Quotessence
Home / Topics / Paradigm Quotes

Paradigm Quotes

Browse 367 quotes about Paradigm.

Related topics

Paradigm Quotes

“Our assumptions and presuppositions filter our perceptions of reality without any conscious effort. Even when we’re trying to be objective, we can’t get outside of ourselves to be unbiased. In addition, we have outside influences that also distort our perceptions of reality.”

“At the end of all the filtering, we take the distorted perception of reality and add it to our worldviews. Since the worldview created most of the filter in the first place, most of what goes back into the worldview is confirmation bias.”

“We should also note that a great deal of what is in a worldview isn’t even direct experience. We watch talking heads and videos that shape our worldviews. We read books and watch movies that shape our worldviews. Many other influences work on us, and most of these have been designed to shape our worldviews without our awareness. Our friends also influence us for good or evil. We daydream and rationalize and shape our worldviews that way. Worldviews are fake realities that seem deceptively real. Most of the time, we never question our worldviews but blindly trust them to run our lives. That’s the definition of living a lie.”

“When one person’s worldview differs from the worldview of another person, everything is fine until the two people realize that they aren’t seeing eye to eye. Each thinker will regard anything that clashes with his or her worldview to be insane and in conflict with reality.”

“Worldviews are fake realities made up of past interpretations. Interpretations aren’t the same as observations, and they aren’t the same as experiences. Interpretations add to the experiences of the past, and what they add is unreliable. What they add ultimately consists of made-up stuff mixed with flawed memories of some things that may or may not have worked in the past.”

“Worldviews aren’t even directly pragmatic. Many parts of our worldviews don’t even work. They limit us. They interfere with us. They hold us down. Some parts of our worldviews may be accurate while other parts of our worldviews are wildly inaccurate. And yet, every part of every person’s worldview seems accurate to the person who owns the worldview.”

“Here’s how we interpret our experiences. Assumptions come out of our worldviews, and our worldviews are based on previous interpretations of experiences. This is why one person’s assumptions will often be very different from another person’s assumptions. Worldviews vary from person to person in extreme ways.”

“This is the ultimate heresy, then, and a possible outcome of a history of ascent, of system-breaks and paradigm-shifts that are exciting on one level, tedious on another: life characterized by so much somatic security, so much incarnation, that the need for “truth” is far less important than the need for love; and finally, not really in conflict with it. Incarnation means living in life, not transcending it. The last paradigm-shift has to be a shift to a world in which paradigm-shifts become unnecessary, if not actually banal.”

“Recovery through sleep isn’t going to happen if the majority of the components of your being aren’t getting enough stimulation or resistance to work against. Your brain may be tired after work, but if your body and emotions haven’t been challenged through the day, they’re going to keep irritating you even if you’re asleep. They don’t need rest; they need work for real recovery to take place.”

“Well-being, or wholeness, implies integrity and harmony between all existing elements, providing freedom for the whole.”

“In my experience, most people are actually seeking recovery from the monotony and anxiety of qualitative repetition. This applies to body, emotions and mind. And that monotony and anxiety involves inertia just as much as over-use, meaning inertia in some areas and over-use in others.”

“Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God’s sake, do it.”

“People generally believe that stress is responsible for depletion, but apathy and uninspired systematic repetition are equally responsible. Or rather, systematic repetition produces as much or more stress and anxiety as anything else.”

“If you’re ignoring a high percentage of the elements of your entire being, and the range of qualities they can naturally engage, there will be no real recovery or progress until you do. The typical relentless worker is just as lazy as the typical indulgent idler; they’re both just going through the habitual motions. To break the repetitive pattern, and discover more energy and effectiveness, one simply must stretch out in all directions, rotating focus and application of the qualities that make up one’s natural versatility.”

“I look at the idea of rest as rotating one’s qualitative focus, not just doing less or changing activity. The role of rest is recovery. If you keep pushing the same quality button (fast or slow, concentrated or dispersed, hard-working or lazy…) for the same component all the time, of course it’s going to become depleted, just like if you keep working a single muscle in the same fashion or don’t use it at all.”

“Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you.”

