Essay: Accurate thinking

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Accurate thinking

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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Heinrich #Scholz Walter R. #Fuchs, #Cybernetics for the Modern Mind

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

Accurate thinking

I’ve been carrying this hand-written note around with me since high school. Note to parents: What is YOUR impressionable young boy or girl reading when they think you’re not looking?

“There are people who think in a way which I would simply call “accurate” thinking. They are people with persistent, highly controlled intellectual habits. These people can be recognized by four characteristics:

“They remain inexorably silent if they have nothing to say which is at least formulated in such a way that it could be tested.

“They only make assertions about something when whatever this may be will stand up to a possible subsequent test; with the reservation, however, that sometime in the distant future something could be discovered that might lead to a revaluation of their statement.

“They distinguish precisely in what they say between that which they can prove and that which they cannot prove.

“They object relentlessly to something being said in such a way that it cannot be tested, or if it can be tested it will not stand up to a rigorous repeat-test.”

Heinrich Scholz; mathematician, theologian

Quoted in:
Walter R. Fuchs, Cybernetics for the Modern Mind, p. 47, Rupert Hart-Davis Educational Publications and The Macmillan Company , 1971 (Translation)

 

Essay: The emotions of transformation

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The emotions of transformation

From the book: Chum for Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by David Satterlee

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#Integral

Chum For Thought:
Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters

The emotions of transformation

[With appreciation to the research of Susan Cook-Greuter]

The language, concepts, and vocabulary that people use forms the filter through which they see and understand the world. At higher levels of development, you become aware of this process. You are more-able to stand back and observe, not just everything else with dispassion, but your own actions, reactions, emotions and motives as well. You can enter the ego and see that you are playing this game or that game and be a genuine witness to your own struggles.

At first, you feel suspicious of this new perception. You don’t understand it well enough to defend it. It feels threatening and disturbing. Your foundation of assumptions has begun to crumble. You become aware of more of your mental processes such as creating explanatory stories and drawing conclusions. You begin to question all of the stories that you have previously created to explain things. But gradually you become more comfortable with the process of watching your mind at work.

Once you can begin to see yourself reaching the limits of previous understandings, struggling with inadequate ideas, and struggling to sort things out in a new way, there is a joyful satisfaction, an uplifting glow as you feel yourself

Poem: You Must Love Thy Neighbor

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You Must Love Thy Neighbor

Life Will Get You in the End:
Short Stories by David Satterlee

from the book: Life Will Get You in the End:
Short stories by David Satterlee

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A little ditty about empathy and compassion.

“You Must Love Thy Neighbor” 

(The saints among us)

All good things must run their course

And reach their final end.

So say the laws that govern us,

Which no one can amend.

We weep for sorrow not our own,

In love of fellow man.

And on these empathetic hearts

You can impose no ban.

For they can sense the tender need

Within a mind or heart.

And from compassion for such ones

These men will never part.