Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
There is a slightly paradoxical element to the classic, "Getting to Yes": Although most of the focus is placed on re-framing the relationship of the parties to one of cooperative problem solving, there is nonetheless an underlying thread of threat. The specific manifestation of this element is what the authors call "BATNA", an acronym for "Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement". The system in "Getting to Yes" is not the vapid "can't we all just get along" mentality in which "win-win" is little more than a gloss for "everyone loses for peace at any price." It is instead built on each party unilaterally assessing her worst-case-scenario and then working to improve on that. Perhaps, then, the simplest way to parse "Getting to Yes" that the negotiator balances the representations of what each party hopes for, the "best case scenario" of each party, with valid representations of worst case scenario for each party.
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We expect so much these days. But imagine pre-radio days. Take your mind back before the free transmission of passive consumer entertainment into the home. How did people pass the time? Crafts, games. Are painting and writing and other such pastimes remnants of pre-telecom consumerist society?
There are experiences that overstimulate, to the detriment of the organism. Where people might formerly have developed their craft or talent or skill, instead they will consume. Instead of getting a scratch game going in the sand lot, the sand lot is now a 7-11 and the guys will be watching a game on the tube.
And we call it progress.
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Often you will hear people attempt to dismiss a disagreement by announcing, "We're only arguing semantics." Don't let them get away with it.
If there is a substantive disagreement which is confused by the use of a word being used in different senses then adopt new labels to sort out the various positions and continue on to resolve the conflict.
If there is substantive agreement which is confused by use of disparate labels for the same ostensible phenomena, then agree on a label and on the phenomena and continue on to either cement the agreement of diagnose any pertinent but not properly addressed disagreement.
In the latter case, substantive agreement with a mis-match of labels, the tendency to dismiss the matter is understandable. "We agree in substance but are using different labels," is to say conflict is resolved if we agree to the legitimate use of each others labels or find an agreed to alternative label.
But there are at least two dangers to summarily dismiss the matter on grounds of "semantics," first, labels are not passive things affixed to items; the choice of labels will greatly influence the choice and even the available choices related to that item, conceptually, cognitively. So it really is important to achieve agreement on substance and labels.
But the second danger of dismissing a case of mis-matching labels for substantive agreement is more pernicious: the act of dismissing matters on semantic grounds is itself sufficiently ambiguous, and where there is a matter of substantive disagreement under cover of the same label allowing your interlocutor to brush off the matter as one of semantics is to effectively allow that person to leave the field, to invalidate the disagreement, to continue with their acts unabated.
Assuming the issue is important, then allowing another to deflect efforts to pursue a persuasive line of thinking on the grounds that the disagreement is one of semantics is not an acceptable alternative.
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One of the mainstays of N-LP is the distinction between words that have easily identified sensory referents and those which don't. The former are called sensory specfic, the latter, "fluff." Having the knack of switching between these types of words goes a long way towards effective communication. The understanding of the difference between these types of words is essential to knowing when substantive information is being communicated as opposed to when noises are being generated for less consciously accessible reasons.
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A friend told me yesterday of a hypnotist he once knew who tried to use hypnosis get sexual favors from his clients. Howwever, such a situation might well be less about hypnosis and more about denial, dis-association, plausible-deniability (which is quite separate from denial per se) and transference/counter-transference issues.
Of course Erickson broadens the definition of hypnosis to include all that, so we're back where we started. The ability of therapists to violate their clients is inherently so great that I can't imagine complicating matters by trying to force someone "hypnotically."
The Grinder/Bandler discussions of stage hypnotism are relevant here: some folks are simply obedient. It is the case that some people will do what they are told, bark like a dog, crow like a chicken, and claim they had no will to oppose the command---for reasons pertaining to their own ego needs, for reasons that have nothing to do with legitimate hypnotic phenomena. Erickson speaks about the damage done, to specific clients and to the practice of hypnosis in general, by uncritical observers accepting such phenomena as valid.
There is a delightful example in the Grinder/Bandler literature of syntactic ambiguity, "Hypnotizing hypnotists can by tricky." A few of my hypnosis-capaple friends have invited strange loops of the hypnotizing hypnotists sort, but I don't much enjoy that game. It seems an unavoidable part of being in the business, rather like gun-slinging in the old West. But it is a big part of what I've avoided all these years, the showing off, the "look what I can do to you" that seems so much a part of the hypnosis community and even more so in the N-LP community, what with all the talk of "irresistible" communication. Get up, walk away; madness starts with refusal to leave the field.