“If one follows what is in one’s heart (let’s leave out mind for the moment), one ends up with what one truly values and loves in life—and one acts accordingly. One’s own private indulgent cyclic habitual reactive subjective transitory feelings are, hopefully, not at the head of that list.”

“The typical image of a depressed, lazy and tired person is someone hunched over and inert. Often, the assumption is that if one had more enthusiasm and inspiration, he would then stand up straight and move. In many cases, this equation is backward. But, as with everything related to one’s physicality, balance is the key. An overly erect and rigid posture may convey confidence and power to some, but it also causes a subtle accumulation of tension and rigidity on various levels, including psychological and emotional.”

“Ironically, many of the institutions that run the economy, such as medicine, education, law and even psychology are largely dependent upon failing health. If you add up the amounts of money exchanged in the control, anticipation and reaction to failing health (insurance, pharmaceutical research and products, reactive or compensatory medicine, related legal issues, consultation and therapy for those who are unwilling to improve their physical health and claim or believe the problem is elsewhere, etc.), you end up with an enormous chunk. To keep that moving, we need people to be sick. Then we have the extreme social emphasis placed on the pursuit and maintenance of a lifestyle based on making money at any cost, often at the sacrifice of health, sanity and well-being.”

“No one will improve his health significantly without accurately perceiving priorities, knowing clearly what is at stake if those are not attended to and what is to be gained if acted on correctly. That’s the basic homework before any change can come about. Then that knowledge has to be transformed into a sustainable motivation.”

“If you, one, loves something or someone, that means that one is willing to, and does, sacrifice for it. That is, one chooses to do and give what is better to the being or thing one loves than to sacrifice the loved one for the personal emotion that is unrelated to or even hinders the giving. In other words, the way to transform an emotion is with a deeper one. This involves discernment and, yes, discipline, which are both frowned upon and seen as emotionless and less important. Which is immaturity, plain and simple, and is the fundamental aspect of human growth from child to adolescence to adult.”

“Yearning often does not provide a sense of attainment or “peace,” as it is fuel for one’s personal purpose, to in some specific way give or create; to do that is not necessarily easy or peaceful.”

“It’s highly refined stuff—holding to one’s purpose and focus, but also intuiting the value of being a piece in a larger design and evolution. The balance between these two rhythms is where and when true harmony is achieved and magic happens. Often, just the release of the obsession for personal preferences and to personally gain opens the door.”

“If I were to make a list of focus for well-being, I would begin with lifestyle (the totality of one’s circumstance and how that is engaged, including job and relationships, and proximity to nature), attending to the physical functions correctly (posture, breathing, exercise, food, rest, etc.), consistent expression of your natural range of qualities, working and playing well and hard, and designing things so that you are doing what compels you. Obviously, you can’t give this list out as a prescription for physical problems and diseases, but then again, it is probably the correct prescription. If one were to follow it, any specific problem, even extreme, would almost certainly resolve itself.”

“Getting down to the gym a couple days a week and having low-fat milk in your morning latte isn’t going to make much of a dent in a system or lifestyle that is essentially, well, unwell.”

“The essential dynamic underlying almost every elite and esoteric physical art is work with the breath, so there’s information available. I would only add that it’s unfortunate that so much work is done with it, and not much play. Laughter has got to be the single healthiest activity one can perform. Just think how healthy you would be if you could sincerely laugh at that which now oppresses you. I’ve mentioned before that one good measure of someone’s depth of spirituality is how long it takes before they become offended. Imagine laughing hysterically at the criticisms, complaints and impositions you receive. At the least, you’d be breathing well.”

“The subjective experience of intense pain (“That’s all I can take”) corresponds exactly to one’s subjective experience in relation to truth (“That’s all I can take”).”

“The transitory and random quality of emotions (“Well, that’s just the way I feel about it”) is deeply connected to, and largely the cause of, random engagement of one’s values and priorities. This very randomness and inconsistency is actually the cause of deeper suffering, primarily through the accumulation of addictions and the indulgence in reactions that are disproportionately small in comparison to what is really being sacrificed for them. Curiously—and a major theme in my own work over decades—the casual association of emotions to love is part of the insanity in all this.”

