rules of logic. As good is not evil, so black is not white. But to the Eastern mind, black, as can be seen in the figure, extends into white. An element of white exists in black, an element of black in white. The central message is a logical contradiction-that in the end, black and white are more or less the same.

IMAGE SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA.

The image of yin and yang is not just a pretty figure, but rather a template of the Eastern mind, where opposites meld and distinctions evaporate. Good becomes evil and evil becomes good, depending on the situation. Communism mixes with capitalism. With a straight face, the Chinese will say they are both communist and capitalist, indeed that one requires the other. And China, according to Mao, was a “people’s democratic dictatorship”- he meant it too. Think of this as a skill, an ability to believe with equal conviction two contradictory ideas, surmounting in a way, the rules of logic.

Of course the ends justify the means

The value system I’ve just described leads the East Asian states (not just China) to be extraordinarily freewheeling when it comes to the means they are prepared to use in pursuit of their goals, whether in politics or business. “Machiavellian” is one way to describe it. A strict adherence to moral principle — and to Truth — is even considered a sign of closed-mindedness.

In the West, we often debate about whether the ends justify the means, and in polite society, it is best to say that they do not, best to be straight and square and look appalled by the notion that sometimes principles should be ignored.

In the East, there is not even a debate – or if there was, it was settled long ago. The Eastern equivalent of Machiavellianism is called Legalism. Like Machiavelli, the Legalists advanced a rather cynical view of human nature and proposed a strong, amoral government as the best way to preserve stability. Legalism arose during the Warring States Period (475 BC – 221 BC) — before China was even united. In other words, the Eastern Machiavelli predates the Western Machiavelli by about 1800 years. This should demonstrate the degree to which the Machiavellian spirit is engrained in the spirit of East Asia.

By contrast, Americans still maintain a deep-seated belief that human nature can be improved and that a better world can develop as a result.

But China, Japan, Korea-these are old societies. Americans could not even begin to imagine the tragedies Asian peoples have both incurred and perpetrated. A single rebellion in the 19th century — the Taiping Rebellion — is said to have killed around 20 million people in China. During the Great Leap Forward, only sixty years ago, 45 million people are said to have perished, thousands in macabre scenes of cannibalism.

If ever the Asian states entertained the hope that human nature could be improved, it was lost long before in the annals of time, somewhat like the hopes and dreams of childhood are lost in maturity. So, in that sense, the Asian states are not so much unscrupulous as they are jaded.

A different civilization

It is with this civilization, many times older than us and complex beyond comprehension, that we have decided to struggle. We could not have picked an adversary more difficult to understand.

This article isn’t meant to explain Chinese civilization. That would require a book. Instead, this article is meant to illustrate how different China really is and how unlikely it is that those differences will reverse, given how Chinese culture has developed over millennia.

Until now, America has imposed its own moral system onto the world, aided of course by its physical might. Moral superiority buttressed by economic and military power — this is really what we mean by American leadership.

The Chinese have never accepted this system, but they bowed to it. Looking back, we should have taken this acquiescence for what it was: respect for American power. Instead we took it further, mixed our hopes into our predictions, and theorized that, somewhere down the line, China, too, would take on our democratic ways. Why the Communists would actively assist in their own extinction was never adequately explained.

This delusion was mainly self-delusion on our part, though certainly the Chinese made no effort to dispute us. In retrospect, we must admit that it was somewhat mad even to think that a country of China’s pride, after thousands of years of continuous history, would choose this moment to take on the ideals of a country which has only been around for 250 years — a country that has barely lived, as the Chinese would say.

One cannot truly understand the Chinese — or East Asia, for that matter — without recognizing that a different moral system exists, that it will continue, and that it is just as legitimate to 1.4 billion people as ours is to us. That is akin to Christians recognizing the authority of Vishnu, which is why a true understanding between the U.S. and China — society to society — is impossible. But perhaps it is possible to achieve singly that which is impossible collectively. In any case, that is our hope.

Something big just happened

I don’t know about you, but I always pay attention when one of the best growth investors in the world gives me a stock tip. Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner and his brother, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner, just revealed two brand new stock recommendations. Together, they’ve tripled the stock market’s return over the last 17 years.* And while timing isn’t everything, the history of Tom and David’s stock picks shows that it pays to get in early on their ideas.