Update, 051222: It has come to my attention that this post was off-putting for one or two of the folks with whom I suspect I could quite enjoy playing hypnotizing hypnotists. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and let the games begin.
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Added Automatic Motion to the glossary.
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The pendulum is a fine tool for certain clients. One of the values of this tool is that while both therapist and client consciously attend to the to-and-fro of the swinging weight they are also each placed in the peripheral vision of the other. The physical structures in the eye that give us peripheral vision are very different, and respond to very different kinds of phenomena, than those of foveal vision. For the therapist who has trained herself to creatively use the information available in such a situation pendulum work can be very powerful. Some people develop a refined sensitivity to the otherwise unconscious cues that are only visible in the part of the eye that tracks peripheral vision. People who grow up in physically abusive homes often develop tremendous abilities at "reading people." Pendulum work is one way to approach developing such "people reading skills" in a healthy and adaptive environment as a competent and capable adult.
However, there is the stigma of occultism and hypnosis to contend with, and some clients will not be able to divorce that stigma from the otherwise meaningless act of pendulum work. Later entries will touch on the ideo-sensory aspects of pendulum work, for now it is enough to contemplate the pendulum as an aid to an altered view of ones clients, the shifting of the therapist's mode of information gathering and processing to one that allows powerful, but seemingly effortless, intervention.
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Last time I saw my friend Lisa Golan I had just finished re-working the hyponsis language patterns. I was very excited. But I was also about to start school, as I recall. Strange, even disturbing how the time flies sometimes.
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There are clients for whom I don't have anything much theraputic that I can give or do because they don't genuinely desire change. "Not ready" turns out to be a gloss for, "Not willing." Take, for example, phobias. People love their phobias. I have never heard anyone say, "Hey, I'd love to get rid of this; when can I see you?" After 20 years of dealing with that phenomena it is time to take that feedback and craft an effective approach. Next time phobia's come up, I will plan on hearing that polarity response. Next time someone says anything about a phobia, play polarity: "Oh, you probably really love that, most people love their phobias. Most people get a lot of personality reinforcement from them, can't imagine giving up the phobia and really still being themselves." That's much more likely to obtain the desired result.
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Dreamt last night about a computer with little inserts for the buttons; someone was changing the insert label for this one button in particular, the only button seen clearly. The changes were coming so quick that only one of the inserts was readable, a yellow one reading "sarcasm." There were other yellow inserts, but their text was blurred; so too for the single red insert. Was there truly an insert of green or blue? It seems like there must have been at least one or the other.
Whatever behaviors are attached to a given button, the truth is that big shiny red buttons are going to get pushed more often than quiet unobtrusive green ones. And who can say, from within that metaphor, that it should be otherwise? There's the issue of attractiveness to the pusher. There's the issue of ease of pushing. There's the matter of what is triggered by the button. Under attractiveness, "button design" if you will, there's size and gloss and color and accessibility. How to balance, say, a red danger button, small, matte finish, but easy to get at, with a fairly large, shiny green "I'm O.K., You're O.K." button right in the center?
The problem with the button metaphor, of course, is that people aren't machines. People resent having things "done to them". No one wants to be "worked on." No one wants to think they are being done to, being run. And, frankly, who would want to feel like they are running people? It's not good to make people feel that way. That was Erickson's genius, the ability to run people and yet make them feel they were running themselves; better still, in time they truly would be running themselves if at all possible. The biggest problem with the N-LP formulations is the instrumentalist view of doing things to people. Try doing things for them, or even with them; it's a much cooler place to be. Make it easier for folks to push the good buttons, harder to push the bad ones, and recognize that the relationship between what they want, what they're looking for when they punch a shiny red button and what is actually wired to any particular shiny red button need not have anything to do with each other.
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Musings on Pattern Interruption
Violation of expectation might be a better term for the phenomenon. Unexpected repitition makes more sense under this view.
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The process of assigning wordness to a noise group is a function of social processes. The value of the the wordness assigned will be determined by the social group in which one was trained to assign wordness. And so the act of assigning wordness to a noise group is in reality a reinforcement of one's relationship to that social group, an act of allegiance. So, every word is allegiance, every use of language a deepening of one's involvement with the social group identified by (and indicative, even diagnostic, of) that language, a deepening of the reliance on the concepts and perceptions demanded by that language, a retrenchment of the world view found therein.
