The Power of Three

Wanted to flesh out more in a response to Marko who introduced a picture of a nicely woven material but the point of which is reminding ourselves of the messy stitching hidden on the other side. The problem with this example is that it speaks to the dualistic world we already exist in where things are this Or that, or them Vs us - and it best serves us to become just as black and white we are about things while ignoring the gray areas. It is not a holistic view.

My response was based on three aspects and because Marko focused just on the first in reply

1. Conceptual Thinking
2. Felt-Experience
3. Sixth Sense

There is not room in a regular comment box to flesh or draw out distinction and difference. I mentioned that I was not naturally good at the first two but the idea of a Sixth Sense is something I would consider to be natural. That third thing does not help me or anyone else if we are not good or well-developed in the first two areas. All three combine as WHOLE to be a part of the POWER OF THREE I describe here.

Our usual frame of reference is often about left brain vs right brain, but this is so limiting and it is also what is most defining in the way most of us think. It also precludes us from or at least get in the way of the one thinking that does matter which is WHOLE BRAIN.

Why we become so content and happy with binary thoughts as if our brain was a computer processor probably speaks to the machine age we are in, which naturally is now becoming an advanced machine age.

Across the Power of Three are three other horizontal reference points, which are not the same as the vertical 1,2,3 Power of Three mentioned above. These are :

Critical Thinking - Creative Thinking - Reflective Thinking

These are three lens that I know I can vastly improve and examine against the Power of Three. We automatically assume that conceptual thinking must be critical thinking or that felt-experience is automatically creative thinking or Sixth Sense is mostly reflective thinking, but that speaks to our need to label and categorize things in neat compartments. For sure that is an offshoot of what happens if we only focus on conceptual thinking.

There are dominant aspects within the Power of Three but they are not represented by types of thinking but different ways of seeing, feeling and hearing the world, whether that be our critical thinking or our creative thinking or our reflective thinking. Once we place seeing, hearing and feeling into this, we see that is is not also a Matrix. We cannot answer our life's question because we happen to define a 3 x 3 or 9 box grid any better than if we resort to the 2 x 2 like a Decision Matrix. It has value to organize things like that, but it is only one frame of reference. So it is that

Seeing - Hearing- Feeling

informs all of the 9 boxes we might draw - which renders the box obsolete. We have moved from two dimensional to three dimensional and back to what life is which is multi-dimensional

If a person asks for a construct that is easy for them to get their head around, the answer I would least give them is LIFE. We can safely say our education system has not figured out how to teach us LIFE. Nor should it because this is what we find out from living it. That is not a new idea - it is as old as Artistotle when he talked about Phronesis and Practical Wisdom, but instead of relating to this to life, we have sought a Darwinian need for classifying things, where even the person who sought to teach us about evolution cannot teach us to be evolved.

If this is about LIFE then it is not at all about the person who is reading this, but the person who is living this. Since I am living this, I am talking solely from my own experience. Maybe it is the same for everybody else, but why should I classify someone else's experience. Let them decide how this touches them or whether they want to, or more to the point that they can actually have the faculty or capability to do it. Not that we need to be a superman but timing and evolution runs its own course, in that regard I was handicapped by being a late developer.

Conceptual Thinking

The predominant forces that dominate conceptual thinking is WORDS & IDEAS. Those that were exposed earlier or who naturally gravitated to words and ideas when they were young have benefited in ways I have not. Conceptual thinking was not predominant nor a focus for the first four decades of my life. It has begun to be in the last 20 years and there is a big difference to how one learns to conceptually think when our brain is younger, rather than how one learns to conceptually think when our brain is older. Of course an old dog can learn new tricks but what is problematic about this is that we are not dogs !

As the rise of the Internet brought me into a whole new world over two decades ago, I could see at the time that those who were leading the conversation and had the technical nous to lead that change, generally were people who also loved immersing themselves in philosophical reasoning when they were students at University. I could see this relationship unfold before my eyes, I just could not take advantage of what I could see. Firstly I could not hear it because I had spent zero hours in being immersed in philosophical argument or logic and this lack of cognitive muscle was and still remains a limiting factor.

Of the philosophers who I did appreciate, most were more modern. The philosophies that inform technology include Bayesian. It informs it because it informs statistics. If we don't get exposure to math and statistics or meaningful and related philosophy when we are younger, we miss out in that part of our development. Naturally there also has to be a will to want to learn this stuff and also the presence of some innate capability. The philosophers who did capture my attention were people Albert Camus.

