on humanism and environmental crisis

Archive for March, 2016

How to Build your Personal Worldview

This post is going to be published as a part of Worldview Owner’s Manual.  It is posted on my blog to invite you to cooperate in this project.                                           

This is the first chapter in which I’ll discuss the process of working on your personal, unique worldview. I promise that this process will be interesting and rewarding and will make you a better person and the world a better place. It might appear that the two distinct parts of the process can be distinguished: the making of your worldview, conceiving it, and writing down the answers into philozophy.com web site. But it is much more complicated, and you will see it as soon as you begin.

First, you are not creating it, you are teasing it out from your subconsciousness, from your past, from your image (or rather images) of yourself. Like going to hell and back.

The writing it down requires some skills and some courage and some freedoms, and one doesn’t know , really can’t know whether one has them. And when you find them you are a different person from the one you have started with… The writing is the creative process and the form can not really be separated from the content.

Secondly, as I mentioned before, one usually goes through the phases of the working on it:

      1 Browsing

  1. Writing “placement” answers (like “I will tell you as soon as I know” or “human cognition is not yet equipped to handle this question” etc.)
  2. The jokes and/or expressing the dislike towards the site, the questions, us, etc.
  3. The answers where you start to see a glimpse of you.

The benefits are visible from the level 1, the first answer you browse through, but naturally they accumulate and accelerate as you are walking the walk.

Thirdly, there are two sites to work on, the present one  and the future one, the one I am hoping for.

We ( Sophia , our friendly developer and I) are planning to remake and uplift the site.

  1. so , how to do it. No hurry , step by step. Remember , you are the human, the Curious One.

The questions will stay there, and that or this way, you will be trying to understand them to the last day of your life.

I suggest these steps:

  1. Read the Manual (or a part of it). This will slow you down, allow for the reflection and the introspection. Enjoy and repeat. Make notes, how exciting you are doing something completely new, this is rare in our secure lives, and the other rare thing , you completely  do not know the end result. It is like going to a sport event and the rules change every 10 minutes. And it is a bit like a mortal combat (unlike “Mortal Combat”), the results will be with you at the deathbed.
  2. Browse, this is again a shifting target: the more people participating , the richer and more interesting will be browsing. See how silly-heroic-insecure and brilliant people are. There is no ”party line”, each answer comes from the real person like you.
  3. Browse the “famous philosophers” collection which is slowly growing. Even these “giants” had a hard time with the succinct answer to the big questions.
  4. Respond, click and note the answer which can be useful for you, wise or just beautiful.
  5. You may find an answer (or answers) which you really like- “reuse” it, make it yours for now. This would be your first, ginger start of the budding personal worldview.
  6. Pick the first question, out of 14, which you are going to work on. I suggest an area which you are familiar with, thought a lot of it, like it a lot. To choose easier, read the beginning of the Part Two chapters. The philosophical questions become more practical, everyday things, may be related to your very personal story.
  7. Write this story, or a joke or an insight. This is your answer. For now, no hurry.

If the story is too long, put it as the “comment” (the future version will have separate “laboratory” space) and it will help you to formulate the  answer condensed to 250 characters. We wanted the answer to be long enough to show unique opinion, but short enough to be read, understood and commented on.

  1. This point is the most important. Return and edit the answers. Like “real” writers, they edit and edit and edit, they have hundreds of pages to edit, you – 3 or 4 lines…

Then, return after several months, knock yourself on the head, does it sound like metal? you are not a robot, you are not dead, you changed. You’ll be surprised unless you are still on the “early answers”, they reflect not who you are, but your “issues”. And those tend to persist…

 

Move slowly, answer more and more questions: notice that later questions, those you did not like, are more difficult. They correspond with your hang ups and figuring them out will bring the most personal benefits.

If you’re ready to work on your worldview now, click here.

 

Category:

Explicit and implicit worldview, Humanism, The Worldview Internet Game, What will happen to the mankind, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Why invest time and effort in working on your Personal Worldview?