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Re-Visioning class ended on a high note; sorry not to have said more here sooner. Everyone was pleased with the work, the evals were all positive, and Adept will be doing it again at the SeaPort Marina Hotel in Long Beach; starting February 1, 2006. (Download the brochure!)
In the time between now and the next class I will be making changes to the course outline, incorporating student feedback as well as valuable course adjustments diagnosed by me along the way. This is an exciting new project for me, for Adept, and I am really looking forward to polishing it up to it's glittering best.
Meanwhile there is still school and developing the private practice; plenty to keep me busy!
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Re-Vision class comes to an end Tuesday. I haven't had much to say about it here but expect I'll change that next week after the final class. This much I can say now: We've set the dates for the next Long Beach class, to start February 1---or is that January 31. Check this spot Tuesday; I have to resolve this by then so I can produce flyers.
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It looks like 784 "On the framing of Padilla" may get converted into a piece for an online magazine. Before that happens I'll be needing to add to the discussion of framing.
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The case for detaining Jose Padilla in a military prison for over three years without benefit of due process rests on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Joint Resolution (AUMF), which reads:
"[T]he President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons _he_ determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."(emphasis added)
If the above sentence is constitutionally valid, and it is constitutionally valid to be at war with a non-nation/state entity, then Padilla is lawfully detained.
I am not the scholar to say whether or not giving such broad and vaguely termed powers to the executive is constitutionally valid. However, given my limited understanding of the checks and balances built into that venerable document, our Constitution, it would seem this section of the AUMF violates constitutional principle.
Further, there exists no convincing argument that it is legal, reasonable or even sane to consider war to be applicable to non-nation/state entities. The rational and reasonable grounds for fighting al Queda as a collective and it's members as individuals is through a) conspiracy law where the issue is with a citizen of the United States, b) where the persons in question are not U.S. nationals, international diplomacy and assisting other nations with enforcement of their laws by which conspiring to kill innocents is universally prohibited.
Given that the current administration, as well as the majority of representatives in both the House and the Senate, subscribe to a "We are the world's policeman" ideology most articulately presented by the Plan for the New American Century (PNAC), and likewise given that so many of our elected representatives, and so too, presumably, our fellow countrymen, fail to see the evil and dangers of taking such a position, it is no surprise that few have the will to question the basic assumption, but I will phrase it for you nonetheless: Are there legal, reasonable, sane grounds on which to define as "war" our effort to bring to justice the architects of the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center?
The legal, reasonable, sane and moral answer is a clear and resounding, "No."
By allowing such efforts to be couched in terms of war we have allowed an immoral and power drunk element of our society to take the steering wheel of our nation and to frame all dissent thereto as treasonous, and so we have each of us become complicit in the crimes of that immoral and power drunk element. The "war" in Afghanistan never offered any hope of permanently defeating a shadow organization such as al Queda. Likewise for the war in Iraq, even if we credit such a goal as the motivation behind our continued illegal military occupation of that country. On the contrary, such acts of arrogance and belligerence can only fuel the fire, can only increase the perception in the eyes of people who might otherwise have shunned al Queda and their ilk that we are indeed the evil empire and that a blow struck against our citizens is a blow struck for justice.
I have used the inclusive pronoun throughout most of this, not because of any affirmative act or support on my part for these crimes committed and being committed in our names, but because my will to speak out against these crimes was overshadowed by fear. I have even been in fear of physical violence against my person, in late 2001, for suggesting then what I say now about the fruits of invading Afghanistan. I still would think twice before verbalizing what I write here.
Legally it is the flimsiest nonsense to grant war powers to the executive to pursue international criminals; it is dangerous nonsense, nonsense which puts you and me and all our fellow citizens at grave risk by deteriorating our civil liberties and by increasing the palpable anti-American sentiment that spreads like a plague wherever PNAC has its way.
Jose Padilla is clearly an international criminals, perhaps not directly involved with the destruction of the World Trade Center four years and one day ago, but clearly conspiring to bring more of same to the extent of his abilities; he should be accordingly charged, tried and punished. It is farcical, however, to even so much as declare his acts treasonous on their face; he posed no threat to the nation as a whole, whatever threat he posed to the individuals who would have been killed by his intended acts. To hold Padilla's acts as inherently treasonous, on the reasoning that to injure a citizen is to injure the nation, would expose every petty thug to the same charge. That the rhetoric of the organization of international criminals with whom Padilla affiliated is rhetoric of "destroying the United States" does not in fact mean that said organization approaches having any such power or in any reasonable fashion can be raised to the status of an entity with which the United States can legally or even rationally war. Padilla was in possession of no vital state secrets, was not privy to information that could reasonably or even arguably affect security of a legitimately national character.
