If there is a letter in the alphabet that represents the complexity of our world, it has to be R. Children have trouble to pronounce it, and some adults too. It’s the sound of perplexing technical gimmicks, the resonance of recondite robots reverberating through our reality.
E is the opposite, it represents the simplicity. It is the sound of letting go, of allowing things to happen and voices to be heard. It is the sound of going out on a quest and coming back with the newly discovered. E is the soul’s acceptance of its potential. It is the community’s yielding in to the common wisdom and dropping the inner conflict that springs from the R.
When R dominates over E — RE is born.
RE is the sacred crow of the humanity; it is never questioned, never doubted, never objected.
We praise the history and tradition. Everyone is expected to respect the past. To respect (lat.: re specere) literary means to “look back”. And gosh, do we love to look back! Throughout the history we’ve been reverentially protecting traditions of the past. The future is uncertain and it’s hard, if not impossible, to respect it. Future holds only our hopes and aspirations.
We wish our children would look back one day at their history and tradition and respect it. We wish they would retain the gifts we handed over to them. We hope they will repeat what we thought them and not rebel against our sacred crow.
It’s unrealistic to think that new generations won’t have their revolutions which will change the old traditions, just as the present generation had revolutions of their own. REvolution, however, does not change the lifeblood of the culture, only Evolution does.
Revolution is a circular repetition of reliability.
Evolution is a spiraling emergence of expediency.
There is no essential innovation in the RE. It’s just returning to how it was a while ago, maybe changing the tapestry.
All the revolutions in the history were superficial events to prevent the profound evolution of the human culture.
Thus we keep on running in circles of recession, regression, restriction, retaliation, reprehension, repulsion… No amount of resistance, revolting, rebellion and revolution can replace the repetition of religious repression and the recycling of republican redundancies (and democratic, of course, it’s just two sides of the same coin).
We have to stop revolving to evolve.
Erase the R…
Emancipate the E…
Imagine the RE-words without the R! Can you see how deeply the meaning changes?
E in Latin stands for out! Out of the box! Out of the blue! Beyond the old and stale!
E is the basis of real education! The word “educate” consists of e-, “out”, and -ducere, “to lead”. So, to educate means to lead out, while in our world it usually means to keep inside — physically, mentally, emotionally — while we repeat the old (only interpreted as new when it is revealed to us). The new can only be discovered, not learned.
Re is learning the known; E is leaning on the unknown and trusting it.
Re is imitation; E is innovation and acting on it.
There is a better world just behind
the horizon of our imagination.
We won’t get to it by moving ahead
or adding anything to the present reality.
We just have to sit still and drop
the repetitive, self-serving complexities.
The real change is the change of perspective, the mind-shift,
the moment when you stop running in circle.
(R)Edefining the language is a must if we are to edefine the human culture and lead it out of the irrational, insensible, rigid constraints.
Let’s begin by evolving religion to eligion! Make it the elucidation of the essence of god; the evoking of the emphatic ethics; the awakening of the esprit of trans-cultural divinity. The elation of the personality of Him — or Her or It or Them — letting Them be whatever They actually are: Elohim or Everyone or Whatever or Nothing.
Eligion is evolution of the outlook on the future. We drop the belief that the future is something sealed by (dire) consequences of the (wrong)doings of the past. We drop the belief that we can only be saved by remorseful repentance at the feet of the noble reverends. We open up to future with the eruption of certainty that destiny elicits enlightenment to escort us instantaneously into eternity — which is the same as admitting that we eternally live in the now. And that now is exactly as it is, it can’t be any different.
What can change is our outlook on the now, on the past and on the future. We can complicate them or keep them simple and clear. We can reverentially repeat the religious (and political, economical, cultural…) rituals and imagine they make sense… or we can awaken!
Eligion erases mental projections of the mystical revelation.
Eligion transforms evangelisation into enlightenment.
Eligion celebrates what is instead of glorifying what ought to be.
Eligion is dropping of interpretation because, honestly, we don’t know.
What we do know and even consider too obvious to even talk about — is that it makes no sense to reinvent the wheel.
Edefining the language, however, brings a new possibility: einventing the wheel…
Einventing the wheel means econsidering its purpose, meaning, its essence. Who and what should it serve? Should it have any limits? Haven’t we gone too far by adapting every single surface in our world to the wheel?
The flat floor is an invention of the architects. It fits engineers — not human beings.
We do not only have eyes to see and ears to hear and noses to smell. We also have a sense for the touch of our hands and our feet.
