Saturday, April 16, 2011

Random Thoughts

Sometimes feeling overwhelmed by the web of connections one encounters? With the new social media and the multi-networked environment, the six degrees of separation has been reduced despite the immensity of the growing number of individual expressions of consciousness.

In Science of Mind magazine the other day there was an article by Gary Zukav referencing the human evolution towards multi-sensory perception. A way of approaching reality beyond what we now experience through the five senses. Everyone has heard of the entirely eerie sixth sense but the term multi-sensory perception removes some of the negative connotations now associated with just the sixth sense. What was labelled the sixth sense was an intuitive acknowledgement of what is to become an evolutionary reality, however, with all things defined there will be more that just one additional sense perception. Avoiding the dogmatism imposed by language, there is a way in which the five senses have long operated as a system of perception and in that way I feel intellectually in is easier for us to perceive the possibility of what living with this optimized system might feel like.

The perception of reality informs to a degree what we know or think we know and therefore has a profound impact on our behavior. I think this may be more of an unconscious effect than a conscious one because of the enormity of awareness that would be required to sort through or synthesize what is taking place at any given moment.

Relating this to the modern day workplace and business environment or political landscape, one can see that the early recognition of the importance of data (maps, libraries, constitutions, codes of law, census demographics, databases, analytics, etc.) gave rise to the early MIS environment where it was then necessary to find tools that equipped us to make sense of all the data. With advancing technology and the new cloud environment, I wonder how interconnected our own multi-sensory perceptions are with the advancement of our ability to interact and interpret knowledge through the cloud?

All of this makes me take a deep breathe and remember that in our Western mystical tradition there was a way of contemplating God (ultimate reality) through the apophatic tradition of unknowing...through the Cloud of Unknowing as one anonymous mystical writer put it. How much of our modern Constructivist learning theory is built upon that initial letting go of what we formerly held to be true and real?

Returning to our interconnectedness and the advent of the cloud in technology, how will this alter the social reality. Social constructivism talks about how our meaning making is informed by our encounters with the social environment (now global)and reminds me of the memes and conversations from Integral theory and the greater impact this will have on our interpersonal and international relations, our understanding of ourselves and others, which any modern person realizes has been evolving all along...

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