Not very clever thoughts on Systems Theory

Hi Antonio and Horizons of Significance readers, First off, thanks for the opportunity to engage in what is – for me at least – an important and useful discussion. I wish I had some more fruitful comments to make! For those of you who’ve come in late, this is my attempt to respond to Antonio’s

The Bad Taste of Clever

System Theory was another of those things, like speaking “prose,” that once it was described to me I realized I’ve been doing it for a long time. There are many fascinating insights to be found there. In the end, I found the “practice” of Systems Theory to be a dead end.

“The truth for me…”

“The Truth for me must be what I need it to be.” David Bohm describing the justifications of Ego. Whenever we allow our language to atrophy – as we do when we rely on labels to stand-in for complexities – we arrive at a paradox: We feel the need to be concise. We fear no

Musing on Medusa, Reflections on the Gorgon’s Head

Those of us who fear chaos, through our efforts to control chaos, bring about more chaos, a more virulent chaos, a more violent chaos.

Writing, we invoke…

Writing we invoke. If it is ever to be anything more than a display of cleverness, writing is an act of prayer. We seek out; we ask for; we hope to receive something from beyond what we think. What we think we know.

Lies

We fall for lies because we want to be told what can’t possibly be true. This formulation came to me recently. Shouldn’t be much of a surprise why lies might come into focus these days….

What is missing…

The change of the seasons is so powerful…. It is disorienting…. We tend to view this as a collapse of whatever momentum we had developed over the months spent within a circle of similarity that allows us to feel a kind of certainty building. Yes, even for those of us talking endlessly about the pitfalls of

Cause & Effect

The greatest difficulty when we turn our attention on something like Cause & Effect comes from the astounding inertia of conditioned assumptions. To make a case that Cause & Effect is an illusion is to put one frail voice up against thousands of years of common sense. This is why it’s so important to sort

It’s a Crime, part I

Money is the root of all evil. Sure, we all know this platitude. Why doesn’t it ever sink in? The debasement of language is part of it. What was once an insight is fossilized and words no longer convey meaning. It’s also what happens when a statement is too broad. Its indicators too vague. A

Intelligence

Tossing the Die One thing coming into view is that intelligence is not…. I began to write in earnest when I discovered – not that what I had to say was hard to say – but that I needed to work at…. For me, language is a freedom. As soon as you have found the

Falling Awake

We say, we “fall asleep.” We imagine a vertiginous scene, leaning over a precipice. Just a moment’s loss of attention, and over we go. We see this as a kind of death. A conflation of self-consciousness with life? There is an expectation that attention and reflexive self-awareness are identical, or at least that we cannot

The Proprioception of Power

Finding what needs to be said is a challenge. In large part it requires letting go of reacting to things and getting caught-up in complaining. Chasing disappointment… It requires allowing the force of what is not being said to make itself felt. This is a combination of internal listening with sampling what comes to us