🅿Week 2026-17: On Perspectives

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." (Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations", cca. 121–180 AD

"Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective." (Hunter S. Thompson, [letter] 1958)

"Every impression, every idea flows through the distorted filter of individual ego, and humanity is plagued with a nearsighted tunnel vision. We sharply separate harmony and conflict, defining harmony as soft and good, and conflict as harsh and evil; with each person standing in the center of his or her own private universe, we decide what is fair from the limited perspective of one individual participating in his or her own space at his or her own immediate timing. We do not comprehend the all-encompassing harmony of nature, nor truly understand the exquisite justice of the Creator’s universal laws. Harmony does not mean that there are no conflicts, for the dynamic spiral of existence embraces both extremes." (Mitsugi Saotome, "Aikido and the Harmony of Nature", 1993)

"From the perspective of meditation, every state is a special state, every moment a special moment." (Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness meditation for everyday life", 1994)

"If you were to pause for a moment and look at your life from a slightly different perspective, you would see you’ve always been changing." (Steve Andreas, "NLP: The New Technology of Achievement", 1994)

"Anybody can they say they are being 'spiritual' - and they are, because everybody has some type and level of concern. Let us therefore see their actual conception, in thought and action, and see how many perspectives it is in fact concerned with, and how many perspectives it actually takes into account, and how many perspectives it attempts to integrate, and thus let us see how deep and how wide runs that bodhisattva vow to refuse rest until all perspectives whatsoever are liberated into their own primordial nature." (Ken Wilber, "The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad", 1997)

"Perceiving a situation or experience from multiple perspectives allows a person to gain broader insight and understanding with respect to the event." (Robert B Dilts, "Modeling with NLP", 1998)

"[...] Zen may be regarded from a spiritual perspective as a way of regulating the mind. The unification of mind resulting from it is concentration and the workings of concentration is wisdom." (Omori Sogen, "Introduction to Zen Training", 2012)

"Contentment is a wealth that gives the highest satisfaction, and we can gain it simply by mining our own mental resources, and knowing our own mind. We can cultivate the perspective that what we have is enough. We can see that we do not actually need more than we already have, and can be completely satisfied with that." (Gyalwa Karmapa, "The Heart Is Noble: Changing the World from the Inside Out", 2013)