Notes on Logic and Living
April 27th, 2007 by Richard CockrumAll knowledge begins from experience.
All experience does not come from physical sense.
You can’t get more out of deductive logic than you put in. Your basic premises determine your final outcomes. A perfect train of logic can lead to you a perfectly wrong answer.
New knowledge can come from inductive logic, generalizing from the particular to the general. However, all inductive logic is local and temporary - subject to change as experience changes.
Being right isn’t near as important as being effective.
Logic and reasoning are important, but they are tools, not ends.
Science, too, is a tool. It’s great for building sheds and finding ways to blow them up. It can answer the hows and whens of many aspects of existence, but the whys - that’s another story.
People aren’t logical, but they are always reasonable, even when they are insane.
You’ll never change anyone’s heart or mind by proving them wrong.
Life is not a debate, except with yourself.
Truth is not a democratic process. Just because everyone believes something, doesn’t make it true. Just because you believe something, doesn’t make it true.
Through communication we can convey facts, ideas, experiences. Wisdom, though, we have to build for ourselves. It can never be taught.
There are three sources of right knowledge - experience, reasoning, and the testimony of others. Unfortunately, these are also the sources of misinformation and disinformation.
If you think you’ve found the truth, get some sleep. You may feel better in the morning.
Popularity: 19% [?]
Del.icio.us
reddit
April 28th, 2007 at 10:57 am
[…] 2. We create our own truth as we create our own realities. But I recognized a truth from a line in this next post “You’ll never change anyone’s heart or mind by proving them wrong”. This post made me think and it made me ponder. Read Rick’s post “Notes on Logic and Living” at Shards of Consciousness. […]
April 28th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
Rick, there is so much to play with here in this post.
Where would you place intuition? Knowing? The kind of knowing that is not related to experience? That deep, inner sense that bubbles up — not from experience, not from conditioning, but because we’re listening to the core?
(said the seeker to the seeker
L
April 29th, 2007 at 12:15 am
From one seeker to another
From what I’ve been able to see, intuition is before any kind of logic. I read once that man is rationalizing, not rational. I would say we’re a patternizing being.
More than induction, more than deduction, we look for patterns, use (or are used by) our imagination as we try to make sense of our world. We see a pattern that seems to fit - the intuition - then create a logic for it. Depending on what material it has to work with or through, the intuition can be right or wrong. Maybe effective or ineffective would be a better way to put it. I still think the intuition comes from experience. It may not be experience that we remember. It may not be experience from this physical life or the physical world, but experience, nonetheless.
Even intutions that come from the core are filtered and changed by the contents of our minds as they work their way to awareness. How else explain that the mystical experience, for example, which has common earmarks throughout time and cultures, has been interpreted in so many different ways?
April 29th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
[…] In the words of Rick Cockrum, of Shards of Consciousness, in his post, Notes on Logic and Living: […]
April 30th, 2007 at 8:18 am
Hi Rick, I’m have a similar question to Lisa. Where do you place knowing?
I understand that we can color intuition from our experience, but Knowing I feel is something different. The kind of Knowing that Ram Dass talks about in Be Here Now. That Knowing that is so deep. It does not come from anything out here, even our experiences. And it comes through purely if we are paying attention.
Was I typing a question or a statement?
In Spirit,
Nneka
April 30th, 2007 at 8:29 am
Nneka, that’s exactly where I was going.
I believe there is a beautiful, no time space, where knowing is.
When we gobble up knowing with the mind, it transforms, becomes something other than knowing.
We have many of these meditative moments in our waking life. They move across the landscape of the soul — first — without the mind.
Then we make up all kinds of things, like this comment
April 30th, 2007 at 9:16 am
Lisa and Nneka,
You both put a smile in my heart. Thank you.
Be Here Now - If I’ve ever read the book, I don’t remember it, though I can see the cover in my mind.
All experience does not come from out there. Direct cognition, the experience beyond time and space, is one of those experiences. From what I’ve seen, that experience is always there. We have to stop watching the monkeys long enough to experience it. As you say, Nneka, it comes through clearly if we pay attention.
But then we ask ourselves, what does it mean? as we try to understand it. All sorts of things get attached to it. As you say, Lisa, we gobble up knowing with the mind, transforming it until it becomes something other than knowing.
Or am I being dense?
April 30th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Oh Rick, not dense at all. I’ve given up on having my intellect understand these things. It just doesn’t have the capacity while it tries to hold onto everything that it interprets from the outside (books, talks, life, childhood, etc).
April 30th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
You’re right, Nneka. It doesn’t have the capacity. Sometimes I feel like a man who builds glass walls and thinks that’s better than going outside.