"I, Abstract Thinker. Concrete Thinkers Don´t Treat Me Right."

Vic Sho I swim in the abstract like a fish in water, I can see that concrete thinkers can not follow my leaps in abstract thought, and they tell me, I think too much, and I am not special. So I am inclined to keep my abstract thinking to myself, even though I love sharing it. It is true some of us with a mental problem do get lost in abstract thought, but when I listen to them, I can tell they don't understand what they are saying. Reply 1d Mark Rego Monteiro Victor Shortus I certainly appreciate you valuing of abstract thinking. However, the question is its healthiest and optimal application, and the truth. Here, you´re bringing up "concrete thinking" as a category as if it is in opposition to abstract thought, since you are equating it with the unappreciative and uncomprehending attitudes of some number of individuals you have encountered. In my case, having gone to one of the best colleges/Universities on the planet, I was seeking the truth in sociology when I ran into Karl Marx´s saying "The individual is abstract. Social activity is real." or the like, at some point in one of his works that we were reading for class. I duked it out a bit with the course professor, as I drew on the empirical type of thinking of Hume, in that area anyway. The professor couldn´t get passed the disagreement, and said "I don´t think you´re ready for this class." Well, that reflected a key principle that I´ve found fundamentally important to develop the solutions to key modern confusion. Empiricism. I switched three classes and my major to Biological Anthropology. For one thing, the insights involved lead to the perception that while theoretical physicists, as you mention, can get wild and crazy, and profound in certain ways, they usually remain disconnected from the realities of our biological needs for survival. Wall St. as you mention, has created regular crises in the economy, no less, as physicists operate in the rarefied context of socioeconomic maneuvering for profit instead of ecological sustainability and social justice for well-being. It is thus that economist Herman Daly drew on the work of N Georgescu-Roegan (sp?) to develop Ecological Economics based on basic parameters of biophysical and ethicosocial limits. Those are concepts tied to our empirical realities, that are all important for human survival and well-being. In your case of feeling unappreciated and uncomprehended, I would refer you to the primary empirical reality of your own personal psychological needs, actually psychosocial in nature. I was blessed by a co-worker as I worked in social services having returned from teaching science in Africa for a year. She, an Afro-Haitian-American to celebrate, shared a technique for self-care with me by Louise Hay. I got Hay´s book, You Can Heal Your Life, and a little later, endorser Bernie Siegel MD´s book Love, Medicine, and Miracles. Another colleague, with less education but an ebullient spirit, introduced me to the 12 step groups. I paid attention to my own joy in the community experience. I linked that to my own curiosity and vision, and looked up alternative meetings, and found for myself CoDA and Al-Anon, about codependency. As I learned self-care in community at those support groups, I learned about my range of emotions, and my ability to care for myself in spiritual practice. The idea of a Higher Power restoring people to sanity, restoring us in the group to sanity, and me, myself, and I, integrated with my existing notion of the Chinese Tao. I had embraced that years earlier as I read scholar Huston Smith´s work. He referred to the Tao as a "creative continuum that is always accessible." My work also included training in basic counseling technique for emotional awareness and visualization. CoDA had been founded by an AA couple, Ken and Mary, with Ken at least having professional therapeutic training. The tools of CoDA are fairly advanced in that respect, with affirmations included, such as, "I am a precious child of God and deserve love, peace, prosperity, serenity, and understanding. I am loving and loved." Louise Hay had similar techniques. Joseph Murphy is another author I discovered of a similar background to Hay in Religious and Divine Science, both derived from Mary Baker Eddy´s Christian Science, I later learned. It is with that understanding of meeting my basic needs for love that I met Abe Maslow´s pyramid scheme of building blocks of needs, I can appreciate. I also had already related to nature, with a hike in first year of college, time in the Outdoor Club, up Mt. Kenya with friends in Africa, and then hikes with Sierra Club back in a big city area on the East Coast. I had also knocked on doors summer after graduation for eco-consumer advocacy in Ralph Nader´s legacy, the PIRGs. They taught me about public interest activism by the Sierra Club and Greenpeace. All of that led me to work like Herman Daly´s and theologian JB Cobb´s For the Common Good about ecological economics. Later, I came upon physicist philosopher Fritjof Capra´s multidisciplinary work, first with The Tao of Physics, then his book of interviews Uncommon Wisdom, including EF Schumacher and OC Simonton MD, RD Laing, S Grof MD, and W Heisenberg. Capra´s work Hidden Dimensions reflects his application of Systems Theory and extending it into ecology, and sociology with concerns for social justice. A little less abstract than Capra´s Hidden Dimensions is the late W Greider´s The Soul of Capitalism. He researched ESOPs, and linked them to Daly´s ecological economics work briefly, and David Ellerman´s co-op social economics, also in an excellent introductory manner. I highly recommend people recognizing their own psychological needs. In fact, physicist Arnie Mindell became a psychotherapist with spiritual interests. Fred Wolfe is a physicist who became interested in shamanism. Both have been interviewed on Thinking Allowed videos with J Mishlove. Hume, incidentally had traced the building block process from sensations to abstract thought. Eliot D Chappell was a behavioral anthropologist who linked Pavlov´s discovery of basic symbolic physiological conditioning to a full analysis of human culture and individual involvement in interactions. When I got my masters in International Relations years later, I was happy to find that scholar Alex Wendt had drawn on perspectives like symbolic interactionism in sociology and social psychology to develop social constructivism with a compatible perspective. All told, that provides a powerful balance of perspectives that allow understanding what Systems Theory has been covering overall, along with epistemology, and what biologist N Tinbergen called Levels of Analysis. It boils down to the great spiritual insights of the likes of Buddha and Jesus, no less, in the end. Such work is actually philosophical in nature, and has its heritage directly in Jesus´ legacy. Maybe you can find something in what I´ve mentioned that is of interest. No man is an island, and the classic bargain described by Goethe, most famously anyway, in Faust, is powerfully instructive when we look at the UN reports of the likes of the 2005 World Bank UNEP NGO Ecosystem Assessment. You can´t do abstract thought on a dead planet, to riff on one quote.