I may have missed out on developing any mathematical or deep philosophical ability but I had lived a life or rebellion to make the translation of The Rebel something I could read cover to cover and violently nod my head in support. When we develop this kind of feel we also reduce our own nihilism. What Camus taught me was not to take my rebel spirit down a life damaging path where the person we end up beating up and fighting the most is ourselves. When I got my start with Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and his work on FLOW, that was a moment which rescued me from the highly self-destructive path I was heading towards. The nose of my life plan went upwards from that moment and then people like Albert Camus added to the flaps and direction I have been taking ever since. The great thing is that I am still beginner when it comes philosophical thought, but at the same time I have not quite developed a taste for this, for the simple reason that to change my brain requires way more additional rigour and a desire to go very deep to learn to think this way. The mistake we make is thinking all of this is in the bucket of critical thinking. It is not, why do we limit our own potential by being this polarized about the way we individually learn?

Felt-Experience

The predominant form that informs Felt-Experience is MUSIC & ART. If a philosophers mind would have advanced my conceptual thinking, my zero exposure to music education and failure to develop my artistic skills would have greatly advanced Felt-Experience. Even without knowing how to play a musical instrument or develop artistic skills the way Julia Campbell says we all are able to do in her book the Artist Way, an appreciation of other people's music and art is still a valid way into developing felt-experience. The only problem with felt-experience today is that we tend to turn it into an ideology and so when we talk about emotional intelligence, we engage it through conceptual thinking. When we define ourselves as New Age, we are not getting any better at developing our Felt-Experience, we are simply learning to group and be tribal in the way we have been educated to, not just by our education system but across the millennia. The degree of felt-experience in music is different by artist as well as our own capability. Take Enya for example :

What makes her different is that her music is built of a pretty advanced level of felt-experience, that is then channeled into her craft and her songs. We can feel all that because she has let it flow into her music. All artists have a basis for felt-experience but again, it differs in how we express it and how we develop our capability.

It is natural to think that felt-experience is at the heart and soul of creativity. We can become even more black and white by adding further levels of definition to it such as "this is right brained" and all we doing is identifying further with our own tribe. We are not then reaching into the depths of our individual self and seeing how much more we can develop such felt-sense. If we say it has to be "experienced" then we are also off-base, because those who study logic or philosophy are experiencing logic and philosophy. The felt part is how it converts us from being mostly tribal, into becoming mostly human (which is a rare thing). Felt experience is full bodied but it is not holistic. For that there is a third part of the Power of Three - "Sixth Sense".

Sixth-Sense

We can avoid going off the rails and woo-woo, if we realize that the major component of developing a Sixth-Sense are in the formation of our INTUITION & SILENCE. If we get spiritual about this stuff or theological about it, we are simply returning back to our conceptual thinking place. It is not that WORDS and IDEAS, and MUSIC and ART are not a part of a Sixth Sense, but they get in the way of seeing, hearing and feeling it. This is my strongest area because I am a naturally reflective thinker, but creative and critical thinking have their place also in how we cultivate this ability or nascent capability. In our world which is predicated on critical thinking and informed by creative thinking we have two things working against a Sixth Sense, the noise that gets in the way and equally trusting too much on our intuition, if intuition happens to be our greatest strength. Lets start with noise :

The key is silence without defining silence with words and ideas like meditation. It is incredibly difficult to see, hear or feel the space we need to create in order to know silence. This is extremely difficult because we live in an extremely noisy world and any impulse within us to explore or think creates additional noise within us. Just having a Sixth Sense by itself is a phenomenal disaster simply because it blows against the very world we have created and if we want to be flattened by a critical thinking or creative thinking steam roller, we are missing out big time by not realizing the paradox, that we need that, but we also need the space to see that. While this is helped by reflective thinking, reflective thinking alone paradoxically is a noise that can get in the way. To silence our mind is something I am not even close to at a personal level. I am highly intuitive as a person but the only person who I have come across anywhere close to figuring how to get to this space (Not State) is Jiddu Krishnmurti - and economically and psychologically I am too weak to attempt to challenge myself the way he has outlined it. Since I do have intuitive ability, instead of seeking this space of silence which I am not ready for (really helps to be totally retired in order to do that), I can further develop my Sixth Sense by supporting it in a POWER OF THREE - and so it is in association with developing my Conceptual Thinking and developing greater Felt-Experience.

We can end up reverting to very raw concepts like Emotional Intelligence when what the POWER OF THREE emanates is an emanation of wisdom. What really messes us up as people trying to develop as human beings is conceptually wanting to be god. I am not going to capitalize the g on god whether that is bad grammar or woo-woo thinking. I don't want to go to the dark side or the light side, I don't want to be a Super Hero or a Super Villian and live my life in some comic minded utopia or dystopia - I simply want to recognize the Power of Three and get to know just how much more holistic it can be. That is the problem in the end as well - that we think we are "HOLISTIC" - no we are not whole and we should not pretend to be - the WHOLE is the entire cosmos and that takes a bit more than the short blip of a human lifetime to reach. We don't know even know if the cosmos is a WHOLE.