Extraordinary Sense

Buzz Submitted by : Ali Anani PhD

Buzz: Common Sense That Has No Sense

Ali Anani looks at logic and sense relationship while questioning a popular quote by Carl Jung

Ali Anani began his buzz with a Carl Jung quote, which he challenged and the result was a different lens to look at lens between the swinging pendulum of logic and sense.

Immediately I too was chopping at the Jung quote.  My first disappointment was that though this quote has been quoted by so many people, I did not find one instance online which attributed the actual source of this quote.  The internet is famous for both misattribution of quotes and using quotes out of context.  That is why it was important for me to know where Jung actually said this, so I could read the actual context that Jung was referencing. 

The reality of interpretation is the same one that I heard from singer Joni Mitchell in an audience with her fans.  As fans poured forth the meaning of her songs, Mitchell asserted that as a song-writer all of the meanings her fan prescribed were not what she had in mind, she acknowledged the sense-making of her fans but did not fuel those meanings.  The same encounter happened with John Lennon meeting a homeless man who began to tell Lennon the meaning of his songs, Lennon replied honestly in this clip :

"Don't confuse songs for your own life"

John Lennon speaking to a Homeless Man about the Meaning of his Songs

The idea of "common sense" is more than a commonality, it is a thirst for certainty.  Why do I want to make a living out of pushing the drug of certainty into people's lives, when uncertainty is the norm.  For sure biologically our brains crave certainty as children, but if I am at all concerned about self-development or learning or any such ilk about personal growth, then it is uncertainty that I must explore - and uncertainty is not common sense.

So it is that I saw Ali Anani's post title through my own eyes removed of the word "THAT" and only as "Common Sense is NO Sense".  If it is common then what am I sensing?

Uncertainty also does not mean that my life should be about swinging across fences, if anything in embracing abundance and knowing certainty, I can discern between what is knowledge and what is learning.  For the most part I question whether I really have extended my sense-making or whether I am just responding as I am psychologically and biologically programmed to do.

Randomness is a form of swinging here, there and everywhere, whereas finding one's center and presence in uncertainty is quite a challenge - either we are swung or we at the most peaceful point of a cerebral and spiritual hurricane, which is at the center.  If I have truly found this center then I should be considered a fool, because a common sense view is what that looks like, so it is that I identify with another Beatles track that speaks of the "Fool on the Hill".

So it is with common sense we look for commonalities with each other, but I intuitively know that I am going to engage in learning when I see the diversity and the difference - not the the comfort food of common sense.   So it is we reject the innovator, we see people different from us as something to attack or at least pretend to be comfortable with in our "authenticity".  So it is with disability.  We won't look into the stark reality of how people with disability are severely abused, we are more likely to share video's of disability as a motivational video.  What does that say about common sense?

By the time I had finished reading Ali Anani's buzz what had arisen within me is a desire to find an alternative to common sense and the only thing I could think of was "extraordinary sense".  It is ironic that the first group of people that I could think of teaching me this kind of sense are those who have heightened senses due to loss of a particular sense.  This does not make these people less, it makes them fascinating teachers of how we can overcome our own common sense disability.  One clue was this video that showed how we can cultivate our sense making :

This made sense to me, because it taught me that our minds are both very adaptable to how we input sense, how we foster sense-making depending where our loci of thoughts is, and at the same time recognize how vulnerable and fragile our minds own sense making capacity is.  So it is here that I thought about what starts our minds swinging and sometimes into extremes, where we have lost the ability to own our own sensory experiences and dysfunctions begins to occur. 

In the video above there is startling evidence that in a sense-deprivation chamber, within 15 minutes symptoms of mental dysfunction begins to appear - and that by itself is a profound realization - and in terms of learning it is my realization, it is my reflection - I own this.  So it is I thought about two forces that create dysfunction, namely the overloading of my senses and equally sense deprivation - and it seemed plausible to me that where I may find "extraordinary sense" is where my sense is in flow - i.e. not in sense overload or sense deprivation.

Here is where the theoretical construct weighs heavy as a sense overload and the deprives us from experiencing our own "what is", because when my senses are defined by a theory of everything or everyone, we can only begin to relate all that old that sits outside of us and very little in regards of the new that sits within us. 

This for me is the difference between self-reflection and narcissism - self reflection is discovery of the new which is a personal freedom, but narcissism is revolving in the old of enslaving others, which is a public control. 

Instead of being the center of the world where narcissism feeds leadership and the ascent of leaders in modern corporations, I can personally risk unemployment by being different.  I don't have to be an empath to know people, I don't have to be a narcissist to know people - for me the responsibility for people to know themselves is theirs and theirs alone.  Those who think that personal branding isn't a form of narcissism are only kidding themselves - or they brand me.

I have known for some time that there is a flow in my own existence that I have not mastered, even though I have focused on individual elements. This is not about using common sense but focusing on this realization of what it takes to develop extraordinary sense.  This now amounts to a cycle of virtuous resolve - and as I improve my own sense-creation, I am no longer sense-making but sense-discovering and this is what I assume is the flywheel at the center of this virtuous resolve, and this in my minds eye looks like this :

At this point when common sense prevails there are ah-ha moments popping inside our heads but life is not a bottle of champagne, where all the bubbles rise in the moment we find it on social media. In the temporal availability of so much media we are more apt to get lost and thus if this view is right, then I am damning myself unless it is possible to develop extraordinary sense.  Every life should not be anymore predictable than our own, for if each life is rich with diversity and self-reflective genius then how can I predict any life in a teaspoon of their experiences - that we repeat so many of these experiences is only a lack of our evolution.

If my response is as a rebel then I continue to be a programmed as those who conform and I am rejecting conformity not because it prevents me recognizing extraordinary sense but I am focused outwards at conformity and not finding the equanimity necessary to be personally present to my own extraordinary sense development.  It is not as if any of us where given a users guide to our own brain - when it comes to the magic hidden in our brains we are all absolute beginners - all of us, and that is where I start from, not a blank slate but a white page. 

That I conduct this exploration in a social space means I must be carefully how I look at the rise of social bubbly, and at the end of day what and how we interpret our senses is either ours to discover or it is champagne supernova - and if it is a social and group-think, then I have lined up that famous Oasis song - and whoever listens to it can interpret meaning from it at their hearts content - but when we so interpret spare me the comparisons when it comes to this discovery.

All I know for sure is that common sense is the drug we all get to smoke on a daily basis otherwise why would it be so common? 

Extraordinary sense is only a possibility IMHO if we understand what makes us socially drunk on inputs, that define the quality and presence of our own output - an output that has always been called "Know Thyself" - and on the whole (including myself) we never get to experience that, so what is the point of learning as personal growth if what we really share here is a conformity called "common sense".  If this is not a source for my self reflection, there is always another Oasis song to line up anytime I like and I can interpret life from others lyrics and not my own.