Our Lives Are Shaped by the Quality of Our Attention
Delusion is completely convincing. This point can be difficult to acknowledge. When we suffer under a delusion we accept its rationalizations completely. We simply cannot see any incoherence in our outlook. We are certain.
How then can we tell whether attending to coherence is not just another delusion?
Continue reading “How do we distinguish integration from delusion?”Thought shapes thinking. We cannot think differently unless we become aware of how thought shapes our thinking.
There is a shape implicit in thought, forming a trajectory for our thinking, that is there as we gather a thought. Right there in the act of thinking itself.
Technological thinking, institutionalized, taught thinking, what we call rational thought is shaped entirely by an Edifice of Thought. It never looks at, is blind to, even the existence of Thought as an edifice, a bounded world. It takes its sense of bounded-ness as being the result of essential limits on what is possible; what is realistic, in its terms. But, even when we question thought and take forays outside these boundaries thought is still exercising control, in the sense of giving a particular shape, to how we think.
Continue reading “The Edifice of Thought*”
This fact has been elusive. One effect of confusion is that we struggle to find some simple way to untangle it. The real lesson of confusion is that it is a sign we are perceiving complexity as complication.
Linear thinking and the Machine Model lead us to want to eliminate complication, or at least manage it. In this mode we don’t even see complication for what it is: Complication is a condition of perception. It is not inherent in what we are looking at. When we see something as complicated we have misunderstood complexity.
Continue reading “Confusion is part of the message”
