1 result for (book:tps4 AND heading:"delet session septemb 3 1977" AND stemmed:cultur)
[... 10 paragraphs ...]
Perhaps primarily the answer lies in the necessity that man recognize the spontaneous source of his being. I will come back to that. More than that, however, your question of course reflects your cultural beliefs and assumptions, and so you do not realize that in some ways such conscious knowledge of the body’s workings might limit rather than expand concepts and experience of the body and the self.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]
Native cultures, believing that the courage or fleetness of an eaten animal became part of the hunter’s mental and physical acquisition, handled the body in entirely different terms, and did very well. You can say that you have a brain and heart and liver and appendix, and so forth, and muscles and bones, and insist that all of these work in a certain fashion, as of course they do. Cutting the body open will show those organs. You can say with equal validity that the body holds a man’s ghost, that it is filled also with the organs of all the animals a man has consumed—that one man has the heart of a lion, and in that framework that is true.
[... 4 paragraphs ...]
Give us a moment.... For example, in your culture some people feel that there is a struggle between their hearts and their heads, a conflict between emotion and reason, in other words. In many cases, now, meaning not in all, such feelings set up quite invisible but definite alienations, or lacks of balance, between the heart and the brain, so that delicate relationships between them are upset. Those relationships affect physical organs, but the medical profession is not used to thinking in terms of relationships that cannot appear under a microscope.
[... 28 paragraphs ...]