eThoughts : Fundamentals Before Complexity

Instead of standing around acting like our view of reality is the view, maybe we could consider it a view. All right, I know we all know this, but it seems like we spend a lot less time reporting what we see and a lot more time trying to impose it. Ethical and moral reporting from the landscape of awareness is a descriptive process, not a deliberately self-righteous spin process. I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with spinning our descriptions, but that would be in a world of people not so easily fooled. Otherwise, the spinning process is a kind of magical process—a sleight of cognition. In psychology, it is called the availability heuristic—rules of thumb created from available, rather than sufficient and comprehensive, information. This is not always a bad thing either, if there is precious little information to begin with. However, spin-meisters tend to limit comprehensiveness and sufficiency so that perception is twisted to support the spinner’s view—again, not always unethical, but not likely as a way of life.

However, if we adopt an initial stance of reporting what we see in our journey through awareness, we are far less likely to begin the interactive process with self-righteous judgments. Judgments are about assessing goodness and badness, and about position and location—once again, not inherently unethical, but judgments need a check and balance or they’re likely to run the show.

So, it would seem that we might be a bit more civil if we report what we perceive and sense, rather than try and impose our perceptions and sensations. And it might be a bit more civil to listen to those reports without buying them upfront. We can have our descriptions without judging ourselves or others for having the same or different ones. This is a process of checking in to see how our view of reality stacks up to other views.

Okay, this descriptive, checking-in process is sometimes practiced and sometimes not, but it seems like a fundamental attribute lost in the importance of acquisition. It is true that we can’t just stay with reporting our descriptions about the awareness landscape, we’re going to actually have to do something about it sooner or later—and that may entail imposing upon the landscape. Then the nuances, or not, of what constitute ethical imposition begins—and, as we all know, that’s a journey that can create a lot of beauty or a lot of waste in our awareness landscape. But this is not about those complexities, this is about the basics in a journey of awareness—the fundamentals. And like all fundamentals, they need to be readily practiced, by beginners and experts alike.

Development proceeds from the simple to the complex, but does not ever forgo either. It may be an odd world where twisted complexities require fundamentals to solve, but it looks like that’s the world we live in. There’s a certain amount of comfort and beauty in such a world.

That’s my report. How do you see it?