I thought I would throw in a quote from A Simpler Way by Margaret Wheatley
and Myron Kellner-Rogers which relates to our wondering about thinking
differently -- it's on page 49...
"In their work on human cognition, Maturana and Varela explain that, at
any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be.
Our eyes do not simply pick up information from an outside world and relay
it to our brains. Information relayed from the outside through the eye
accounts for only 20 percent of what we use to create a perception. At
least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is
information already in the brain.
We each create our own worlds by what we choose to notice, creating a
world of distictions that make sense to us. We then "see" the world
through this self we have created. Information from the external world is
a minor influence. We connect who we are with selected amounts of new
information to enact our particular version of reality.
Because information from the outside plays such a small role in our
perceptions, Maturana and Varela note something quite important for our
activities with one another. We can never direct a living system. We can
only disturb it. As external agents we provide only small impulses of
information. We can nudge, titillate, or provoke one another into some
new ways of seeing. But we can never give anyone an instruction and
expect him or her to follow it precisely. We can never assume that anyone
else sees the world as we do.
Their work on human cognition underscores the realization that we are all,
always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also
all the time exploring possibilities."
Sherri
sherri@maloufinc.com Tel:603-672-0355
LMA, Inc Fax:603-673-7120
--sherri@maloufinc.com (Sherri Malouf)
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>