Padilla's detention and the current legal proceedings related thereto are simply and clearly a case of history's most spectacular international crime being used to justify the world police ideology of PNAC and fellow travelers. Padilla qua Padilla may be of little strategic importance even in the goal of bringing to justice the international criminals of al Queda; the truly important issue raised by this man's three year detention without due process is how long America, my country, will stand to be run by representatives with such frighteningly deficient moral development, by men and women of such stunted thinking ability as to not cry out against the nonsense of granting war powers to combat international conspiracy, by fellow citizens who for one reason or another seem not to care for protecting the liberties that, if real and present, would give this nation it's only reason for pride, and if absent give this nation reason for nothing but shame.
References:
Padilla v Hanft: http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/056396.P.pdf
PNAC: http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm
Framing: http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/research/lakoff/gwot_rip/view?searchterm=frame
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Ramblings spawned by Professor Sydney Lamb's Neuro-Cognitive Structure in the Interplay of Language and Thought.
It is easy to [think of] concepts, like language, thought, perception, behavior, as actual objects or entities of some kind, as if they had existence apart from human beings; to be more exact, as if they had some life of their own, apart from the human mind. But I'd like to suggest that thinking in such terms is in itself an example of just the kind of phenomenon Whorf was talking about, an example of language influencing thought -- in this case, through the process of reification, in which we are reifying "language", "thought", and so forth, and treating them as independent objects.
It just doesn't get any better than this. And remember, this is from a guy working on the physical end of things, who is investigating the neuro-physiology of individual "language systems." Frustratingly, it seems there is no escape from such reifications. Lamb goes on to talk about information and information systems and such without any disclaimers as to their equally intangible nature. But I'm waiting to see where he ends up.
If I ask you to visualize a cat and you do so, you are activating those connections in your visual system as a consequence of linguistic rather than sensory input.
This troubles me ever so slightly. The response would still be to sensory input, whether the printed word or someone's speech act or even braille. The difference between visualizing a cat in response to hearing an unidentified purr or meow versus visualizing a cat in response to words exhorting you to so visualize is one of direct association. There is comparatively direct association between certain auditory and visual stimuli, such as the sound of purring and the sight of a cat. The associations from the sensory inputs that make up the command, "Visualize a cat," be they visual, auditory or kinesthetic are arbitrary and responses to those stimuli are constrained only by the listener's experience with and exposure to the social milieu in which the sensations occur.
As the discussion turns to the topic of learning I am again frustrated that we must work with such an amorphous term. I am, personally, about ready to define "learning" as entropy, as the changes in the biot over time in relation to its environment and as constrained by its physiological parameters. But, boy-oh-boy, is that clunky, not to mention in direct opposition to prevailing uses wherein "learning" is the accumulation of "information" which has been defined as "anti-entropy" or "reverse-entropy." But that definition of "information" always struck me as a little question begging, a little unduly privileging of humanist ideals, at least undue in the realm of the physical sciences.
We can hypothesize, in harmony with Hebb (1949), that the fundamental learning process might consist of strengthening a connection when it is active while the node to which it is connected has its threshold satisfied by virtue of also receiving activation from other connections.
This seems a tad off: Surely a "connection" is the relationship between the things connected. It is confusing to talk about the node to which a connection is connected, and I don't yet have the grasp to craft a good alternative. I think that's a good place to stop for now. I will come back with a better understanding of the "node" and "connection" nomenclature.
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Just discovered Claude Steiner's wonderful web site. Go visit it, and be sure to at least scan the full length of the home page.
If you aren't familiar with Steiner's work, a good place to start is his "Games Alcoholics Play," which uses Transactional Analysis concepts to create a much needed alternative to the "I'm not okay, you're not okay" based 12-step program.
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Added entry for anchoring, an important N-LP term of art. The treatment is not terribly pro-N-LP, but it is honest.
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I have been busy in meatspace. Apologies. Lots of good stuff happening, just not all relevant to the ISR pages. Soon, hopefully, I will have a single-page handout for the speed reading method. Keep checking back.
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I am not sure I am entirely at ease with having the blog be the home page. This space has yet to coalesce into whatever it is becoming, and I am overwhelmed by the number of partial projects it represents.
