Totally Quotable Research

"Obsession always destroys what it intended to nurture. But if you're able to let yourself love honestly and without fear, then maybe that huge heart you have will somehow set you free."

[Referring to the Yi Ching: Book of Changes] It not only suggests a process of constant change in the Universe, the duality of interconnected-ness of necessity and chance of rational and irrational, culture and anti culture, but also a strategy to launch "attacks" on the legitimacy of the West-Centric monopoly in intellectual and everyday life. …….. In contemporary times, the Yi Ching provides us with alternative information that is beyond the "reality" created by contemporary mass media and factual "reality". It is another "reality".

Until now, the mainstream of international culture and art has been West-Centric. This situation should change in view of current global cultural developments. It is why "construction" of a "New Internationalism"; which should take the place of all the previous forms of "West-Centric Internationalism" or "Universalism", becomes urgent and absolutely necessary.

Indeed, not only contemporary events radiate instantaneously--now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called a "time skip". An event that affected only a handful of people at the time of its occurrence in the past can have large-scale consequences today. The Peloponnesian War, for example, was little more than a skirmish by modern standards. While Athens, Sparta and several nearby city-states battled, the population of the rest of the globe remained largely unaware of and undisturbed by the war. The Zapotec Indians living in Mexico at the time were wholly untouched by it. The ancient Japanese felt none of its impact. Yet the Peloponnesian War deeply altered the future course of Greek history. By changing the movement of men, the geographical distribution of genes, values, and ideas, it affected later events in Rome, and, through Rome, all Europe. Today's Europeans are to some small degree different people because that conflict occurred. In turn, in the tightly wired world of today, these Europeans influence Mexicans and Japanese alike. Whatever trace of impact the Peloponnesian War left on the genetic structure, the ideas and the values of today's Europeans is now exported by them to all parts of the world. Thus today's Mexicans and Japanese feel the distant, twice-removed impact of that war even though their ancestors, alive during its occurrence, did not. In this way, the events of the past, skipping as it were over generations and centuries, rise up to haunt and change us today.