Samkit Faith Practice Liberation

SR No.: 007764
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Amit B Bhansali
Publisher: Amit B Bhansali
Publication Year: 2015
Total Pages: 447
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 7 MB

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see and report is not merely a message from the starts, but has contributions in it from the way in which we look and speak and do things together. There is light, and doing astronomy during the day does not yield the same results as in the night. So, include light in the story. Then there are lenses, both in the telescope and in the body, eyes. Then there is chemistry in the eyes, and in the transportation of what happens in the eye via neurons to the brain. Even that takes time, and the place in the brain where the neurons go to determines whether we see stars, or smell them, or even hear them (if the neuron of the eye would arrive in the auditory center of the brain), and then we combine all these signals, to form a picture or gestalt, and finally there is the 'concept' of a star, and last but not least, a book written on astronomy, in a certain language and in a certain cultural context. So, in the end we do not know where our understanding of the star really comes from. Did the star speak to us, and were we predisposed to understand what it said, not in Latin anymore, as before, but in English, or is the star the product of our own meaning-making interactions in which we do things together and create a referential reality, called stars and the universe. This bottom-up way of accounting for our understanding became even more compelling in the study of the smaller parts of the universe, the micro-micro-micro parts, that can be seen only by touching them with a force that is larger than the one we look at, so that even the innocent act of seeing is actually an act of severe intervention. One does not need to be a specialist in quantum mechanics to understand this image of uncertainty, if seeing is dancing with what is seen, then we actually include our dance in speaking about our partner. And this is even more so when the object of our understanding is the other subject, because how can we get access to what one thinks or feels without some form of communication, and preferably in a language that the other person understands, because if not, the interview cannot even start, let alone produce significant results, unless we consider 'missing data' as significant results anyway, say of indicating the ignorance of the person we want to speak to. One can go on with pointing at and reflecting upon this interventionist way of constructing knowledge, but the bottom line question is what to do in concrete research. The major implication was and is that the image of the non-interventionist passive objectivist, predisposed to merely say in numbers and in Latin or English what is out there, has lost its power, not only in the world of science as a whole, but particularly in science that is more an art, namely that of studying culture. Culture, by its very definition, is something that is cultivated, and studying culture is for sure an act of contributing to it, of doing something in it. To understand culture, one cannot but take part in it, and this has led to what nowadays is called 'participatory action research'. This term was originally coined by Kurt Lewin (1946), a German psychologist who fled the Nazi regime in the late thirties, and started a line of interventionist research in the United States, concerned with democratic forms of leadership and helping communities to adapt to new circumstances. His mantra was that the people themselves must be included in the programs of change, rather than that some external agent or researcher would merely impose it on them. To make a long story short, this led to more and more so called 'qualitative' research methods, or 'mixed' methods, as they are more often called nowadays, opening space for reading and understanding texts, rather than just take measures, allowing for engaged participatory action research without a pre-established hypotheses, but more with what one would call hope or love or belief, previously seen as properties of religious or parental engagements,