Blog post

Thomas Anderson

4/6/18

Engl 102

Melissa Santos

In part 5 of the one straw revolution Masanobu talks a lot about some interesting ideas. He talks about how through our search for knowledge we have lost sight of the truth of the world. He says that “Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them each within the vault of his own mind. The more involved they become with the activity of the intellect the more they set themselves apart and the more difficult it becomes to live naturally.” His saying means that as one studies something they do not truely understand it more but are simply becoming used to it more and more and by doing so become less able to truly understand the thing for what it truly is rather than an object of research. I think that this line of thinking is interesting because we as humans keep learning more things but we seem to be becoming more and more estranged from nature and what goes on in it. Sure we can say we understand what a forest is and why it is important but as time goes on less and less people go to them and understand the beauty that is it. As people become more advanced our abilities to perceive the world come from simply what we learned in books and less what we learn ourselves by living life. “They set the orange fruit apart from the green leaves and say they know the green of the leaves and the orange of the fruit. But from the instant one makes a distinction between green and orange, the true colors vanish”. By naming things and thinking of them as different entities you lose sight of the system. You lose sight of the fact that the leaves and the oranges are all part of the same tree working together to help the tree survive. Masanobu believes that in our quest for knowledge we have forgotten how things connect.