(Submitted by Janet Cornwell, H.W., m.)

When we’re at home and searching to better ourselves, a certain genre of books beckons, again and again.

By Kristen Radtke

• June 5, 2020 (NYTimes.com)

Kristen Radtke is an illustrator and author of the graphic memoir “Imagine Wanting Only This.”

(Submitted by Michael Kelly, H.W.)

Theodore Nottingham “The Lost Gospel of Thomas: The Original Mystical Teachings of Yeshua” by Ted Nottingham is on Amazon and Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Gospel-Th… Teachings and guidance for subscribers at: http://www.tednottinghamteachings.com/

(hazelden.org)

In 1961, Bill W., cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, wrote a letter to one of the world’s
most famous psychiatrists, Dr. Carl Jung. This letter described a chain of events that changed Bill’s life and influenced the spiritual emphasis of Alcoholics Anonymous — events in which Jung played a key role.

It all began, Bill wrote, in a 1931 conversation between Jung and a hopeless alcoholic named Roland H.

Roland-young, gifted in business, rich-had tried every “cure” for alcoholism available at the time. All his attempts failed. In despair, he traveled to Zurich, Switzerland, and placed himself under the care of Dr. Jung for nearly a year.

Jung was blunt. He told Roland that any further medical treatment was pointless.

Stunned, Roland asked if there was any other hope.

Jung held out only one- — that Roland experience a “genuine conversion,” a spiritual transformation. According to Jung, such experiences were rare among alcoholics. But alcoholics who had them stopped drinking.

This shred of hope was enough for Roland. He returned home and began his spiritual search.

Bill, in his letter to Jung, told of his firsthand knowledge of conversion. For Bill, it happened in 1934 during his last “detox” at Towns Hospital in New York City. At that time, Bill was also an alcoholic at the end of his rope. Dr. Silkworth, Bill’s attending physician, laid out the options to Bill’s wife: She could let the authorities lock Bill up, watch him go insane, or let him die.

Bill knew the doctor’s prognosis. “My depression deepened unbearably and finally it seemed to me as though I were at the bottom of the pit,” he wrote to Jung. “All at once I found myself crying out, ‘If there is a God, let Him show Himself! I am ready to do anything.'”

At that moment, Bill wrote, his hospital room seemed to flood with white light. “I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.”

Silkworth encouraged Bill to hold on to this experience, whatever it was. Bill did, and never took another drink.

Released from the hospital, Bill immediately began work on two tasks: understanding that “white light” and helping other alcoholics to experience something equally powerful.

He got help with the first task from the writings of psychologist William James. James described conversion experiences in detail-including accounts from recovering alcoholics. Bill read these accounts eagerly, finding direct correspondences with his own experience.

For the second task, Bill borrowed heavily from the Oxford Group, an evangelical Christian movement that Rowland also joined. Bill embraced many of the group’s principles, which required members to:

• Make restitution to any people they’d harmed.
• Take a moral inventory by listing “personal defects.”
• Confess these defects to another person.
• Receive direction from God through prayer and meditation.

However, Bill and Oxford members later parted ways. The Oxford Group got political, endorsing a lot of people for elected office and the Oxford program was too black-and-white. Bill wanted a suggested program-not a list of requirements.

In this spirit of tolerance, Bill started talking about a “Higher Power” as the source of conversion experience. This Higher Power could be the God of the Christians. But it could also be any source of help that an alcoholic would accept.

Eventually Bill invited Roland and several more friends to form their own group, one that would focus strictly on helping alcoholics stay sober. And this group, Bill noted with gratitude in his letter to Jung, became the international movement that we now call Alcoholics Anonymous.

(Courtesy of Sarah Flynn)

radekk76 Lecture by Stanislav Grof on the “Psychology of the Future” (2009). Stan Grof, M.D., Ph.D. is a psychiatrist with more than fifty years experience researching the healing and transformative potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness. His groundbreaking theories influenced the integration of Western science with his brilliant mapping of the transpersonal dimension. He is one of the founders and chief theoreticians of Transpersonal Psychology and received an Honorary Award for major contributions to and development of the field of Transpersonal Psychology from the Association for Transpersonal Psychology in 1993.