“True balance, and harmony, necessitates finding a way to override the addictive, reactive emotions that are the fabric of one’s subjective illusion, and discover emotions that correspond to actuality.”

“On the high-end spectrum of emotions, which are innately connected to intuition and direct comprehension as well as imagination and creativity, meaning true empathy and knowledge, appreciative realization, transformation and invention, one finds a richer and more voluptuous combination of experience. Unfortunately, to “get there,” one has to be willing to sacrifice what is known for what is not.”

“The trick is in genuinely appreciating the elements of apparent resistance while you are engaging them. Not to oppose or remove them as much as to creatively fold them into one’s linear line of movement, exploiting them and making the necessary adjustments as you go.”

“As I’ve mentioned too often before, we are governed, and specifically our physicality is governed, by fairly strict rules, which are easily observable in nature. We have some freedom to manipulate some of these, but really not by very much. Everyone knows, or at least has the information, about the horrors of ignoring health issues and expecting your body to do what you want it to do with the least investment in it. Another “authority” telling you what you should do is not the answer.”

“Besides having been identified recently as the single most important factor in what men find sexy in women, the list of how correct posture influences internal organs and systems, and also mood and general energy, is very long indeed. Your internal environment depends on the efficiency of the flow of elements within it. Obviously, this includes oxygen, blood, hormones and nutrients, but also all interaction between nerves and the brain. The spine, which is your foundation and support, has a natural position that guarantees the efficiency of movement and interaction of the related elements. Your internal organs are all right alongside the spine and depend on its correct position to function well. Any prolonged restriction or deviation from this natural position will result in some, at least partial, dysfunction. Over a long time, the results can be devastating.”

“The human body, like the human mind, is best at versatility and adaptability. This is our greatest skill and our greatest chance to unlock natural potential. What that means in terms of physical movement is that a fairly equal amount of time and effort should be allocated to the widest possible range of activity. That includes strength, flexibility, precision and endurance, but it certainly doesn’t stop there.”

“A balanced diet” is not so much about protein/fat/carbohydrate ratios. The real ratios to consider, at least for the typical American or European, are energy consumption/expenditure, pleasure/actual need, food/everything else.”

“McKusick's belief in this paradigm-the focus on disability rather than abnormalcy-was actualized in the treatment of patients in his clinic. Patients with dwarfism, for instance, were treated by an interdisciplinary team of genetic counselors, neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, nurses, and psychiatrists trained to focus on specific disabilities of persons with short stature. Surgical interventions were reserved to correct specific deformities as they arose. The goal was not to restore "normalcy"-but vitality, joy, and function. McKusic had rediscovered the founding principles of modern genetics in the realm of human pathology. In humans as in wild flies, genetic variations abounded. Here too genetic variants, environments, and gene-environment interactions ultimately collaborated to cause phenotypes-except in this case, the "phenotype" in question was disease. Here too some genes had partial penetrance and widely variable expressivity. One gene could cause many diseases, and one disease could be caused by many genes. And here too "fitness" could not be judged in absolutes. Rather the lack of fitness-illness [italicized, sic] in colloquial terms- was defined by the relative mismatch between an organism and environment.”

“About some books we feel that our reluctance to return to them is the true measure of our admiration. It is hard to suppose that many people go back, from a spontaneous desire, to reread 1984: there is neither reason nor need to, no one forgets it. The usual distinctions between forgotten details and a vivid general impression mean nothing here, for the book is written out of one passionate breath, each word is bent to a severe discipline of meaning, everything is stripped to the bareness of terror. Kafka's The Trial is also a book of terror, but it is a paradigm and to some extent a puzzle, so that one may lose oneself in the rhythm of the paradigm and play with the parts of the puzzle. Kafka's novel persuades us that life is inescapably hazardous and problematic, but the very 'universality' of this idea helps soften its impact: to apprehend the terrible on the plane of metaphysics is to lend it an almost soothing aura.”

“Empiricists say, “Where’s your evidence?” In fact, our evidence is every piece of evidence ever gathered by science. Our disagreement is not with the evidence, it’s with the interpretation of the evidence. Every scientist interprets the evidence via the Meta Paradigm of empiricism and materialism, leading to wholly bizarre and irrational conclusions. The correct way to interpret the evidence is via rationalism and idealism. When has any scientific experiment ever refuted rationalism and idealism and proved the truth of empiricism and materialism? Scientists are so ignorant and philosophically illiterate that they don’t even realize they are engaged in interpretation rather than factuality.”

