The Last Psychiatrist produces more brilliant thoughts per minute than any other blogger I know. See the following, for example:
We acknowledge the ideas of prior cultures relied on their context, but we willfully ignore our own immersion in our context. . . This is the problem with omnivores of contemporary media, the people who are constantly reading every magazine that comes out or every new book on X. Even the best stuff still suffers from its immersion in 2012. If you want to see things differently, you have to approach them from radically different contexts.
I will put this as an epigraph on my syllabus next semester. Maybe this will prevent students from complaining on the evaluations that I made them read “stuff that was written 1,000 years ago which it makes no sense to read today because it was written so long ago.”
Clarissa's Blog 
Couldn’t agree more and I think this also applies to reading in different languages.
LikeLike
Definitely — that is one of the keys to shamanism. Altered states of consciousness make you experience the present through new eyes — hence you see more than you had seen before.
LikeLike
f course, the dual problem is the viewpoint shared by many people that only things written centuries or millenia ago are to be taken seriously. The Bible and the Koran come to mind, but they are not the only ones.
LikeLike
I know what you mean but, thankfully, I have not encountered this attitude among students, at least!
LikeLike