Playing with Perspectives

[UnbornTao]

Quote

a cherry tree 
being nourished 
by falling blossoms

–Basho

Edited September 11, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

The difference that turns life from a mediocre attempt at subsistence into an adventure of growth and learning is your ability and willingness to open yourself fully to your present experience and contemplating it.

Edited September 11, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

I have been noticing for some time the role that metaphors play in shaping our thinking and language. It's quite revealing and more prevalent than we think.

I'm going to use AI in order to compile a list of metaphors that invent, define and/or shape the ways we experience, conceptualize, and communicate:

• Jumping to conclusions
• Falling in love
• Splitting hairs
• Being blind to something: another's motives, etc
• Recovering time / Making up for lost time
• Seeing eye to eye
• Bridging the gap
• Turning over a new leaf
• Planting seeds of doubt
• Nurturing a relationship
• Weathering the storm
• Climbing the ladder of success
• Walking on eggshells
• Burying the hatchet
• Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel
• Dancing with the devil
• Playing devil's advocate
• Painting with broad strokes
• Swimming against the current
• Casting a wide net
• Walking a tightrope
• Sowing the seeds of discord
• Building castles in the air
• Climbing the walls
• Lifting the veil
• Time is money
• Food for thought
• Beating around the bush
• Letting the cat out of the bag
• Hitting a wall
• Keeping an eye on something
• Opening a can of worms
• Feeding an idea
• The weight of responsibility
• The flow of a conversation
• A window of opportunity
• The roots of a problem
• Climbing the corporate ladder
• The fabric of society
• A memory lapse
• The spark of an idea
• Bottleneck
• Cloud computing
• Emotional baggage
• Brainstorming
• Surfing the web
• Feeling drained
• Burning the midnight oil
• A heart of stone
• Breathing new life into something
• Spinning your wheels
• Biting off more than you can chew
• Going out on a limb
• Raining on someone's parade
• Having a chip on your shoulder
• Burying your head in the sand
• Letting someone off the hook
• Being a couch potato
• Having a green thumb
• Pulling someone's leg
• Cutting corners
• Hitting the nail on the head
• Passing the buck
• Biting the bullet
• Beating a dead horse
• Reinventing the wheel
• Going down the rabbit hole
• Putting your foot in your mouth
• Chewing someone out
• Giving someone the cold shoulder
• Hitting the sack
• Having a change of heart
• Making a mountain out of a molehill
• Breaking the ice
• Letting your hair down
• Having a blast
• Losing your marbles
• Spilling the beans
• Hitting the books
• Feeling under the weather
• Turning a blind eye
• Having blinders on
• Having rose-colored glasses on
• Being in the dark
• Wearing beer goggles
• Seeing what you want to see
• Having a blind spot
• Living in a bubble
• Having tunnel vision
• Connecting the dots
• Gut feeling
• Butterflies in your stomach
• Stomach dropping
• Gut-wrenching experience
• Standing on your own two feet
• Being grounded
• Being open
• Being bent out of shape
• To straighten you up
• Being fit, being out of shape
• Being off-balance (psychologically or emotionally)
•  

---

Time Metaphors:

1. Time is a moving object:
   - "The years are flying by."
   - "The holidays are approaching."

2. Time is a stationary landscape:
   - "We're looking ahead to a bright future."
   - "We're leaving the past behind."

3. Time is a resource:
   - "I don't have enough time to finish this project."
   - "We're running out of time."

4. Time is money:
   - "Don't waste your time." "Saving time." "Spending time."
   - "I invested a lot of time in that project." 

5. Time is a container:
   - "We're in a new era."
   - "The meeting fell within the scheduled timeframe."

Space Metaphors:

1. Up is good, down is bad:
   - "She's really down today."
   - "Her spirits were lifted by the good news."

2. Physical closeness represents emotional closeness:
   - "We've grown apart over the years."
   - "They're a close-knit family."

3. Physical force represents emotional force:
   - "She was deeply moved by the speech."
   - "His words struck a chord with the audience."

4. Physical balance represents mental balance:
   - "She's a well-balanced person."
   - "He lost his equilibrium after the incident."

5. Physical obstacles represent difficulties:
   - "We're facing many hurdles in this project."
   - "She overcame numerous obstacles to achieve her goals."

