11 GA. Let's look into Edward De Bono, the famous author of "Lateral Thinking".
In a comment from our user, Frani, she suggested De Bono as an important theory of expanded thinking. I have found some of his quotes.
I don't really know what his "Lateral Thinking concept is, since I didn't read his book. He wrote 57 books and made a lifetime career out of it. Lateral Thinking was written in 1967.
Included in it are four types pf thinking:
1. Tools to break current patterns, 2. Tools to focus where there are new ideas, 3. Tools to gather the generated output, 4. Tools to be in sync with real-world constraints, real-world resources, and possible support systems.
Offhand we could say a few things about it before considering any quotes.
1. You break current patters by admitting that "I do NOT already know that". There are a lot of blocks to the new, but that is the most devastating.
2. You find new ideas where you weren't looking before. It is a new field of vision.
3. This is about the judgement, that what we have discovered could fit into the world patterns we already know. Anything new has to be compatible with the existing, or where to use it?? This is one of the quotes: “No way of doing things is beyond improvement.” Meaning both, all current methods can be adjusted, and if they are too far-off there’s no ways to implement them.
4. Just means stay grounded and practical.
1. In the course of describing thinking, De Bono refers to Creativity a lot. Here's some quotes:
a) “Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way.” “Creative thinking is not a talent; it is a skill that can be learned. It empowers people by adding strength to their natural abilities which improve teamwork, productivity and, where appropriate, profits.”
b) “We need creativity in order to break free from the temporary structures that have been set up by a particular sequence of experience,” (now held in MEMORY).
c) “Creativity involves provocation, exploration, and risk-taking. Creativity involves “thought experiments.” You cannot tell in advance how the experiment is going to turn out. But you want to be able to carry out the experiment.”
d) “The simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity.” “The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas.”
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We can ask: Is there anything new under the sun? Is there really such a thing as creativity, or does it all rest on the shoulders of the past? When you carry a certain volume of memory within, your life becomes repetitive and automatic.
All sense of being open to your potential humanity, all the possibilities of being spontaneous, all the possibility of exploring new terrain in one’s life, gets obliterated because of memory. Memory is impacting your every thought, every emotion and every action. The very way you sit, stand, breathe, understand and perceive life, is determined by this memory.
People think that their thoughts are free. This is a joke because your memory is determining everything.
If we go back up to 1 and 2 above, discovery comes from attentiveness. It is the human potential to have an attentive conscious contact with the world. If I were to say "Pay Attention" that is already distorted, because "PAY" connotes a direction and a focus defined by memory (the old). What is taking away human attentiveness is simply one’s own cerebral activity.
People do not know how to handle both their memory, and their attention separately.
Their memory floods into their attention and clouds it all the time. People may call this clouding-by-the-memory as important thoughts and emotions. But it is essentially just the accumulated weight of memory which interferes with one's current perception. Some people are very heavy with it.
Otherwise, it would be very natural for you to be attentive in 360 degrees all the time, but memory seeps into every aspect. Instead of using this memory as the fantastic, phenomenal capability that it is, most people use it to cause harm and misery to themselves. Well, they try to infect it on others also.
SO WITH:
a) Raw attentiveness breaks established patterns. It is not a talent, but your natural inner ability, (that you may have blunted). b) Breaking free from memory; at least he says from "temporary structures". c) Provocation, and “thought experiments,” without knowing the results. d) Looking at what's "Normally taken for granted", means from the current realm of possibility, or your current world view.
2. Here are three quotes that have a very practical application:
e) “An expert is someone who has succeeded in making decisions and judgments simpler through knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore.”
f) “Effectiveness without values is a tool without a purpose.”
g) “A discussion should be a genuine attempt to explore a subject rather than a battle between competing egos.” “Asking a question is the simplest way of focusing on thinking…asking the right question may be the most important part of thinking.”
I don’t have anything to say here, except agreement.
3. Here are a couple that ring true, but there is no indication how to do it. How do you get there from here?
h) “You cannot look in a new direction by looking harder in the same direction.” “You can’t dig a different hole by digging the same one deeper.”
i) “You can analyze the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it.” “If you do not design the future, someone or something else will design it for you.”
4. Here are a couple of quotes explaining suffering through comparing:
j) “The image that concerns most people is the reflection they see in other people’s minds.”
k) “Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.” (But above he did not stress talent, he stressed learned skill.)
I think these are obvious, perhaps I have said them many times. If you are in the herd mentality, you will compare, and be driven and suffer by it. You also have to compare when you have a job, compare to the boss’s requirements.
5. This one is not normally understood (at least by me)?
l) “A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.”
Completely “unhappen” must mean completion. We do lose track of some things. Is that because we “imbibed them to the fullest”, completed them? If we took-in something 100%, I think it would become a benchmark in our life, and we wouldn’t forget it? This one I do not understand.
6. Here is a caution about language:
m) “While Language is the foundation of thinking and "creativity", it is also the biggest barrier to human progress, because language is an encyclopedia of ignorance. Old perceptions are frozen into language and force us to look at the world in an old-fashioned way.”
This might just be a provocation. Now he is talking against memory, the old, it’s not that memory and language are the same thing. Much of memory is linguistic, and some not. Maybe it is difficult to access the non-linguistic part of memory, because language is applied to everything after the fact. So, the view of it is completely mixed.
But an an encyclopedia of ignorance is an apt way to describe memory.
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I believe this is a good way to generate posts. By analyzing the famous lines-of-thought from others, we are sort-of dialoging with these authors. Some of their insights might be quite good, and some might miss the mark. Some might be based on foundation assumptions that don’t apply everywhere.
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