Ontological Concepts
The ideas offered on this site may seem disparate but they fit into an overarching model.
The principles fit together as a means of understanding human being and becoming. It starts with the foundational idea:
‘Every human life is an entirely subjective, internal, and bounded experience. We define our life on a timeline of past, present and future, yet we experience time as a self-constructed and constantly changing present moment that is always focused on the immediate future.‘
From here there we move to the control, influence and concern model which is based on Ken Wilber’s Big 3 idea of ‘I, We and It’. From here we branch into two streams – one for our field of control encompassing the ‘I’ domain and the other encompassing our field of influence and the ‘We’ domain.
The ideas outlined in this work are based on a fundamental premise:
Every human life is an entirely subjective, internal, and bounded experience. We define our life on a timeline of past, present...
Although all we know is our own inner experience of life, our concerns extend to others and the world at large. Our experiences and our ways of being are also shaped by our interactions with...
Our relationship with the future throws up two major apprehensions about life. The first relates to the one certainty of our life – our death; a certainty we all have to address at some stage...
A common-sense view of our experience would have us believe our brains react to what our senses tell us about the world. We perceive something, process what we perceive and then take some sort...
Our simulations occur outside our awareness, yet some enter our consciousness and become our conscious experience. Any discussion about the human brain and our biological or physical being must...
Human beings are emotional beings. It would be hard to imagine life without happiness, sadness, anger and the other emotions that are part of the rich tapestry of the human experience.
Yet...
One of the most popular theories about the human brain is known as the ‘triune brain theory’. Attributed to Paul MacLean and popularised by writers such as Carl Sagan and Daniel Goleman, the...
Interoception produces a bi-product known as ‘affect’, which is the sense of feeling that we experience throughout each day. Feelings that we have to make meaningful. Affect falls into two very...
As far as we know, human language is unique. That is not to say that other animals do not communicate via sound, action or signs. They do. Rather, what makes human language unique lies in its...
We have long lived with the concept of time. Whether it is the seasons, the motion of the sun, the moon or the stars, or the ticking of a clock, time is ever present for us. It is through our...
An assertion is a statement about our empirical observations of phenomena in the world.
Assertions generally relate to the past and provide a linguistic association with what is true about...
There are many theories about the psychosocial development of human beings but amongst those theories there is some commonality. To quote Ken Wilber in his book, ‘A Theory of Everything’:
“From...
Before telephones became common place, people used to communicate over long distances by telegraph via a sequence of electrical impulses. ‘Morse Code’, which involves patterns of short and long...
In this work, learning is a distinction we make in language. It is an assessment made of someone’s or something’s change in capacity to generate effective action. As an assessment...
In his book, ‘The Good Listener’, Hugh Mackay termed this approach to communication the ‘injection myth’.
“The ‘injection myth’ treats messages rather like drugs which act on other people’s...
This approach is based on a new understanding of language where language is seen as action. This interpretation provides us with a new way of looking at the phenomenon of listening.
J.L.Austin,...
What does it take to be a good listener? I have touched on what we can listen for such as the various linguistic actions and others’ concerns. However, we can also look at how we can engage in...
As we are always stepping into the future, we are constantly making predictions about what comes next. These predictions become our simulations, experience and actions. Either implicitly or explicitly...
In order to understand the role of authority, it is useful to develop an understanding of what has us declare authority for others or ourselves in the first place.
To begin with, we can distinguish...
The concept of ‘control’ directly links an underlying need for certainty to the linguistic act of a declaration. This link is predicated on a belief that our declarations can create a definite...
Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela identified that living organisms, including we humans, have both conservative and expansive tendencies.
Our conservative tendency is...
This is a question that has been asked through the ages and many great minds have come up with ideas about how to be a good person and live a good life.
Aristotle (384bc-322bc) developed...
When asked about life’s meaning it is easy to start to think about the BIG questions – the meaning of existence, the nature of a good life and our individual and communal purpose. It is...