Structure Function

This discussion will be about structure, function, order.  It is not about concepts, thoughts, beliefs and other flights of fancy.
We’ll start with a few quotes:

Socrates “With all thy getting get understanding” Good advice. But what does understanding mean. Does it have to do with knowledge or something else like information. We’ll get into that later on.

Rene Descartes – ” If you want to talk to me define your terms”
More good advice. We would modify that statement slightly by saying describe to me what you mean by . . . such and such. One word definitions don’t cut it anymore. As the founder of the Institute of General Semantics once said, ” words defined in terms of other words ultimately leads to undefined terms.

There are many hindrances to understanding, but the two main blockages are belief and identity.  The human belief system is part of the overall field of mind, but a very small part.  As a system it can be compared to the lymphatic system or the immune system in that it is a structural part of the whole.  You would not consider turning over your whole being to the lymphatic system nor should you be that involved with the content of your belief system.  It is there and is useful but not a major player in the life of the total organism.  A quick story – I had several individuals stop by my house sometime ago giving away printed material about the “WatchTower”.  I listened for a minute and then said ” you are talking about belief systems.  All religions are belief systems but it’s not about belief, it’s about consciousness.  The young man looked at me as if he had been hit by a bomb.  He suddenly realized that he needed to investigate a bit more.

Belief systems do not have a very good track record.  There was a time when the whole world believed the earth was flat.  But that didn’t make it flat.  In the 17th century we believed that the earth was the center of the universe not withstanding evidence by Copernicus and Galileo to the contrary.  The Holy Office of the Inquisition however managed to persuaded Galileo to recant setting the world back at least 250 years.  So it seems belief doesn’t make any difference.  That is we can believe that the world is flat, but the world does not respond.  My course of instruction goes into more depth regarding belief but the essentials are stated.  Belief doesn’t make any difference to the outside world, but it does make a difference to the individual.

The wholesale adoption of belief systems by the masses is analogous to turning over all your driving responsibilities to your hydraulic system.  It can’t do it.  It is not designed to do it.  The hydraulic system is designed to stop the car not to make it go.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t important.  It is, but it’s not everything.  Similarly with the human belief system.  It’s there and needs to be recognized, but we have given our whole being to it unnecessarily much to our detriment.

The next major impediment to our ongoing is identity.  Not only are we identified with our thoughts, ideas, body, feelings etc, but are also identified with images that we self create in our mind and believe to be substantive and out there when in fact they are in our heads.  My course deals with methods to loosen the strangle hold that these images impart to our being.

Adding to the confusion is the enormous amount of disinformation purveyed by the media.  In our times we have seen information expand from miniscule in the beginning of the last century to overwhelming at the beginning of the 21st century.  Today we suffer from information overload and faced with the difficulty of parsing and determining fact from fiction and lies from relative truth.  An examination of the human nervous system as an information processing system is also examined in the course material.

My philosophy has always been “leave an organism alone and ultimately it will realize its destiny”.  Unfortunately we are approaching a time deadline and the information is better released with its attendant risks, rather than hold it back and be overtaken by events.
More in the next post. . . .