Wisdom-Seeking The other face of information-seeking is wisdom-seeking. There are many ways to define wisdom. I find it useful to contrast it with information. Information is pointed, discrete. It is “a difference that makes a difference,” something standing out against …
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Information-Seeking Imagine you awake on the floor in a pitch black room and you don’t know where you are, how you got there, or anything else about the situation. It could be said that you lack “information.” You could be …
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The Message and the Meaning Communication is the effort to convey meaning. When we think of communication, we probably imagine people talking to one another, and maybe reading messages that the other one wrote. Those are good examples, but there …
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The One, The Only, The All In our effort to completely eliminate sloppy thinking, to leave no fallacy unturned, we arrive at the All. This complete inclusion of being is tough to talk about. What can we say about something …
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Ternary Thinking “The equal is an intermediate between excess and defect” —Aristotle Thinking is imprecise. We can hardly expect to arrive like an arrow on the perfect mark every time. First, that would assume there is a right answer, when …
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Will Close your eyes and extend your hand slowly, very slowly, until it meets the resistance of some object. Feel the sensation of that thing blocking, or at least slowing, further extension of your hand. You’ve just summarized in experiment …
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Awareness Awareness is the universal solvent. We can’t intentionally change what we don’t know exists. To become aware of something, even without meaning to act on it in any other way, affects that thing. It becomes separated from the background, …
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Thirdness To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness. —Alfred Korzybski What is a word? It seems straightforward: a sound or written symbol that stands for something else and conveys meaning. And …
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Secondness Imagine you were born each day with no memory. I don’t mean amnesia. Even a person with memory loss retains more than we realize. You forget a name, or a face, but you know a human from a wolf …
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Firstness We experience the world through an act of imagination. It’s real, of course. If I look over a landscape, there is something “out there,” beyond me. But that’s not what I experience. Tree, grass, river, and mountain are words—categories. …
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