 

Might read Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff at some point.

Edited December 7, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Worth taking a look:

• List of epistemologists
• List of philosophers

Edited May 27, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

When you hold life as merely a pragmatic matter, this may diminish, and even undermine, your experience of vitality, intimacy, creativity, and all the other things that make life worth living.

Edited May 17, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Create a contrast between "living dead" and vital people. What sets them apart?

What does a powerful presence entail and what does it take to develop it?

Edited August 28, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Rather than resisting problems, viewing them as insurmountable obstacles to avoid, reframe them as challenges—processes of struggle that open the door to opportunities and lessons if you pay attention (and to the degree to which you do).

Quote

Always walk through life as if you have something new to learn, and you will

— Vernon Howard

Edited August 28, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

The ability to actualize, to make real, to realize, could be called mastery.

Edited June 19, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Opportunism is often an antithesis of integrity.

Edited June 11, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Going through the motions vs paying closer attention.

Edited May 26, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Scene from The Last Samurai:

Quote

Throughout the film, Katsumoto, the samurai leader, is depicted searching for the perfect cherry blossom, symbolizing his quest for perfection and beauty in life. Towards the end of the film, he is mortally wounded after a fierce battle.

In his final moments, lying on the battlefield, Katsumoto looks into the distance and sees a cherry tree in bloom. As he watches the petals falling, with his last breaths, he says, "Perfect... They are all perfect."

 

Edited June 27, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

The point of an insight isn't the expression and form it takes but rather the recognition of the reality of something. Eloquent and "profound" speech that isn't sourced by your own experiential understanding is an adopted artifice, a belief, not a communication. This adds to our sense of inauthenticity.

Edited July 19, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Beware of being intellectual and abstract in order to avoid the uncomfortable work of confronting your own experience of things. Your mind wants to keep the work in the domain of abstraction where it is safe and no real confrontation takes place.

What we think of and intellectualize about might not be aligned with our actual experience of such matters.

Edited February 4 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

If you're suffering, it means there's something you are still ignorant of and is yet to be recognized.

[UnbornTao]

Brad Goodman self-help!

 

[UnbornTao]

With mastery in mind, it ultimately isn't about what you decide to pursue, but rather that the pursuit brings to the fore (draws out) your relationship with yourself and with life.

Edited July 19, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Quote

Beware of confining yourself to a particular belief and denying all else, for much good would elude you—indeed, the knowledge of reality would elude you

— Ibn Arabi

Edited June 14, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Taking up an invention and being familiar with it is not the same as being able to reproduce it in your experience and comprehending how it comes to exist and work.

Insights and discoveries are made by individuals. Ways of thinking get created based on these breakthroughs, and then adopted by the rest of us. Yet, the initial creative component of such inventions goes often unnoticed. We live as if familiarity implies understanding. Looking closely, however, we see that there are a lot of things that we fail to grasp and yet adopt as a given.

For instance, we overlook the fact that it took a genius mind like Newton's to make a breakthrough into the principle of gravity. We now say that gravity is obvious since "everyone knows that objects fall down." We're missing something fundamental here. What Newton understood was that objects don't go sideways, float, or go up!

Examples:

• Confusing the form an expression takes with the insight underlying it
• Picasso's art died with him; the ability to create that art was unique to him
• As a culture, we are somewhat familiar with Ancient Skepticism, yet very few of us are able to generate that kind of rigorous, deep, intelligent and multi-faceted thinking
• We take on the invention of language and presume to know what it is since it is a prevalent construct paramount to our survival, yet we remain unaware of its real nature
• Any "ism" eventually degrades into a form of shared conjecture, while the insight that precipitated such invention, if there was one to begin with, is overlooked and thus missed/unseen

Edited April 11 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

Two approaches to facilitating others:

1. Moving them into a new experience: This tends to be resisted, as it involves taking their current experience "away" in favor of a new one
2. Pushing them into their experience as it is: This requires guiding them through the process of personal discovery, enabling them to generate an experience that more closely aligns with the one you'd like them to have, hopefully in the direction of honesty and transformation

Edited August 28, 2024 by UnbornTao

[UnbornTao]

What are you giving life to?