"In
the sixties it became fashionable to euphemistically refer to one of
man's problems as the 'generation gap.' This euphemism, like all
euphemisms, seems to exist more to protect man from the cold facts
of reality than to communicate what really is. For nothing could be
further from the truth than to infer that the problem between
dissent and establishment is just a generation gap. This problem is
a far more pervasive one. It is the problem of the separation in
thinking between those, at any level, of any age, whose being has
closed down and those at other levels who are open and growing no
matter where their position be on man's existential staircase.
The
person who is closed desperately believes that he has truly found
the way for man to be and in his honest desperation he defends it
'til its death. He who is open genuinely sees change as the law of
life. The closed lives in a completely assured and timeless world of
never a question and nary a doubt. The open reaches, albeit
sometimes recklessly, for a new sun to rise tomorrow. As the open
man, in his unending quest for new and different meaning, moves from
one level of existence to each that is to follow, more of the world
and its foibles are open to his view. At each new level he has
increased degrees of behavioral freedom, and from the increased
freedom which is his, he looks upon the closed both above and below
not hesitating to tell it, how it is.
.
. . I cannot say, beyond the confines of my theory, where man will
go from here. But of this you can rest assured. If man survives to
meet the I-J state of being, the few who are the artists will be
describing its mentality far beyond my capacity to do it from the
theory I have drawn. And among these artists is aborning the few,
for it is always the few "dissenters" who will see ahead,
who will be utilizing the medium of music to present their youthful
plea for change from that which has been and was good in its day, to
that which is the better in man."
- - Dr. Clare W. Graves
©
Copyright 2001 NVC Consulting and The Quetico Centre