This post is going to be published as a part of Worldview Owner’s Manual.  It is posted on my blog to invite you to cooperate in this project.                                           

     “You are a hero!” I repeat this several times a day. It is what I say in my office to a mother who brings her new baby and tell me that she is breastfeeding. Many of them will quit in few days, some will breastfeed for weeks or months. But she is a hero, and in the same way you are a hero. You are attempting to work on your worldview. This statement urgently needs two clarifications( so urgently, that I will proceed at the peril of mistake of not starting with the thesis of the chapter.)

First, I have to remind you that you are not going to reveal any Truth about the Universe. If you are, you are going to get the Nobel Prize, become a prophet or be invited by Oprah. But it is a test, a test of you being unique, individual thinking being. The dogs, cats, the robots, the mob members should not apply. We are going to work on the essence of your experience, of your story. We are going to work on our personal worldview.  

Second, I need to say something about the term “to work on”. And it is more difficult than it looks from the distance. Because you are my hero, you are already working on it. Actually, nolens-volens everybody is working on it. Our every action is an attempt to understand our world and ourselves. And we have been working on it since birth, and our species has been absolutely famous of working on it since we jumped down from the branch. So, our work here is just an “accelerated method” or “advanced course”. We will be transferring our gut feelings and deep instinctual worries and hopes into written, short, crisp thoughts.

 

     In this chapter, I will discuss the dilemma of “why to do it”. And it is a real dilemma. Billions of people never have done it and they go their more or less happy way. Initially, we thought (really!) that the fun of working on it would be so great that no elaborate cajoling would be necessary.

Be advised: this work is arduous and takes longer than expected. Many famous philosophers never did it. If you’ve been to counseling, you know about spilling your guts – and justly so, this metaphor doesn’t sound very inviting.

But it is worth it.

      The most obvious benefit of this work is of course , personal. The personal growth that is.

The term of the personal growth may seem rather vague, but not for a worldview owner. You go from the question to question, you write down your answers and you’re learning about yourself at the every step. Usually, you start with the questions which are most familiar and finding this out very often is  in itself a revelation. Like “am I really worry about the death?” “Is material more important than spiritual?”. You go through several answers and the picture of a human emerges.

Is it you? Or no picture emerges. Oh -oh… You might find yourself in the unfamiliar “territory”. Look, this is great! And you can stop and review and edit.

It is similar to the psychotherapy but more interesting and profound. As you go further and further, you’ll observe that these “late” questions are harder and more revealing. If it is difficult to condense your answer, I suggest that you write a longer version in “comments” and come back other day and finish the job. I have never revisited my worldview without an insight and editing. The most beneficial times to work on it is during the crisis- you’ll be surprised how much it helps to get clarity of the feelings.

There are professional philosophers who would work on big questions with you for a fee, as some sort of therapy. They claim to make you happier and more resilient. I agree, but having it written may be people liking it or commenting on your answers, has for me an additional element of building your own intellectual and emotional castle. You can just hide there if needed, or you can add another tower!

Think also that working on the personal worldview may and should “branch” into the conversations about personal freedoms and personal values. They also deserve to be transferred from implicit to explicit.

Of course, there is always the anxiety that the worldview that emerges from your writing might be incompatible with what you do, who you are. Well, there you are and it is good thing that you got confronted, isn’t it?

     These goodies are all personal, but I believe that this work can have an impact on the society. Does everybody need the personal, unique worldview? In the same way in which everybody needs good education- yes, everybody does. And then people can choose- to be a savage, easterner or westerner , are they any other options? I believe that the people who did the worldview are not only more successful but also easier to talk and negotiate with, they know where they stand. Creating one’s personal worldview can be beneficial for the society, especially if people in charge, people with power will do it and bravely share it with the rest of citizens.

Lastly, participating in the growing community of the worldview owners adds to our knowledge about the society and its values.


