Today I will continue to explore context. It also nicely relates to my general weakness towards meta-moves. I am working on the growing collection of various strategies to develop more meta awareness. I believe it is a necessity move to increase overall wellbeing. A lot of unsettlements, anxieties and clumsiness comes from the fact that our ability to view the situation form the side is obstructed. Mist of the time what ever we experience becomes us. So when something bad happens we automatically embody it and get sucked into a loop of negative emotions. Going meta, solves it. There are various way to practice it, and I’ve bee already exploring some of them.
Thinking about context has brought me to another two stances which make it to the meta-move collections. There are the ways we engage with the information and the context. There are two ways to do so: decoupling and contextualisation. Both strategies are used in various situations. The first one requires additional moves and not commonly practiced in day to day situations, but used a lot in science. I’ll unfold both of them.
Decoupling is a a technique in which truth of the clan is considered in isolation. It is free of potential complications as it block out all the contact and experiential knowledge and just follows formal rules. It is based on the ability to separate things and look at them at the level of abstraction. There can be various degrees of decoupling. High-decouplers isolate ideas from each other and their surrounding context. This approach used a lot in mathematics, for example, in order to separate variables, understand causality and come up with good hypothesis. Low-decouplers have a softer rules about it and this form we use more often. In life experiences It is a good skill to have to keep the connection fresh and relevant. I will talk about the effects that contextual/non-contextual stance in information processing tomorrow, in more details. But important to mention that main pitfall here is without contextualisation, decoupling can lead to fragmented knowledge thus requires conscious awareness and ability to shift between these two modalities.
Contextualising does require the context and takes into account implications. Everything that we experience we experience in particular context. This way of engaging with the world is most common. We are educated to process this way and automatically use it without thinking. In this sense decoupling is much more effortful and has to be mastered, taking into account all the limitations that come along. One might argue that context is important at all times as it introduces more information to understand the situation. And most of the time this is indeed the case. But I believe that context, being such a powerful moving force, able to direct a situation in any direction, can be not very useful. Clinging to context, staying in the past rather than in the present moment, takes us out of the present moment where future can be happening. Staying true to the context and not able to change, cal lead to polarisation, where people are stuck in their narratives, which they passionately defence. And the stronger the defence is, the stronger the distance grows. Context can reduce overall openness and flexibility. It takes away the attention form an object, a person or a situation which is being encountered, which can be really unfortunate because miss out on the deep level of connection which might arise from true presence.
Both stances have their pros and cons, and I am not saying we must give a preference to one over another. The important question is learn how and when to shift. What I am hoping for, a general awareness about the role of the context will increase. That is the most important to me. Not blocking it out, or only being led by it, but consciously making a choice about how to use it. To be continued…