“Nostalgia is an excessive sentimentality for the past, for home. It is associated with a yearning to return to a happy and safe period in your life. The word comes from nóstos, meaning “homecoming”, and álgos, meaning “pain” or “ache”. It’s all about the “good old days”, and “the good times”. Conservatism revolves around nostalgia. All right wingers are nostalgic, and suffer from future shock and future fear. Science is about extreme nostalgia for the material atoms of the ancient Greeks. Materialism is entirely dead in the era of quantum mechanics, yet scientists go on believing in matter anyway. They are highly conservative individuals unwilling to contemplate leaving the home materialism has provided for them. The last thing they want is to end up in the Unknown Land of Mind, where thought, not matter, is core reality. That would ruin everything for the scientific materialists and empiricists.”

“Aby podążyć za wytyczonymi przez Poppera ścieżkami naukowej praktyki badawczej, trzeba na samym jej początku dokonać aktu wiary w postaci wyboru paradygmatu. Wiary – ponieważ żadne argumenty empiryczne nie wesprą, ani nie sprzeciwiają się naszej decyzji o przyjęciu bądź odrzuceniu założenia, że rzeczywistość rządzi się zasadami przyczyny i skutku, że jest poznawalna, a nawet że istnieje. Zwolennicy przekonań odmiennych od naszych mają tyle samo dobrych powodów, by przyjmować swoje założenia, a odrzucać te, które przez nas wybraliśmy. Wszystkie te powody trzeba uznać za pozaracjonalne i pozaempiryczne, ponieważ nie potrafimy naukowo badać prawdziwości twierdzeń z tak ogólnego poziomu. Praktyka naukowa zaczyna się o krok później, gdy na fundamentach przyjętych założeń ontologicznych i epistemologicznych budujemy konkretne modele teoretyczne interesujących nas zjawisk, aby następnie poddać je testom empirycznym i w ich wyniku przyjąć, odrzucić lub modyfikować. Mając "ironiczną okoliczność" w pamięci, nie będziemy zapewne skłonni do angażowania się w gorące spory na temat wyższości jakiego konkretnego paradygmatu, np. ilościowego, nad innym, np. jakościowym – lub odwrotnie. Nie ma tak wielkiego znaczenia, który zestaw założeń i kryteriów poprawności metodologicznej przyjmiemy za swój. Tym, co odróżnia praktykę naukową od pozanaukowych form budowania wiedzy, jest bezdyskusyjne trzymanie się przyjętego (w ramach wybranego paradygmatu) rygoru metodologicznego i pokora wobec empirii. Warunki te spełnia zarówno podejście jakościowe, jak i ilościowe, a także kilka innych paradygmatów, w których rozróżnienie to nie jest tak istotne. Możemy wybierać z wielkiej różnorodności metod, systemów teoretycznych i paradygmatów, jakie mamy dziś do dyspozycji.”

“Let us, thusly, embrace the assumption that to each advocate of a respective paradigm within his respective bubble, the phenomenological gaps between himself and those in neighboring bubbles are insurmountable. The resident of a given bubble has become so inured to the echoes of his own ‘truth’ as to abandon all terms of commonality with the ‘truths’ of others outside his bubble. The internal terms, concepts, definitions and assumptions underlying each paradigm are different and incommensurate with those of their external counterparts. And so, to debate them would be tantamount to speaking through one another without much mutual understanding. In their communities, they speak different words, abide by different sets of logic, axioms and propositions from those of other communities; they, thusly, do not understand the terminology upholding other paradigms beside their own, and many attempts at translation have become lost in circular discourse for there exists no equivalency of terms. Thus, any gaps between bubbles of paradigm are beyond traversal; all arguments between them remain perplexing and irreconcilable. There, then, evolves, among them, a strong tendency to seek out information that only serves to confirm their own biases, and, in the process, to otherize any alien paradigms as hotbeds of disinformation.”