I have been developing a thought about language and reality and suggesting that it might be better to think about the sentences that we use as commitments to reality rather than descriptions of it. Of …
A World of Sentences, Part 3: The Transformative Power of Language
In my last two posts I have suggested that it may not be valid to think of language as a description of reality. So if our language does not describe reality, what does it do? …
A World of Sentences, Part 2: Language and the Reality of Reality
When we begin to suspect how much language might be influencing our perception of reality our fundamental conception of what is real and true starts to unravel. Have we been wrong to assume that language …
A World Made of Sentences, Part I: Sentences and the Perception or Reality
My last series of posts showed how our sense of self can be seen to be composed from an unending string of conclusions about who we are. In discovering this something interesting becomes apparent. We realize …
Self, Truth, Reality and Language – Part 4: A Model for Human Transformation
This will be the final post in this series and it brings the ideas we have been working with together into a model for how human transformation happens. Human beings change in many ways. We …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language – Part III: Psychological Development vs. Spiritual Transformation
Over my last couple of posts I have been writing some thoughts about our sense of self. One way to think about our sense of self is to see that it is formed by a …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language – Part II: Sentences In Your Head
We are all trapped in a self-image – a set of ideas that we identify with as who we are. If you want to discover radical freedom then you have to look closely at what …
Self, Reality, Truth and Language – Part I: The Discovery of Radical Freedom
The most important relationships that we have are the ones that we have with the thoughts in our heads. Our relationship to thought determines everything that we experience and everything that we are. Let’s start …
Experience and Understanding
There are two kinds of knowing – experience and understanding – and the confusion between them is the cause of all sorts of trouble for any thinking person. Experience is the knowing of things. It …
Are Relationships Real Things?
Our sense of reality is dominated by things. Things feel real to us. We live in a universe that we experience as empty space filled with things. And some things have relationships between them. But …
Mind is not Brain
What is the mind? Most of us think about it as a storehouse of ideas and memories. It is the place where we experience the world. Sometimes we think about it as a movie screen …
Is a Dog Really a Dog?
One of the great philosophical dividing lines has always been the line that separates the particular from the universal – the unique from the general. We live in a world of both particulars and universals …
The Objective Reality of Language
We live in a universe of discourse – a flowing ever-adjusting transfer of information. If you want to see the world the way that George Herbert Mead and the other American Pragmatists saw it you …
Learning to be a Self
George Herbert Mead said a self is a subject that is an object to itself. A subject is a perceiving thing and a self is a perceiving thing that can perceive itself. Human beings are …
Into The Human Flow
I am currently completely captivated by the image of a Human Flow. The American Pragmatist philosophers developed a view of humanity as a constant flow of activity and society was a flow of flows. There …
Worldviews and Ways of Being
Immanuel Kant, the great German philosopher of the 18th Century, presented the radical idea that the world is not the way it appears to be. What we see as the world is not a real …
Mead, Mind and World
George Herbert Mead is the fourth major figure in Classical American Pragmatism. Mead studied philosophy at Harvard while William James chaired the department. He taught with John Dewey at the University of Michigan before they …
Martin Heidegger and The Worlds of Sense and Purpose
I am still thinking about Heidegger’s three ways of being. The first two of these he called ‘presence-to-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand.’ Both of these are defined in what could be seen as human terms and I …
To be or not to be: What is Ontology?
What does it mean ‘to be’? When I say “I am…” or “It is…” what am I saying? What does it mean to exist – or to not exist, to be or not to be? …
Substance, Utility, Existence: Heidegger’s Modes of Being
Martin Heidegger, the 20th century German philosopher, believed that for thousands of years human beings had misidentified the nature of what it means ‘to be.” From the time of the great Greek thinkers the fundamental …