Quotes about Context

When I was trying to popularize the concept of the Internet -- ten or 15 years ago -- I came up with this concept of "the 5 Cs." Services needed to have content, context, community, commerce, and connectivity. After that, when I was trying to think of what the key management principles were to build into the culture, I started talking about the Ps. The P's were things like passion, perseverance, perspective and people. I think the people aspect is really the most important one.

It's quite easy to imagine one grasps the essential outlines of an issue once one has cleared away all the emotional and moral turbulence that interfere with thinking about it--but in those greenhouse-conditions one is not truly thinking about reality as it actually is. Modern "academic" or "scholarly" philosophy is the victim of the delusionality of "scientism" or "objectivity," of thinking supposing that the controversiality or polemicality of our lives can be effectively purged out of things. We can cosmeticize it, depress its strife and tension with a facade of pseudo-neutralized terms; but even the most meager forms of insight suffice to reveal that this objectivity is mere facade. Modern culture is becalmed in a Sargasso Sea of sophisticated relativism, a mentality that hasn't got a clue what to do about perspectival variations and rationalizations from one mind to another. If there isn't a consensual community about what is right or good, then bourgeois society can only seek forms of mediation or compromise or count the votes of its countless subrational idiots. To wrestle with fundamental norms and principles is not something intellectually respectable among bourgeois minds, any more than it is to make public and direct value-judgments about someone else's thinking. By default we sink into a morass of incommensurable and pathetic views.

Our main source of psychic energy in the future will depend on our ability to understand this symbol of evolution in an acceptable context of interpretation. Only in the context of an emergent universe will the human project come to an integral understanding of itself. We must, however, come to experience the universe in its psychic as well as in its physical aspect. We need to experience the sequence of evolutionary transformations as moments of grace, and also as celebration moments in our new experience of the sacred.

The Qur’an is being studied for clues to the militant Muslim mind.  There was no such rush to buy the Bible or the Torah when some Afrikaners or Serbs or Jewish settlers were justifying their actions in the name of fulfilling their God’s mission.  Even more instructive of our troubled times is the anti-Islamists are quoting the Qur’an, selectively and out of context, exactly as Osama Bin Laden does – they to “prove” that Islam is a militant faith and he to justify his murders.  What are we to make of this axis of evil?

Every book that comes into being does so within the context of a web of interconnections between individuals, and this is no less so in the present case. The idea for this book first occured to me in 1994 while reading a passage from William Irwin Thompson's book - Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science - in which he briefly discusses David Cronenberg's great film - Videodrome - and I would never have stumbled across the works of Thompson if they had not been recommended to me by my friend John Lobell - and the website companion to this book -  CinemaDiscourse.com - would not exist without Lobell's initiative and enthusiasm for the essays contained herein.

Making mental connections is our most crucial learning tool, the essence of human intelligence; to forge links; to go beyond the given; to see patterns, relationships, context.

 The Context-Age

Context has become absolutely essential to grasping what is taking place in society, no matter what the area of examination. Seeing the whole range of actions in a set pattern . . . is essential to understanding the specifics of what needs to be done. . .

Data, information and knowledge are levels of awareness along a continuous scale. Data are facts in isolation - the specific number of this, or the particular color of that. In common language, "Do you have the data?" means do you have specific, unconnected facts. Information emerges when data are combined to make a point about a topic. Again in common language, "information retrieval" means to acquire data within a specific category, or to piece together data in one category. Knowledge is information in context. In common language, "she's knowledgeable" means she has accumulated information within a larger context of theory or experience and has that learning at her disposal. All of this differ from wisdom, which would be knowledge in perspective.

 "Context" is the invisible environment, the interrelated conditions, the structure of interpretation in which your life occurs. The context of your life is like water to a fish. The fish doesn't see the water, isn't necessarily aware of the water, doesn't think about the water. And yet, everything in a fish's world is consistent with and generated from the fact the fish exists in water. Similarly, everything that shows up in your life, every word you speak, and every action you take, is naturally consistent with and indicative of your context.

Life is like a stand you take for someone or something - a stand you take FOR someone, towards someone, rather than it being an internal state which you represent with the word "love."  If that were true, if just that little bit were true, the distance between you and the mastery of love would be very short.  You and I could bring forth the phenomenon of love by virtue of a declaration, "I love you," where the declaration was a stand, a commitment and we could see that that was not some "thing" called love, but an opening, a possibility, a clearing in which our
experiences could show up as an expression of the declaration, of the stand, of the commitment, of the context.  If all that were really possible, then the distance between us and mastering love is pretty short.  You see, what shows up in a stand validates the stand.  If a doubt shows up in the space of something for which you stand, it shows up as an expression of the stand, that is to say it shows up for you as something to handle out of your stand, not as something contrary to that for which you stand.   So if love in our relationships was a clearing in which life became present, even what we ordinarily think of as a negative circumstance, in a clearing created by a declaration of love, where the declaration is something for which you stand, even a so-called negative circumstance does not show up in opposition to that for which you stand, but shows up as something to be handled within the stand.  

I know you're sitting there saying "gee i wish it were that easy" and I'm saying it might be something very close to that easy...just like that.   And I'm inviting you into this domain of possibility where you don't know the answers, where relationship and love exist like a question.   I know you think that love is a set of emotions and moods and thoughts and attitudes and outlooks and feelings. And I'm inviting you to consider the possibility that that simply is one interpretation not one with which you are stuck. that you do not need to live the rest of your life without love when you don't have that set of feelings which you have heretofore described as love. ...that it might be possible to bring love into your life, like a creation, like something for which you could be responsible, like something you could bring forth on your our own as a matter of declaration and as a matter of taking a stand. and that you could bring love into those circumstance in your life when the relationships are most difficult, most problematic.  And you could do it as a simple act of being where being is that for which you are willing to stand. and that the stand comes forth in a declaration and exists behind the declaration as a stand.

There is no out there out there.

This is our challenge at the beginning of the twenty-first century - we need to find the courage to see our own spiritual yearnings in the biggest possible context,  in such a way that is going to compel us to finally transcend our self-concern. We need to find the heart to come together in such a way that will enable us to face the challenges before us. And to do this, we need a new spirituality. We need a new enlightenment.

The three rules of the Tipping Point -- The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context -- offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

Character, then, isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.