| |
| |
| |
| |
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.
Francis Bacon
This book presupposes that you have read Volume I of Six Blind Elephants, which explores the fundamental properties and functioning of scope and category, processes that exist in all our thinking. A scope is the extent of what we attend to in all our senses, and our internal images (remembered or forecast) of sensory-based experience. Then we select and collect a group of scopes into what is called a basic-level category, according to some criteria, in order to organize and simplify our experience.
We also subdivide these basic-level categories into more specific categories, and group them into more general categories, creating logical levels of understanding, one of the hallmarks of human intelligence, and the basis of all its successes in understanding and modifying our world. Scope and category also interact in a number of different ways. A change in scope often changes how we categorize it, and a change in categorization always changes the scope that we attend to.
Categories of events create meaning and significance in conjunction with context, which is one example of a larger scope. Our values are categories of what is important to us, interacting in a dynamic heterarchy, (in contrast to a fixed hierarchy) guiding our attention in satisfying our many different needs. The category shelter protects us from the elements, while the category food nourishes us. If we got these categories mixed up, we would try to eat our homes, and find shelter under food, neither of which would work very well.
These processes are mostly unconscious, and we usually act as if the result of these processes are truth or reality, rather than the somewhat arbitrary construction that it is. In most of our lives it works very well to ignore these processes and assume that the world of experience that they create for us is real.
However sometimes we are led into understandings that are frustrating and painful, and from which we can find no escape. At those times we desperately need to understand how our process of understanding has led us astray, or into unpleasant or painful dead ends. Without that understanding we are stuck, and no matter how hard we struggle, we will be captives of our own misunderstanding. In volume I we explored how we can change the scope of what we attend to, and how we categorize it in a variety of different ways, in order to change our experience.
This volume applies the fundamental understandings developed in volume I to a number of interesting problems that commonly occur in human communication and misunderstanding, beginning by examining implication, a way of saying something without actually saying it. Implication relies on categories of which we are usually only dimly aware, and it can be used in both positive and negative ways. Verbal implication is based on negation, a unique and fundamental skill in both human thinking and mathematics, yet one that has dangerous pitfalls for the unwary. Judgment splits the world into two halves, good and bad, a skill that is useful in life-or-death emergencies, but which can cause enormous and pervasive suffering in everyday life. Nonverbal or contextual implication utilizes the ways that we unconsciously categorize and respond to things and events around us.
We divide our experience into different modes of operating, basic attitudes like having to, wanting to, and choosing to, that are useful in categorizing our activities, but which can also become traps that limit us and cause unhappiness. Tanking about ourselves, our understandings, or our relationships creates self-reference, another uniquely useful human skill that can also cause confusion and difficulty.
Self-contradiction creates a puzzling situation in which we simultaneously must and cant do something, an impossible situation unless it is recognized. Paradox, which has puzzled thinkers for thousand of years, is created by a combination of self-reference, negation, and a universal statement in which must and cant oscillate endlessly. Although paradox often traps people in quandaries, it can also be used to free them, particularly when they have too much certainty about their categories. Since our categories are always uncertain, thinking that they are certain will keep us from even considering changing them.
A double bind, like implication and paradox, can either create a horrible and punishing trap, or can release someone from a trap that they are already in. Metaphor is a unique way of understanding and communicating that has been used since before the dawn of civilization. Metaphor is one of the subtlest and most powerful ways of communicating, but like all our capabilities and skills, it can be used either to poison us or nourish us, enslave us or liberate us.
Finally, I present a complete verbatim transcript of a client session, Reaching Forgiveness, that illustrates many of the patterns of changing scope and categorizations that we explore in these two volumes.
With understanding of all these different processes, and the choices and options that they offer us, we can use them wisely and carefully to enhance our lives and the lives of those around us. Without that knowledge, we are powerless, wandering about in a dark labyrinth.
Steve Andreas
March, 2006
There is nothing quite so practical as a good theory.
Albert Einstein
| |
| |
| |
| |