If man is forced to walk of flat floors as they were planned thoughtlessly in designers’ offices, estranged from man’s age old relationship and contact to earth — a decisive part of man withers and dies. This has catastrophic consequences for the soul, the equilibrium, the well being and the health of man. Man’s ability to experience ceases and he becomes disabled, mentally and organically.
An uneven and animated floor means to recover dignity of man which is violated in our unnatural and hostile urban grid system.
The uneven floor becomes a symphony, a melody for the feet and brings back natural vibrations to man.
Architecture should elevate and not subdue man. It is good to walk on uneven floors and regain our human balance.
HUNDERTWASSER
Einventing the wheel is ethinking the essence of everything in the world and all of us, people. It means to edifine our common purpose.
Can we breathe a fresh meaning into the zillions of wheels around us? Can we evolve from more and more rotation into… I don’t know what, but my intuition tells me that we know. Should we, maybe, say no to wheels?
We are the only one who can eset the tenets of our civilization. It should be obvious by now that resetting it is not enough: it would be just another evasion of evolution.
When you go down to the bottom of human relationships, you’ll see the humanity did not advance even a bit; what advanced was: the intensity of activity, the intricacy of technology, the immenseness of the global governance, the rapaciousness of the economy, the monstrous wastefulness of resources and energy, the extravagant exuberance in all spheres of life. We’ve actually regressed to serve what we were told would serve us.
The relationships have hardly made any progress. Perhaps the reason is that they are relationships — heedless repetition of vain behavioral patterns. Can you imagine elationships? Can you see how they esult in elation: when human interactions carry all of us to the summit of our personal and collective potentials? Can you imagine the quantum leap from following the herd running in circles to choosing to excel? To excel, meaning to allow the organic development of the human being, our communities and entire society.
Ironically, to stop running in circles we need to sit down in circle together and talk. Eally talk!
When we eally begin to talk, we’ll figure out how to lead the society out of the self-imposed confines. We’ll begin to genuinely educate each other.
In the E-age grasping the concept of edifining the language should come easy. We’re used to seeing the E in the beginning of many words we “electronised”. If we were able to change the language to fit our e-inventions, we should be able to change it to fit our e-ality.
There is a difference, though, between adding the E and removing the R. Adding the E is an act of pride about the marvels of our technological inventiveness. It does not originate in acceptance of the now, it reinforces the convictions of the past and paints a dehumanized future of AI solving all our problems. As in the story of Babel, pride precedes the fall. We’ll never know how much we don’t know about the universe. That’s why we’ll never be able to predict the exact outcome of our activities.
Removing the R, on the other hand, is the act of humility, admittance of inherent imperfection of the human interpretation of the universe. It’s subtracting the fault from the ideal and reaching towards the reality, which is beautiful — as it is. No additions needed.
By adding the E we follow the old paradigm which is: if you want to improve anything, you have to add something to it.
Based on this paradigm we amass dry information in the name of learning instead of freeing the mind and allowing it to come up with entirely new, original ideas. We swallow pills, drink infusions, take medicines to get healthy, instead of simply doing away with harmful conditions and letting the body balance itself. We keep on piling up stuff in our homes believing that having more potential to enjoy is the same as enjoying more; we end up drooling over thicker and thicker menus that take more and more space in our lives, yet we eat fast food, junk food, plastic food.
Edefining the language is evolution of human interpretation of the universe.
Allowing the progression of some re-words by the pattern of revolution vs. evolution may allow us to evolve as a species, to develop new philosophies of living and values that are true to nature. Dropping the R is, of course, not the solution of all our problems in itself. Einstein said it so well: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler!”
What we need is a new worldview. Changing the language can only be the result of a change in consciousness not its cause. To quote Einstein again: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Maybe it is not a coincidence that the name Einstein begins with the E. Maybe it is not a coincidence that Einstein coined the famous formula E=mc2. There is definitely more to E than what can be verbalized and conceptualized.
All that doesn’t matter, really… What matters is what we do, based on what we know. What matters is can we take up more than responsibility for the world–can we take up esponsibility, can we ethink how to eset our ways and build new eality? Can we be esourceful, so we wouldn’t fall back into old habits that don’t serve us anymore?
Can we nurture esilience and develop eflexes to be able to espond appropriately to the challenges of our time?
Can we imagine ourselves especting the earth, our home, being able to actually look forward?
I believe we can withstand any hardships if we strongly uphold our Future. Only we can make sense of the complexities of this world and come up with lasting solutions. To do that we must dare to change deeper than we know how.
