It's All in the Learning, that is Plus and Minus

Learning language helps us learn the truths offered in this world. Conversely it starts the process of modulating truth to make it similar to that truth understood by the teacher and those around us.

We think through each thing we identify by assigning a word to it. We use words that we have learned apply to the object named. This takes place as part of learning to talk and continues the rest of our lives. We do it in the same way as we encounter new things to learn.

We follow a process in doing this. We encounter a thing, an object, some subject with in our observation, recognize it to be different than others known by us. Concluding we have not seen it before nor classified by name a similar object, then we examine, analyze, review our knowledge bank for similarity with others, then, if still new and different we then discern all there is about a certain thing. Doing so we name it and couple the name with all we have learned about that certain thing.

On coupling all we have learned about it with the name, we then file it in our memory bank under that name. We take an additional step to link it to all other names and things about those names that have been filed before. We also continue to link that name to all other new names we learn in this process we call thinking and remebering.

This is an interesting process by which we educate ourselves in the things of this life.

Its start is described in an article taken from the New York Times entitled Understanding ‘Ba Ba Ba’ as a Key to Development. I have posted it in my Archive, click on the title to go there and read it.

The article describes the start of this process of learning we undertake as infants. This process continues all of our lives. We learn with those talents we discover we have in this life. We evoke the world about us for information using those talents which are ours. We receive the information in the style presented or encountered by us, using the talent we have to receive the transmission of it. We store it in the style we have learned it.

This goes on and on, building into this beautiful databank called our minds. Once discovered we use our minds in this process, using it in the style we have learned it works. We learned it acts in a variety of ways.

It can take an item we encounter, measure it, classify it, and analyze it. It will then start comparing it to other things we know, have encountered, named, classified and stored. We then name it and classify it by its name where it fits and link it to all of that which it is similar and/or comparable to.

This bank we are creating grows and becomes more intricate. At some point, having learned to do so generally, we will find our mind reflecting on some portion of this data and will look beyond what is known about it. The purpose of this is to learn what we can from it.

It is in doing this that our minds step out of the data keeping function and into the conceptive intuitive function of which it is capable. It is in this function that the data we have flowers into an altogether different realm.

This component is often referred to as the right brain in action, as compared to the left brain, which is the more mechanically functioning part, more computer like, viz: our data keeper.

The reference to right brain left brain, not wholly accurate from a pathological-neurological standpoint, serves to distinguish the functions by reference to body part.

As such it serves us as a reference point.

The function of the right brain is wholly different from that of the left brain.

The left brain seems designed for us to operate within the limits of this space time dimension of which we as human beings are a part of its material makeup. It is serial; it is sequential, passes as time passes, and separates by classification the data it stores. It builds on itself and changes as it works for us.

The right brain is not sequential. It operates in the now, in the absolute present, in the immediacy of our cognitive connection with all there is at the moment it is engaged. It uses that talents it has, applied from the foundation of data we hold from our left brain function and interpolates all of that as evoked from the moment in which it is engaged.

It is in this function that we as mortals transcend ourselves as animals. We are able to create ideas from it, forge concepts, hear music, dance with the angels and suck in all the beauty presented by it. It is in this function that we exercise our known power of intuition, whatever prescience we might have and know things not otherwise available to be known from the material consequence we are in.

It is in this sphere we touch our hearts, we love others and know gods.

Life in its concourse seems to be taking us through our amalgamation of experience to find the door to this wonderment, to open it and allow us to enter into it.

If all goes as it ought. It is a wonderful encounter this life we live.

I feel blessed in that I suffer Dementia It has forced me to stop and smell the roses; to cope and understand why I have it; to contemplate how my entire life now at its end comes together in this learning process.

Painful as it has been getting here it is worth every twist and turn I have taken in finally finding this insight.

Many Make it Here, Others do not!

It is in our functioning Right Brain that we as mortals transcend ourselves as otherwise animals. We are able to create ideas from it, forge concepts, hear music, dance with the angels and suck in all the beauty presented by it. It is in this function that we exercise our known power of intuition, whatever prescience we might have and know things not otherwise available to be known from the material consequence we are in.

It is in this sphere we touch our hearts; we love others and know gods.

