Knowledge is not understanding. Understanding requires all three brains, the capacities of all three brains in right relationship as well as purpose, as well as intent, as well as seeing the future, as well as being founded by the past and the limitations of the past and then is it practical? Is it possible? And so all three of our parts have to be in proper balance and unfortunately one of the byproducts of scientific investigation, especially in the last say hundred/hundred and fifty years, has been a great unbalancing of that.
Knowledge by itself, I would say especially when it accumulates in the way in which it has accumulated in Western Science, becomes an unbalancing influence, unbalancing force in the life of man into all life that is so unbalancing as to end up being incredibly destructive. Knowledge is not understanding. Understanding requires all three brains, the capacities of all three brains in right relationship as well as purpose, as well as intent, as well as seeing the future, as well as being founded by the past and the limitations of the past and then is it practical? Is it possible? And so all three of our parts have to be in proper balance and unfortunately one of the byproducts of scientific investigation, especially in the last say hundred/hundred and fifty years, has been a great unbalancing of that. The middle world, the limbic world has been almost not just left out, it has been assaulted, I mean of subtle assault. When you look at Charles Dickens and you look at the affluent that he describes coming out of the industrial revolution, that’s I think one of the most traumatic characterizations. Other people have done it in more modern times but he goes back here at the origin, he starts 1800 or even shortly before that when suddenly the power of the technological application of science begins to invade. And then that invasion doesn’t have anything to do with the world of abstraction, it has to do with using that, applying that in the political, religious, philosophical whatever sense to the circumstances that we live in without any understanding of its consequences in those worlds. And that has been a terror, the most precarious circumstance that I believe has ever happened in the life of mankind. We really are at the brink. We have the capacity to really permanently do away with ourselves.
Well we can look at that in two ways; one is the unrealistic which is to say what if it happened differently 200 years ago? We can look at it that way and say how could it have worked its way out differently, which it didn’t, or we can put a question in terms of today and say okay given the mess that we’re in, now if we were to make the effort to bring the limbic brain back as a balancing mechanism inside of us, how would we do that and how would that work now? In the first instance I think we can give examples that if there has been more awareness of the essentiality, the absolute essentiality, for instance as a family triad of the family as the center point of nurture and early development and son on, then we would not have seen the sweat shops that came out of the steam engine, the development of these enormous factories that brought people out of circumstances I which they have competence and had a place and were playing a role in their community into a factory situation where there was simply a widget, a total denial of their humanness, of their role as a father, as a mother, as a child or whatever. These are all denials. This is what I mean by the assault and the assault, while certainly other cultures have assaulted this brain, this assault has been the most penetrating and has produced the greatest changes in the cultural sect itself. So we can go back and look at the origin of those things and we can also look at the origin of each new technology and see how it did not do what many people intended it to do when the innovation was made. Television, I think television is a perfect example of society not understanding what does this instrument do to us? How we are now a passive instrument sitting in front of this and we take it as real because our brain says it’s real. And so we cloud and just flood the mind with all these images that are resident with the images that our own brain forms only they’re preformed, they’re already prefabricated and they’re put inside of us. What a social instrument that has been and very largely because of the world of propaganda and money making and so on and so on it has turned into a terrible negative, incredibly negative force which by and in large most of society, including the Academy of Pediatrics, doesn’t recognize.
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