Am skimming through an interesting collection of essays relating legal interpretation to literary interpretation. It's a 1988 copyright, so much of the material is hopelessly dated, but still there are themes that ring true despite the lack of topicality of the examples. Later I suspect I'll look for more current incarnations of these thoughts.
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Goodnight, John-boy. I've done all the damage I can think to do for the night. I hope this makes more sense for folks; hope it's easier to navigate, to generally "get one's head around" the subject matter. It's been a nice reminder for me just how much I've got in progress, waiting, and in so many different levels of completion, which is nice, as sometimes one wants to get lost for hours, other times one wants more instant gratification of the closure appetite. So, this has been a good session for me today; I hope it's been of value to you too.
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It has come to my attention that perhaps this site could be a little more user friendly. Okay, we're working on it. Starting pretty much now the blog will be the splash page for the domain, and I'll probably run as much of the content as possible through the blosxom cgi. However, for starters I'll probably just put the blog up front and leave the rest intact, such that http://www.semanticrestructuring.com works but http://www.semanticrestructuring.com/abstracts.php will getcha back to the older versions until the change over is complete. Also, of course, I'm trying to make sure I don't create linkrot for the three people who have actually linked to portions of this site; all existing inbound links should still work just fine.
In particular, btw, I've been told that folks just don't get what the site is about, and I'm hoping to change that. It's about Semantic Restructuring, but that's not a very nutritious answer. The best I've come up with so far is still Brief Therapy with Achilles. Hope that helps.
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Ignore this post. Unless you think it is self-defeating to say so.
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We invent these entities, then forget we invent them. We fail to defer suspension of disbelief. Language. Mind. Self. Good, useful terms, up to the limits of their usefulness, but don't mistake them for anything real. Defer.
And maybe not really apropos of the above, but today I am again amused at the attempts to deny having metaphysical assumptions by statements such as Whereof one cannot speak..., which some have taken as "Metaphysicians, shut up."
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In what discipline do adherents say:
There is no such thing as grammar, it's an intangible entity, and we might do well to identify the set of tangible, experiential and conceptual entities that are conflated to arrive at "grammar."
Probably none. But that is a question I would ask. I understand it's not a question likely to be asked in any discipline that water-skis in the wake of Chomsky, but it's a question I'd like to see asked in a meaningful way. Hell, just the "what do we conflate to create grammar?" would be a good one to work on. One thing that really strikes me is the notion of grammar seems to flow from hierarchicalized social structures in which an authority can dictate what is and isn't "proper" communication. Grammar seems, to my eye, inextricably linked with prescription, proscription, social order, force, inequity. It's enough to make a flower girl say, "Garn."
Think for a bit about Chomsky's stated goal, rules for generating all and only the grammatical sentences of a language. Now think about the overwhelming percentage of language (not to mention the rest of communication and interaction) that is fully acceptable, effective, and ungrammatical. It's a cousin of Aristotle's error of excluding the middle. Sure, we can do some neat tricks by excluding the middle, but that doesn't make the method empirically valid; life is lived pretty exclusively in that excluded middle, made up not only of greys but the infitite blend of colors. Likewise Chomsky's "Language = Set of Grammatical Sentences." Neat, useful, but in no way the whole shebang, quite limited in scope, and, seemingly, an unacknowledged byproduct of prescription, proscription, social order, force, inequity.
Now, maybe it's just that within a discipline, like linguistics, the folks accept these lacunae, either because the resulting efforts seem still to have merit and bear worthwhile fruits, or simply because that's the price of discipleship. And maybe that's why I've never been able to find a discpipline, because I can't accept these huge gaping holes and I'm not presonally tied to any group enough to accept their orthodoxies just for membership.
Thanks, by the way, to Eve Sweetser, on cogling, for introducing me to "conflation" in this context. I haven't yet tracked down the source article she cited, and so am probably using the term differently than the literature. But in the meantime it works wonders for me as a means of thinking about nominalization, in the N-LP sense of the word (in Semantic Restructuring we call them "intangibles.")
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From Pg. 22:
..."deja vu", for which I have no explanation
One model of deja vu, sloppy, formative:
Sensorium affected by events
Clusters of events encoded and semantically punctuated
Encoding includes
Orthodox "time stamp", data relating to occurence of other events ("when")
Duration ("how long")
Uniqueness ("Nth occurence of sensory inputs encoded/punctuated such as to be considered 'the same as')
Given this structure, we can define deja vu as unorthodox assignment of time stamp and/or uniqueness.