Life in its concourse seems to be taking us through our amalgamation of experience to find the door to this wonderment, to open it and allow us to enter into it.

If all goes as it ought it is a wonderful encounter this life we live getting there and entering into it. I certainly feel blessed by my AD for having done so. Painful as it has been getting here it is worth every twist and turn I have taken in finding it.

Many Make it Here, Others do not! If this were true for everyone Senior Life would be the Dance of the Spheres. All of us here know it is not. Some of us having made it here look out through all of the clutter and crap we see things are better, more meaningful, have greater purpose and satisfaction than we’ve ever had. I speak of that in my recent post on happiness. HAPPINESS IS YOURS, YOURS TO FIND, YOURS TO RELISH... 

I must however strike this caveat! With the inchoate abilities we bring with us into our lives at birth, namely: our talents, in league with the world, coupled together they conspire against us in finding our proper end. It is the contest, the tension between, that fuels our involvement in this life.

From the time we are infants we delight in what we find we can in the world and all that we can learn about it. We immerse ourselves into the learning process and therefore immerse ourselves into this world. The accomplishment in the learning process becomes an end in itself. The excitement of the process, the love and grasp of what we acquire by it becomes our only end. We do this by being alive and more so living to the fullest. The rewards are many, most boil down to the pleasure of it.

Before we know it, we are completely caught up in what we do. So much so that it becomes all we see. We are so focalized in this endeavor we lose sight of all there is around us but that which we are doing. A child is caught up in being a good child, caught up in exercising independence and becoming self sufficient, being a good student, doing what he/she is told to do.

Soon we find ourselves working at being a good husband/wife, then mother/father, all along a contributing member of our community. We do what we become and strive to do that well, whether that be job, career, current involvement. Always, we strive to do it better.

We become pleased with the rewards of having done each undertaking or fulfilled each task. The sense is that of accomplishment. Often that sense of having it done takes on the form of monetary reward, or precious gift, or adulation by others. The benefit can also be abused by us when working and getting it become an end in themselves and not such as to lead to higher purpose. Recognition by others or power over others stand out on the list of benefits that can become burdens. We are such communicable beasts.

In those of us in the common and ordinary level it becomes simply being a good mother, raising your children well. The father or mother adds being a good provider and being good at what is done to provide.

The list of what we do and the rewards we get is endless and it changes every step of the way. The end we seek changes with each step we take from childhood to adulthood. It grows in adulthood leading to later years then senior years. What is important say in the middle years can seem kind of meaningless in the senior years.

The ends we seek keeps changing on us. To exceed at sport is very important in one part of our lives, meaningless in others. What we have accumulated can become and end in itself. Holding unto to what we have, seeking more, or, flaunting it if we believe it is all there is or all we are. We do this in such things as style of life, homes we live in, cars we drive, clothes we wear, money we have or earn they can become our object in life.

Simply striving to be a success can be an end in itself blinding us to all else about us. This is a complication if not a disease of the middle years. Too many of us succumb, becoming blind to love, family, friends, any other of the elements of life available to us at the time and go no further enlightening ourselves with the world.

This can be excused by the crunch of time in the style of life we live. I refer here to the time we are at that age busying ourselves with all of the responsibilities we are trying to keep in balance. Unlike the pastoral life of the farmer who has the time to think as he rides the tractor in the field, the organization urbanite is not given this time. She/he must scoot from one thing to the next, never look up, look out or over, just concentrate on what is at hand and move along with it.

All there is for the middleager in this society in which we live is to keep up. Keeping up with all there is to do take all the time and energy we have. In middle age we are driven in this way to be what we have become, then to hold on and fulfill the responsibilities of whatever that is. That becomes all engrossing.

It is during this time and as we are in this process that we lose sight. We become completely what we are. Doing so we forget “Who We Are!” “What We Are”, what we are about and what is about us becomes all there is. This becomes our reality and we believe this is all the reality there is.

Anything that impugns that reality diminishes us personally. We are so invested in what we are, what we have, what we’ve become that, and that is all there is.

This puts at risk of losing our way. This can cause us to remain stuck in the endeavors of our mid-life, never able to go beyond.