I have spent many months immersing myself in the news media of other english speaking nations through the fare that is available on the internet. Today, I was listening to NPR, which used to be my favorite news source. I've made a little custom computer program that allows me to pull the stories off of their websites, so I can find just the ones I want to listen to, really easily. At any rate, I was reflecting on all the common ways in which people in the Usa look at the world and talk about the world. It's good to have that kind of perspective you get from seeing how other people in other parts of the world think.

What dawned on me today, is that in the usa, people look at the world and chat about it. They tend to think that reality is self-evident, and they will look about and talk with their neighbors casually about what they see. I would like to invite any of the (one or two?) readers who read this website to consider a different paradigm. This is an approach I saw very clearly when paging through the works of Western philosophers like Descarte, Aristotle, Kant, and Nietzsche some years ago. This approach to looking at the world assumes not only the idea of reality, but also the idea of perspectives and narratives that people have as they talk to eachother about their world.

Reading the history of the development of scientific ideas and opinions over the last two thousand years is really a fascinating thing to do.. because you see that one thing is common in every generation - most people (even scientists) err in the way in which they perceive the world around them. That's a pretty heavy thought, isn't it? Given that has been the case in every century over the past two millenia, it isn't too much of a stretch to ponder that perhaps the worldviews we have today are also in error to one degree or another.

What those philosophers I mentioned did in their day, was to simply go away and have some solitary time, and think independently about things, setting aside their preconceptions before they began. They deduced and induced stuff. They used logic, to try to understand the nature of the patterns in the world around them.

So this is my invitation to anyone out there who reads this blog - this, my message in a bottle - ponder this very different approach to looking at the world around you. Would it be good for you?