torstai 22. lokakuuta 2015

Wise men don't speak

"Those who think most of some subject are usually not skilled in it. Either they are slow witted or not talented in it or they have some need unmet and that is why they spend time thinking of the subject, like the hungry tend to think of food and those who eat unhealthily may be obsessed with food thoughts, and like people when they run to some problem, spend time thinking about a solution to it. Instead those who think the subject through but do it very quickly among other things and do not spend time in the subject, typically know it well, especially if their understanding and ways of living tend to be good in such respects."
(A quotation from my blog http://feelingcomputers.blogspot.fi from the text about commenting on building a virtual world, in the sense of governing the societies by a computer network guided by people's pictures of the world)

Advices about learning thinking and intelligence http://quickerlearning.blogspot.fi and more in Finnish at http://pikakoulu.blogspot.fi .

keskiviikko 14. lokakuuta 2015

Translation rights

One may translate this blog of mine morally to other languages.

First chapter, some theory

"The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao..."
When teaching something or when building something, you typically have some building blocks and you build some kind of structures from them by some similarly taught skills to achieve your goals in the building work. Learning things from books or in school is like this too.
So you have some single goal that you want to buikd something or to have the skill of building things like that. And that goal motivates you to spend some of your time in the building work or in studying it. So during those moments that single goal of building dominates your life, you are concentrated to that work and that takes away a large part of your energy from the other sides of your life.
But there are many things in life. Like walking on a street you can see different kinds of people, some houses, children playing, sights of gardens, cars driving, glimpses to homes, the weather, the feel of you walking, thinking of your day, social encounters, plants and animals etc. If you lift one of these to be a subject of conversation that still aren't your whole wisdom about how to live your life. With each skill you need the backing of a strenght and wisdom bought to you by healthy kind of life with a multitude of things and skills in it.
In school the most stupid ones are the ones who rely solely on school. The most intelligent ones are interested in life, in sports and arts and in social relationships, practical life with many things to do: they get added capacity from doing many kinds of things fullheartedly.

Stupid watching and listening to intelligent ones?

So the new perspective to the book is that maybe someone wrote them when hearing lots of advices from the more skilled ones and kind of  dizzy in the head from so peculiar opinions about what to do and what to left undone.
On the other hand, Tao Te Ching advices that a leader, like a teacher in a sense might be, should follow the people and do things naturally. So maybe someone writing wanted to start from the common starting point and see things like the more stupid students saw, and kind of grow from that ground to wisdom.
But of course viewpoint is much of what skill is about, so one should indeed use understandablöe language but so finely skilled viewpoint that it lifts the results to a high amount of skill from an ordinary person.

Just this translation

In the 1990's I read Stephen Mitchell's superb English translation of the 2000 years old Chinese classic Tao-Te-Ching. You can propably find it in the internet, http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html . I haven't liked other translations of Tao-Te-Ching.
After that I haven't been reading the book, but now when I took it to my hand I saw the texts from the perspective of who else might have read Tao-Te-Ching and how they had misinterpreted things. So I felt that maybe I would try to explain some of the most common misunderstandings away, namely the misunderstandings of stupid persons by an intelligent person. So I will explain some basic theory and explain away some misunderstandings that come easily if one does not read the book as a whole.