How to Leverage Paradoxical Thinking and Systems Thinking to Understand the World

The world you perceive depends on the way you see and the lenses you use. (Covey) Somethings are always good, and some always bad, especially if you include concepts and emotions in your definition of "things." Good or Bad? It can depend on the way we 'see' the world. Our paradigms can be "compared to the lenses in our glasses. What we see isn't a completely accurate reflection of reality," it is shaped by our thought processes, attitudes and perceptions. The objective Truth, we use as our yardstick, is just as much an illusion as our subjective perceptions: good vs. bad, talking vs. listening, giving vs. receiving etc.... anything 'social' or 'joint' that benefits all of us in a dance of harmonious balance. What you may think is bad, is not to someone else. Good and bad are simply perspectives, shaped by culture and personal experience. People are different, culture are different, however, as for the substance: human moral constructs determine right and wrong. Regardless religion, culture and any other difference, there’s compass to help human beings find the common ground, people can respect the difference and move to the upground from common ground through empathy, and to harmonize and make collective progress in human society. A"Thinking" classifies many things, Good" and "bad" depend on how you believe a situation to be - influenced by your consciousness and attitude about life. Consciousness is the quality or state of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is. The attitude and behavior depend significantly on human values, conceived a new image of human for emphasizing the role that our species can play in shaping its own destiny, as humans have always created an environment of their own out of symbols which become human values after being cultivated; they may develop new abilities to direct their own evolution on ethical values determined according to emergent realities created by an interdependent global community. Each really new idea needs to break one or more old habitual thoughts. Even an old idea of Free Will, for example, needs to break habitual thought about the same cause having the same effect. And many other habitual thoughts revolve around mediocre understanding of causality. This explains “resulting tendency towards inefficiency and stagnation” and the danger of “egalitarianism” “resulting tendency towards inefficiency and stagnation” --- turning into, what is mediocracy...

We are on the major shift from industrial silo to digital hyperconnectivity, now the physical barriers: the oceans, the mountains and deserts can no longer isolate us, and knowlege is only clicks away, Success in the digital world demands both paradoxical thinking - to see the two sides of the coin; and Systems Thinking - to understand the interconnected nature of digital societal system. But this old saying is still true: “Nothing is either good or bad, but our thinking makes it so.”
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Published on August 01, 2015 23:55
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