Saturday, August 1, 2015

How to Leverage Paradoxical Thinking and Systems Thinking to Understand the World

The world you perceive depends on the way you see and the lenses you use. - Steve Covey

Our conscience and morality in living a quality of life that sustains the health of the mind, body, and spirit, leads us to put a yardstick to events.

 Everything is perspective. Everything is a judgment based upon the perspective that is influenced by our own mentality, experiences and also our belief systems. As old saying: “Nothing is either good or bad, but out thinking makes it so.”

The world you perceive depends on the way you see and the lenses you use. (Covey) Somethings are always good, and some are always bad, especially if you include concepts and emotions in your definition of "things." Good or Bad? It can depend on the way we 'see' the world. Our paradigms can be "compared to the lenses in our glasses. What we see isn't a completely accurate reflection of reality, it is shaped by our thought processes, attitudes, and perceptions. The objective Truth, we use as our yardstick, is just as much an illusion as our subjective perceptions: good vs. bad, talking vs. listening, giving vs. receiving etc.... anything 'social' or 'joint' that benefits all of us in a dance of harmonious balance. What you may think is bad, is not to someone else. Good and bad are simply perspectives, shaped by culture and personal experience. People are different, cultures are different, however, as for the substance: human moral constructs determine right and wrong. Regardless of religion, culture and any other differences, there’s a moral compass to help human beings find the common ground, then people can respect the difference and to harmonize the way moving to the upground through empathy, and make collective progress in human society.
A"Thinking" classifies many things, Good" and "bad" depend on how you believe a situation to be - influenced by your consciousness and attitude about life. Consciousness is the quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. You conscious mentality drives your attitude, the attitude and behavior depend significantly on human values, conceived a new image of human for emphasizing the role that our species can play in shaping its own destiny, as humans have always created an environment of their own out of symbols which become human values after being cultivated; they may develop new abilities to direct their own evolution on ethical values determined according to emergent realities created by an interdependent global community. Each really new idea needs to break one or more old habitual thoughts. Even an old idea of Free Will, for example, needs to break habitual thought about the same cause having the same effect. And many other habitual thoughts revolve around the mediocre understanding of causality. This explains “resulting tendency towards inefficiency and stagnation” and the danger of “egalitarianism” “resulting tendency towards inefficiency and stagnation” --- turning into, what is mediocracy about.


Symbolic systems (language, beliefs, law, customs, values, morality, overall culture…) are the most important subject for researching in global perspectives. This kind of systems may lead groups of humans to raise their consciousness about the need for organizing consistently their means (ideas) — choosing and implementing them according to their ends (goals). The healthy, then moral evolvement of human relations, being necessary for pushing ahead frankly and effectively the development of any particular community, makes necessary to create, maintain and improve the kind of cultural values. It may help and lead people, to develop individually and collectively their gregarious and cooperative features inherent in human nature. It is combined with the sense of responsibility and free decisions, that would support altogether the manifestation of humanitarian societies to be aware of the role of human beings on the planet Earth.

We are on the major shift from industrial silo to digital hyperconnectivity, now the physical barriers: the oceans, the mountains, and the deserts can no longer isolate us, and knowledge is only clicks away, Success in the digital world demands both paradoxical thinking - to see the two sides of the coin; and Systems Thinking - to understand the interconnected nature of digital societal system. But this old saying is still true: “Nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so.”


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