Rote

        I've been having this epiphany of late.  I hate learning by rote.  I guess it is very Taoist in some ways.  I want to get the feel of something, not just learn it from an instruction book.

        We have been singing the praises of education for ages.  Unfortunately, it has only been in the form of rote.  Many think all the answers are in education about how to be nice, well-mannered as everyone should be.  Drone it into everyone's ears early enough and long enough, they can be trained, like Pavlov's Dog, to react correctly.

        Does that sound like the way a sentient race would function?  A set of rules as long as your arm to tell you how to react?  It's deeper than that.

What just struck me is that, in school, I absorbed it all like a sponge.  It was all by rote.  No real effort involved.

That opened a whole new perspective on the matter.  None of it really mattered.  It provided a way in which to get a job so that I could concentrate on what really mattered.  It took almost no effort to breeze through.

There's more to any subject than can be explored by rote alone. 

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This is more on the subject more than a year later.  

    I was just doing exercise and I always keep a count going in my head.  Rote.  I don't know if that is unusual or not.

I stopped doing the count and decided, instead, to concentrate my focus on the exercise itself.  I've always done that in background mode sorta.  It makes a difference bringing it to a conscious state.  I've always adjusted my exercise to suit my body's needs.  It dawned on me that keeping count is just one more way to make it rote.  I'd rather concentrate on the exercise suiting my needs and let the number of repetitions be determined by when I feel I am done.

I think it is part of becoming human.  The rote gets in the way.  Sounds like a good title for a song.

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    This really belongs in An Amazing Time as well as Rote, so I'll probably add it there, as well.  The more I experience music the more I become convinced that knowing the 'theory of music' limits the depth to which one can, errr, inhale music.

    Especially with music, its roots are deeper than any rote can reach.  It ties in with emotions and - I want to say power, but I don't know what I mean by that.  Power to be Human?

    I don't mean to say that learning the rote theory that someone laid down is a bad thing.  A big part of it is a matter of being freely skeptical of what you are told. (we are taught the exact opposite: obey your elders and all that rot).  

    What I have found, across the board, from engineering to music to exercise is that if you learn by doing, first, you are a lot better off.

    Rote may not be bad, it may just need to be handled carefully.  Maybe it's a matter of continuing to seek clarity, which I begin to realize is going to be huge change ('for the better' doesn't even begin to describe it) for humanity.

    Here's another weird one that always stuck in my head.  I should never want to be something.  I should always desire to do something.  For instance, it is wrong-headed to think of being a pianist.  A person with passion wants to play the piano, sing, craft a building, write music.

    If you think about it.  It is all a desire to share with others.  And, there's the problem with wanting to be something!  It is not a desire to share.  It is a desire to ... hoard???

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Every time I sit down to play music, nowadays, it is blowing me away on so many levels.  All starting with rote and the prehuman condition.

As always, I am trying to piece it all together.  The one female, vocal, artist (there's a reason for the commas) that made me stand up and pay attention is weaved into every thread of that tapestry, including, of course, music.

I started something new of late.  I was playing along with my favorite popular songs and it was getting a bit too easy.  

So, I thought I'd try playing along with some classical music.  It was easier than I thought (of course, there is the question of whether anyone would want to hear it or not).  It expanded my horizons.

I could feel the emotions.  It was kind of freaky.  

With classical, I could feel certain emotions trigger on certain strings of notes in a particular order.

Anyways, I was thinking how the female, vocal, artist has the ability to play emotions in voice.  I doubt she learned by rote.  Maybe ever. 

There are depths to music that we have yet to explore and it has little to do with theory.  It has a whole lot to do with getting in touch with both the music and humanity.  The FVA comes closest to what I am trying to describe. 

I feel like I should move this to Clarity.

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Much, much later.  I think the problem with rote is that it tends to limit one's view of any subject.  It narrows the field of view and, often, today, in our limited representation of Humanity, it is just plain wrong or misguided.  That goes for everything we have learned by rote.  I guess Humanity must decide to look at everything through the lens of skepticism.  My considered opinion is, as they view most everything that has occurred, since the first written word, they will find it suspect, riddled with holes.