You can teach Amanda fish but what can you learn from A Fish?PEACE, JOY, SCIENCE, AND SYMBOLISM So this is “by the book” part 2. Why did I choose to highlight a bunch of books? Well it’s my way of suggesting how I use that. Avenue to seek some peace and joy and maybe things like this. Will point to ways you can free your mind right where you are and do it without fear. Books are a way to open new doors and make new conceptual connections...or at least they are for me. So having said that here are the next couple books on my list. Science... Let’s get into our time machine and go back a couple centuries. How’s that for living in the here and now? Seriously, it is difficult for us to realize that modern science and “scientific method” have not always been the way to “know” things. Before the “enlightenment” people looked to other sources for explanations of the things in life we couldn’t understand. Science took the place of mythology, religion, and magic as a way of figuring out. What was going on. It became our way of. Finding the truth or even the TRUTH. Liking math and statistics (notably probability) I found myself buying into this method fully until..well until I read— Thomas Kuhn’s “The Nature of Scientific Revolutions.” This book points out that science. Relies on a theory based upon facts and the idea that. We can study. Smaller and smalle bits of things until we know it all. What Kuhn argues is that we hold on to a theory (a way of understanding) until we find enough anomalies or things that don’t fit the theory. At that point. We develop another theory or set of theories. To. Explain these. Facts if possible. He also argues that we may not be getting any closer to what is in reality going on in nature or in our minds because we replace one structure or theory with another. In other words, science, like mythology is no more or no less than an “as if” explanation for things we experience. So this book talks about “truth” and how difficult it is to come up with a stable definition of Truth with a T. Kuhn did not say to abandon the facts. He said be open to their interpretation because interpretations change. To me this meant two people could. Agree on what they “experienced” and yet assign different meanings to that experience. So is there a truth or something that is true? Yes and using the scientific method of testing the. Null hypothesis (trying to prove the opposite is true to eliminate the fact that something is probably true) one would ask What if nothing could be proven to be true? Well here is the beauty in asking that. If you could find nothing to be absolutely true you could propose the statement “There is. No such things as true.” Well That cannnot happen because if that statement is true then there is at least one truth. So we cannot. Prove there is. Not something. That is true. Anyway, here’s the bottom line on this book. It helped me to understand that people work with different theories to explain what they experience and these theories function for them until they don’t. I have my. Theories and you have yours and while a shared meaning for things depends upon understanding. Each other’s underlying. Notions we don’t need to judge each other because we believe our theory is right and all others are wrong. We can simply explain why. These principles work for us and hope others understand. Symbolism.... Hemmingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea” is the next book that has. Opened my horizon. This at the bare bones level is about a fisherman who catches the fish of. His dreams after a long. Dry spell and then in the processs of bringing this huge Gamefish in it gets desatroyed by sharks that pick up on the blood trail that happens as the fisherman captures the huge fish that he brought in. By the time the old man returned to shore the fish was completely gone and he had become injured and exhausted. There are a number of biblical images. In the story and some baseball references too. The In the process of landing the fish. The. Old man finds a good deal of respect for his catch, realizes that. He went out too far to get it and that in the end he would have to accept his loss of the prize. So for me this signaled that there will be gtimes when we put effort forth and reach our goal only to find out that we can’t hold on. To it or it wasn’t. What we thought it might bring in terms of a result. It serves as a reminder that sometimes I get all caught up in the idea that I will be happy “when....” There are some other themes in the book too—however that’s the one that sticks. For me. Okay to sum up today’s books... Facts are important. The usefulness of explanations depends upon getting as many of them as possible when forming a theory/belief about reality. We have to understand that enough facts may point to an other concept or exzplanation and the world might call that theory “true” when it isn’t more true than some other perspective. Second, we can pursue some things and even grasp them only to see that the destination did not fulfill our dreams. Sometimes we can overcome our enemies and our weaknessesa and sometimes we work through even a failure to gain acceptance. Sometimes the peace and joy is found in the process regardless of the result much as the old man can be proud of teaching the. Younger man how to fish. ” In. Short believe in what you know and stay. Open to what can be known and enjoy the pursuit of a dream, even if the reality associated in reaching that dream is not what. You imagined. Two more tomorrow and then I’ll close the book on this.