And
...human beings keep reporting these rather extraordinary occurrences. I for one would be opposed to dismissing them simply because they don't happen to fit our particular paradigms. The metaphsyical plays an important role in many people's lives...
If only because life is lived in that excluded middle we must logically accept that which falls outside the boundaries of logic.
And
The mistake is in trying to equate the two or act as if it were necessary to create a fixed relationship between the sacred and the profane.
There is, of course, no such one-to-one relationship between the logical and the real. How could there be when logic starts by throwing out all that doesn't fit neatly into one of two boxes?
And
...[the Hopi exhibit] no feeling that life would be out of joint so long as the task remained incomplete.
Have I, then, picked up a little Hopi along the way? We just call it indolence, but Heinlein's Martian protagonist might call it "waiting for fullness." Did R.A.H. pull this from Hopi studies by way of Whorf, by way of Korzybski? Or is this attitude from his own dabbling in other religious and cultural traditions? Either way, I got it early, and it was a fit with other things I'd been taught, and it is now a source of conflict in me, for part of me is happy to wait for fullness, leaving things partly done, another part of me recognizes how at odds this puts me with the world around me.
To paraphrase from pg. 32-33, Hopi do not subscribe to the idea that time heals, whereas that's a staple of American/European thought. How 'bout Africans? Probably an unwise move from "well defined homogeneous group" to "heterogeneous cultures spanning one or more continents."
...as though the dam had a built in schedule, like the maturing of a sheep, or the ripening of corn.
Now *that's* a clear distinction.
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A friend writes:
Evolution jury-rigs out of the available material.
This sentence, useful as it might be for popularizing the matter in a grade-school magazine, is simply catastrophically wrong. Evolution doesn't jury-rig (or jerry-rig or n-rig). Evolution is not a person, does not act, has no goal. The use of anthropomorphic concepts leads to hidden teleologism.
Strangely, many folks agree that teleology, as applied to evolution, is a bad thing. And yet those same folks, as humanists, cannot seem to escape this fallacy. From the proper perspective the movie that is creation, from big bang to big crunch (or whatever happens to turn out to be the case) can be played backwards or forwards; it is only from our limited vantage within the film that we seem to be moving more one way than another. When I read a novel I suspend disbelief and immerse myself in the time-stream of the characters, but this does nothing to change the reality that the whole piece is set and done. There is no surprise, no mystery, only our ignorance from our little, limited perspectives.
This pushes on the ISR domain, rather than simply ending up on the Oblio's Cap site, which is admittedly more unrestrained in terms of free-from philosophizing, because of the seeming paradox in communication theory where we pit information against entropy, redundancy against novelty. Somewhere, somehow, this notion of actively suspending disbelief bears on the signal:noise, pattern:chaos, information:entropy split, even as it butts up against the free-will and predestination issue.
No further statements at this time, just marking a thought to ponder.
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A friend writes
<g> is an early emoticon for "grin"
I think it's worth the effort to maintain a greater level of precision on this. An emoticon is an image, or icon, intended to convey emotion. The "Have a nice day!" smiley face from the early 70s is probably the best known, and most loathed, example of such. Traditionally, inclusion of any such non-verbal nonsense in writing was considered trite at best, vaguely pathological at worst, but in the email era and beyond the rules are changing.
However, <g> is not an emoticon. It is not ascii or any other kind of art. It is a tag, as in a mark-up tag, as in "hypertext mark-up language," or its more valuable predecessor, "standard generalized mark-up language." I would call <g> "a semantic markup tag providing emotive-contextualization." I would not call it an emoticon. And I would, in certain company, stand on this distinction because part of what the next few decades promise to bring is a greater appreciation and application of text-context-subtext-medium distinctions, McLuhan notwithstanding.
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Spell checking some of the pages, which, of course, should be de rigueur before they post. Be that as it may, I've noticed the N-LP oriented stuff is rife with fog. The spell checker barfed on "creativities", and rightly so. There was no reason I couldn't have said, "...the client's competence and creativity." But the over-nominalization bug had hit me.
Sure, over-nominalization can be useful in a confusion technique, but sometimes the goal is not to confuse someone into a trance but to actually transmit information. Duh.
So, be on the lookout for a kinder, gentler, sunnier mode of discourse in some of this stuff. Transparent even. Wish me luck.
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