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The Echo Chamber Perform a Perceptual Self-Diagnostic Test for Echo A note to the reader: Although many of the sentiments within these echoes contain male pronouns the ultimate message is not intended to be patriarchal. It is my sincere desire that each of you will be able to discover that the theme of these thought-clips has more to do with an all-inclusive frame of reference than a gender-specific one. And try to remember: If the sound of the following upsets your equilibrium ask yourself: "Why?" If you can't answer that question Try it again from the top Begin... Part of the communication problem, as we shall see, is the strangeness of what is being found... Very few people are synthesizing information being gathered in far-flung places. -- Marilyn Ferguson common sense.  1. Native good judgment; sound ordinary sense. 2. The set of general unexamined assumptions as distinguished from specially acquired concepts:  Common sense holds that heavier bodies fall faster than lighter ones. -- The American Heritage Dictionary New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common. -- John Locke Common sense is judgment without reflection which is shared by an entire class, a people, a nation, or the whole human race. -- Giovanni Battista Vico Judging by common sense is merely another phrase for judging by first appearance... The men who place implicit faith in their own common sense are, without any exception, the most wrong-headed and impracticable persons. -- John Stewart Mill Sound English common sense -- the inherited stupidity of the race. -- Oscar Wilde Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18. -- Albert Einstein For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are more often influenced by things that seem than by things that are. -- Niccolo Machiavelli If you do not specify and confront real isues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift of the coming human hell. -- C. Wright Mills The trouble with people is not that they don't know, but that they know so much that ain't so. -- Josh Billings The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. -- William Blake In all cases of perception, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, the meaning of the experience is recognized by the observer according to a horizon of expectation within which the experience will be expected to fall. -- James Burke Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models, which are always inadequate, often incomplete, and sometimes profoundly wrong. -- Lyall Watson Every creative act... involves a new innocence of perception liberated from the cataract of accepted belief. -- Arthur Koestler To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old questions from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science. -- Albert Einstein One day posterity will remember, this strange era, these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage. -- Yevgeny Yevtushenko We are always getting ready to live but never living. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. -- Aldous Huxley The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men stand by and do nothing. -- Edmund Burke The whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. -- Bertrand Russell The future of a civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness which characterizes the thought of men today. -- Albert Schweitzer ...illusions multiply, and among them there is, I suppose none more ubiquitous than the idea that "you can't change human nature." This ancient platitude might long ago have been relegated to a home for superannuated ideas, were it not so constantly useful. -- Barrows Dunham Our past is not our potential. -- Marilyn Ferguson There's no need for them to be so unhappy... Pain and sickness and hunger and fighting -- there's no need for any of it. -- Robert Heinlein A doctor says (to a patient whose unorthodox remedy led to recovery): Sir, it would be better to die according to the rules than to live in contradiction to the faculty of medicine. -- Molière "What will people say?" In these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere. -- Berthold Auerbach For our race to reach the next true satori, for us to move to that next level of consciousness and evolution that so many of our philosophers proclaim, all facets of human endeavor must become concious strivings for art. -- Dan Simmons If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body. -- J.C. Kumarappa Is not the real business of the artist to seek for man's salvation, and by understanding his ingredients to make himself less an outlaw to himself? -- Loren Eisley "Learn what is true in order to do what is right" is the summing up of the whole duty of man. -- T.H. Huxley The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. -- Antisthenes To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true. -- H.L. Menkin Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful. -- Albert Schweitzer The invisible tensive straws that can save us are those of individual human integrities -- in daring to steer the individual's course only by truth, strange as the realized truth may often seem -- wherever and whenever the truths are evidenced to the individual -- wherever they may lead, unfamiliar as the way may be. -- R. Buckminster Fuller Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. What deafness may we all not possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? -- Frank Herbert Just as an explorer penetrates into new and unknown lands, one makes discoveries in the everyday life, and the erstwhile mute surroundings begin to speak a language which becomes increasingly clear. -- Wassily Kandinsky To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. -- José Ortega y Gasset In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again. -- James Agee All the grown-ups were once children although few of them remember it. -- Antoine de Saint Exupery All inquirers had the naïveté and some had the boldness of amateurs. -- Daniel J. Boorstin They can because they think they can. -- Virgil ...a childlike playfulness which is one of the hallmarks of creativity. Consensus is rare in psychology, but most workers in the field agree that creative thinkers can be recognized by their ability to entertain wild ideas without feeling the usual need to pass judgment on them. -- Lyall Watson Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. -- Edmond Burke Much of our failure to understand human nature arises from neglect of the need to have our faculties excited and our lives thereby enhanced. The human animal cannot be itself without this exciting enhancement. Excitement is not merely good, it is indispensable to a proper human life. -- Lancelot Law White At some stage in the process of creation, the creative product -- whether painting, poem, or scientific theory -- takes on a life of its own and transmits its own needs to its creator. It stands apart from him and summons material from his subconscious. The creator, then, must know when to cease directing his work and when to allow it to direct him. He must know, in short, when his work is likely to be wiser than he. -- George Kneller It is impossible to undertake any kind of research without being perpetually made aware that the truth is plying us with suggestions, the past prodding us with hints, and if no benefits result from such assistance, it is not the fault of our heavenly helpers but of our all too human obtuseness. -- Cyril Connolly It [the right hemisphere] needs exposure to rich and associative patterns, which it tends to grasp as wholes. Programmed instruction is certainly not for the right hemisphere, but I am not sure what is the right method of instruction for our silent half. It is part of the elusiveness of the right hemisphere that we find it easier to say what it is not than what it is. -- Eran Zaidel It seems, then, to be one of the paradoxes of creativity that in order to think originally, we must familiarize ourselves with the ideas of others. -- George Kneller The unconscious, though one cannot force it, will not produce new ideas unless it has been painstakingly stuffed full of facts, impressions, concepts, and an endless series of conscious ruminations and attempted solutions. On this we have the testimony of many creative people. -- Morton Hunt Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortions of reality which language brings. -- Dan Simmons [He] felt the words wash over him. They were like swarming creatures. He had a strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young. -- David Brin Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars. -- Guasteve Flaubert Words cover secrets like trapdoors over underground passages. To find out their true import, you have to be willing to explore. -- Deepak Chopra Semanticists like Alfred Korzybski and Benjamin Whorf warned that Indo-European languages trap us in a fragmented model of life. They disregard relationship. By their subject-predicate structure, they mold our thought, forcing us to think of everything in terms of cause and effect. For this reason it is hard for us to talk about -- or even think about -- quantum physics, a fourth dimension, or any other notion without clear-cut beginnings and endings, up and down, then and now... Korzybski warned that we will not grasp the nature of reality until we realize the limitation of words. Language forms our thought, thereby setting up barriers. The map is not the territory. -- Marilyn Ferguson The paradox has been apparent for some time, but it seems to be one of those things that looms so large and are so blatantly obvious that they are difficult to see. -- Lyall Watson After all the philosophy and speculations are finished, we're still left with just words, metaphors. They are our tools for understanding the world, but it's always well to remember they have only a nodding acquaintance with reality. -- David Brin Every symbol has a hidden premise behind it. Every word carries unspoken assumptions buried in the history of the language and the conditioning experiences of the speakers. If you snatch those buried meanings out of your words, you spill a whole stream of new understanding into your awareness. -- Frank Herbert Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. -- Walt Whitman Top of Page