Aldous sang us a love-song from the time of the Renaissance, a man complaining about not being able to get away from \u2018love-sickness\u2019 and recognizing that \u2018I am my own fever\/pain\u2019. I drew our friends\u2019 attention to this remarkable degree of self-knowledge. They agreed. I thought, this was easy and came forward with the next proposition : It means we cause our own problems. Nobody else we can blame for them. They agreed. I was surprized Aldous didn\u2019t place the responsibility for the man\u2019s plight squarely on the shoulders of the girl in question. Maybe he had agreed without thinking. I was encouraged to propose : When we have problems with hurt feelings, it\u2019s our own fault ! He was up in arms now. This was going too far. One can\u2019t be held responsible for that. It\u2019s the responsibility of those who do the hurting ! I said, everybody is responsible for himself ! I also maintained that any susceptibility to being hurt was a weakness. No, he said, it\u2019s inherent in human nature, it\u2019s an ability, you\u2019d have to go through life with the skin of a rhino to avoid being hurt, insensitive to the extreme!<\/p>\n
Maybe we can\u2019t avoid being hurt, but it\u2019s not desirable. It creates a bad atmosphere and difficult relationships. It can\u2019t be helped, he said, if somebody hurts you, it\u2019s not your fault. What can you do about it? I said we can control our feelings by analyzing them. When I\u2019m hurt, something has happened to me that I don\u2019t like. As simple as that. Which doesn\u2019t mean that I have to accept it. But no reason to develop hurt feelings. Why bring in emotions ? Ask the person who\u2019s done the hurting, Aldous said.<\/p>\n
He then told us about the dangers of a closed mind. A good scientist will always keep an open mind. He admitted there are a lot of bad ones around. As for him, he has had to change his views about homeopathy, for example, because he had found an article in a scientific journal describing sophisticated experiments corroborating the claims of this branch of medicine. He was now led to believe, he said, that there might well be a lot to it after all, things that science had not yet grasped. I told him that the efficacy of homeopathy had been known and made use of for two hundred years and that in my view he was exactly these two hundred years behind. He said, science asks why. He didn\u2019t want to blindly believe without a convincing demonstration of some kind. The danger of abuse, of placebo effect, etc. He had every reason to be sceptical. Science worked slowly sometimes, but surely, producing satisfying results as in this case, he said. I still thought he was two hundred years behind, able to believe only what science allowed him to.<\/p>\n
I asked, can you form a judgment of something that hasn\u2019t been proved scientifically ? We have to be careful, he said, obviously you can\u2019t. You can consider the factor of probability, of course … But until something is proved, we can\u2019t say much. As far as I know he had until recently not only been sceptical of homeopathy, but had openly scoffed at it … Of course, he tells me frankly, I scoff at religion. I like his openness. At least I know where I am with him.<\/p>\n
Religion and science are, according to him, closely related. The Turin shroud was an excellent example of cooperation between the two disciplines, he said. Maybe science could render religion a great service in this case … Establishing the exact age, reconstructing the body by means of a computer, it would be very interesting to see what the findings were. One or two people present interrupted him, asking what the point of this investigation was. I don\u2019t remember what he answered, nothing that stuck in my memory. He was undeterred, though, and went on for quite a while. It probably went over my head, for I couldn\u2019t help asking spontaneously, that is, without premeditation, what the connection between science and religion really was. Of course, that was what we had been learning all this time, I realized too late. My silly question appeared to frustrate him and I was sorry. He shook his head at me and told me, I was of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n
My husband likes to bring in Buddhism and challenged Aldous on the subject of \u2018chakra\u2019. Was this phenomenon scientifically acceptable? He said, what are \u2018chakras\u2019? Can anybody show me? How many? seven? why not eight, nine, ten? He was about to scoff at the idea openly, but held back, I suppose just in case science would be able to provide evidence in later years.<\/p>\n
There is nothing else I remember of this evening, except that Yan sat a long way from me. It was just as well. He didn\u2019t get a chance to ask my husband\u2019s permission to go out with me. I\u2019m looking forward to this concert, the programme is wonderful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aldous sang us a love-song from the time of the Renaissance, a man complaining about not being able to get away from \u2018love-sickness\u2019 and recognizing that \u2018I am my own fever\/pain\u2019. I drew our friends\u2019 attention to this remarkable degree of self-knowledge. They agreed. I thought, this was easy and came forward with the next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-aloud-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.d-c-k.com\/Readingaloud2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}