     At the end just a hypothesis: The more one works on transferring one’s implicit worldview into the explicit form, the more one become a humanist. And this, by itself, is beneficial for this person and for all humans. Now, I mean the humanist as a person who explores and promotes and holds dear the human values and it includes both religious and non-religious people like Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, my Mom or Kurt Johnson, a prominent force in the Interspirituality Movement.

Category:

Explicit and implicit worldview, Humanism, The Worldview Internet Game, What will happen to the mankind, Worldview Owner's Manual

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Philozophy.com: The Place Where Different Worldviews Mingle

This post is going to be published as a part of Worldview Owner’s Manual.  It is posted on my blog to invite you to cooperate in this project.                                           

 At 72 I am looking in the past and suddenly the idea of “the place where different worldviews mingle” seems like a natural consequence of my life-long folly of mixing cultures, domains, disciplines, purposes and other things.

   In the post-war Poland, I was supposed to be a scientist and I studied immunology. In the early sixties, it was a new science with the excitement of philosophical undertones: “what is self?”, “How can organism tell what is and what is not me?” If the organism has a self-sense, can it also have the sense of “not-self” or a world-sense? Can it be a precursor of the worldview? So, I studied more evolution and by and by I become convinced that while the theory of evolution was more or less victorious in academia, the evolutionary thinking in the philosophy, or even more in society had been only paper thin. With the consequences of the evolution in such a broad spectrum of questions, suddenly the concept of the worldview appeared again! “I have a unique worldview”, I thought, and slowly started to formulate and clumsily write it down. The essay “Plato’s cave revisited” came much later, after five years doctoring in Africa and after an attempt to be the scientist in the USA.  Few years later Clement Vidal published “Metaphilosophical Criteria for the Worldview Comparison”. It was brilliant, it was all I wanted, with the excitement of the new millennium and the global brain very soon the idea of “worldview internet game” was born.

     Naively I thought that everybody will immediately like to play- fill the primitive spreadsheet with their answers. Well, everybody liked the idea, even Vidal himself, but nobody wanted to play, even friends and family. And why? Everybody should have love be around the people with the spiritual depth, lightness, sense of humour and broad perspective on humanness and life. One should love to play and interact and soak the open minds, positive attitudes and freedom of expressions. It would be such an antidote against “small talk”, routine “I let you tell your story, you repeated 100 times, then you let me tell my old stuff”. The chance of the real, important conversation, being intimate with somebody without getting to know the problems with his bowel movements… How refreshing it would be to exchange the ideas , the personal values, and practical wisdom without the uneasiness of talking politics or religion!

      To tell you the truth, we still are amazed how awkward and difficult the process  is.

  1. It is difficult to come up with short answers, what one wants to be a comprehensive definition or “position”.
  2. There is a worry to be too good or too bad, to sincere, or too politically correct, too obvious or too intimate.
  3. Often the answers one come up with do not feel genuine or satisfying and making it more personal feels embarrassing or not for publishing.
  4. Often the possible answer would  offend “persona” or “ego” or “social status”.

So, the original enthusiasm usually ends up like this:

  1. Most often one postpones the hard work, being confronted with the above problems and there are no answers.
  2. To be “done” one comes up with “placement answers” like “I’d like to know” or “whatever you feel like” or “will tell you as soon as I find out”
  3. Making jokes is good and is usually a step up.
  4. Criticizing the questions or the settings is also a good start – “kill the messenger” might start some constructive thinking.

  Undeterred by these painful lessons we are still optimistic and in the next two chapters, I’ll discuss in spite of the above “ why to do it” and “how to do it”  with fun, dignity, and personal benefits. Sophia thinks that the situation will improve with more fun, elegant and interactive site appearance and function while I think that the Manual can alleviate some problems and stimulate the will to create satisfying though always changing a personal worldview. We plan to do both.

If you’re ready to work on your worldview now click here.

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Uncategorized, Worldview Owner's Manual