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The n±1principle: higher, wider, different.

8/6/2011

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PictureA sense of perspective would help the knight
There is always higher than high and lower than low.

There is, be certain,  deeper than deep, wider than wide, more than more and less than less...
You will find stronger than strong, weaker even than the weak, older than the old and newer than new, without fail.
There is always much worse than what befalls you now and better that that which seems enough and  satisfying at one moment. ..

If this litany of common sense makes you sleepy, keep awake nonetheless, it is worth to consider what this string of truism may mean for you in important moments. Reflect on this and you will find it to be valid in your own experience. Apply the consequence and you will be able to do things other people cannot.

Armed with this open-minded view of the world, you will gain degrees of freedom to appreciate, chose, act and help other people. But to make them, the other, understand such simple-looking thinking, you will have to use the "power to make things simple".

The now and the here are always in a context. But there are always other contexts, elsewhere or sometimes else. There is an always possible someone else's view. There is forever something else, you can count on it; and from another, changed perspective, things appear different, with altered meaning and dissimilar horizons.

                                                                                                                *

Our human strength is to rise and travel in the mind and to foresee the new landscapes we do not yet behold with our eyes.

The flow of our mind is not only something that just happens to us: perceiving, being, doing, thinking and feeling; no, we are not mere force-fields of causalities mirrored in our skull more or less as they are.

We have the reflexive might of the person, of “I”; to be aware that we are and what we do and why. We give names and we can change those names too. This opens an ability to observe and conceive ourselves and our context with detachment, as from above, or to question the roots of that which seems obvious. 

Consciousness and imagination are a loss of innocence, the taste of the forbidden fruit that allows us - as agents - to understand where we are, and who we are, in a way that enables us to take distance and freedom from that place and identity. Thus, we gain some power to act and to create that which is not given. We can start something new. 

I like to call the strategy that considers all things differently, from the next higher, wider, or – on the contrary - deeper level, the n±1 principle.     

If you feel curious, read the whole article.
 


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