Mar
29
2009
Every conversation can lead to conversion; to a new context, a different way of perceiving, a step out of habitual patterns of thinking that we unknowingly carry with us or alternately identify as self. As one who attempts to live with Morin's "new way of thinking", one is never converted; one can only be...
Mar
26
2009
Goethean phenomenology acts as a transformative bridge between the researcher and a topic of inquiry. The method is unique not in that it attempts to work through the subject/object split, but rather in the WAY it attempts to do this.
Doing Goethean phenomenological research requires that one be completely open to what presents itself, while...
Mar
24
2009
Edgar Morin, who calls for a transdisciplinary way of thinking, wrote an amazing short essay entitled "A New Way of Thinking". (A New Way of Thinking.pdf) One of the principles of this new way of thinking involves recognizing that wholes and parts are mutually interactive: "properties emerge from the organization of a whole and may...
Mar
20
2009
Following on the last posts about language, I'm just going to go way out on a limb here and re-present a picture that Rudolf Steiner gives which, when you really take it in, can transform your whole sense of language. It is this:
Steiner points out how at the present time, humanity can only...
Mar
18
2009
(Note, the Blackfoot people have a process-oriented language, which is much more strongly verb-based, while English and most other languages are object/noun based.)
A friend of mine asked:
Do the Blackfoot people go through a phase where they need to have conceptual boxes, and then learn to transcend the need to reify these artificial demarcations,...
Mar
16
2009
A friend continued:
Does this mean there is no universal developmental stages that we each pass through simply due to the fact that we are all human? What are the underlying strata, the ground upon which both these explicate perspectives emerge? What is the implicate order regarding human development?
Prompting the response:
As for universal developmental stages......
Mar
15
2009
Evidence can be gained through a variety of means. Just as you would wish to use a sensitive detector of particular frequencies of light if you are doing x-ray crystallography, and not, say, an acoustic detector, so too we need to develop and use detectors that are appropriate to the realm in which we...
Mar
12
2009
We are ecologies within ecologies within ecologies. Complex processes, such as inflammatory responses, span multiple systems as multivalent expressions of dynamic self organization. Within constant interlaced boundaries provided by the dual and complementary forces of growth and decay, life becomes possible; we become possible. Interactivity, specialization, contextual adaptation, flexibility, utilization of 'randomness' and dynamic...
Mar
11
2009
I've been thinking about the co-existence of multiple descriptions of reality lately. In particular, as someone who has taught high-school physics, I run up against a philosophical quandary when I'm presenting, say Newton's laws of motion. Am I presenting a lie to the students, because quantum mechanics and general relativity replaced the Newtonian physics?
On...
Mar
08
2009
Projective geometry offers a window into the human soul -- not as a mere analogy, but directly: projective geometric processes are manifestations of the same archetypes that work through and within human experience.
Doing projective geometry is to move your soul in accordance with these archetypes, and in so doing you start to train your...
Mar
08
2009