The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new
landscapes, but in having new eyes.
- Marcel Prous
This is the context we must have to be able to see the essential
reason why meaning has been so difficult to find. Defining a problem at
its root cause makes its solution obvious-not easy, just obvious.
When I was a kid, what annoyed me most about adults was their attitude
that everything worth knowing was already known. If they were right,
everything should be working just great. A quick glance around dispelled
that notion. The odds were pretty good that everything worth knowing
wasn't already known.
Complex systems are worth knowing. Until recently, we haven't even
acknowledged systems, let alone understood them. Life-reality-is a complex
system composed of complex systems. If we're not even aware of the basic
nature of systems, how competent can we be at life? Our education,
training, and experience rarely contain a systems view of any subject. Yet
everything we know and have ever known, from atoms to our universe, from
an individual embryo to ecosystems composed of thousands of interdependent
life forms, is a complex system. Being unaware of systems amounts to
having no idea what life is about....
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