References to Measuring Hidden Dimensions Volume 2, Figures and Tables (Laske, 2009; MHD V2)
- Table 6.1 Characteristics of the Four Classes of Thought Forms (MHD V2; p. 200)
- Table B1 Table of Thought Forms with Contrasts (p. 590)
Four Classes Of Thought Forms
Let’s go to Table 6.1 Characteristics of the Four Classes of Thought Forms (MHD V2; p. 200) as a kind of review and there you see short definitions of the characteristic aspects of the four classes of thought forms. This is a logical distinction you might say. We are not thinking dialectically here yet. We are just thinking about there being four different aspects of the mind and the world that our thought forms can lead us to.
Process
If you want to have a really short definition of process, it has to do with emergence, and therefore it has to do with unceasing change. The fact that everything is in motion, inside of us, outside of us. That’s what is meant here by process. Processes have steps or they have evolutions and typically people speak of change.
Now change is something quite restricted in that it has to do with getting from A to B. That’s logical thinking. Actually change is more than getting from A to B. It is unceasing change. People have spoken of white water, the change in society being so not only unceasing but rapid.
So people feel overwhelmed by change, in part because they don’t think dialectically. Because dialectically you would expect there to be unceasing change and what is not changing is actually an exception. So you can turn your mind around that and get a different view by saying well of course change is unceasing. What we think is the same, like what you are today compared to yesterday, you think you are the same? No you aren’t. Your body isn’t, your mind isn’t, there is nothing much that is the same except that you can say I.
It’s a very radical notion of change that we have in dialectical thinking. And that’s because these three quadrants or moments of dialectic that we call process, context and relationship, they are anchored in transformation because transformation comprises all of these, process, context, and relationship.
Context
Context is very familiar to us because it has to do with what is stable in the world. And of course it wouldn’t make sense to say that there is unceasing change if there weren’t things that are stable because these two concepts go together. Only what is stable can change and only what is changing can be stable.
Relationship
Relationship is the third element and that in dialectical thinking has to do with the unity in diversity. If you assume, as we do here, that the world is populated by unique instances, unique people, we are all different, but there is something that we share which is the unity in this diversity which we constitute and that is considered here under the rubric of relationship. It is the relationship between what is the same and what is different that is in question. So we can think of the world and ourselves as a system in transformation, built of elements or modules or nodes or whatever you want to say, and they are what they are only in relationship to each other. To exaggerate it would be like saying I could not be if it was not for you. In some sense that is true, not only in this class couldn’t I be doing what I do, and you couldn’t be doing what you do, but even in terms of existence because we are part of the same world, we are part of this totality. And that is what dialectical thinking tries to capture.
Transformation
Transformation is this integration of what we have seen in process, context and relationship and that has to be experienced, so just abstractly talking about it doesn’t do very much.
Introducing the Thought Form Table
Let’s just go to Table B1 Table of Thought Forms with Contrasts (p. 590) to get into some practical work. You see a two-dimensional representation of the thought forms; there are four columns and seven rows, so we have four times seven, 28 thought forms, and they have integer names. What’s the difference as we go down, say, from one to two to three to seven, what’s happening? The same for the other columns. One thing is that as we go down from the lower numbers to the higher numbers, the thought form becomes more complex.
Unceasing motion is in a way quite a fuzzy notion, because everything is always changing, whereas embeddedness, or embedding in process is supposed to be more complex, and here we are speaking of processes that are embedded in other processes.
Movement Into More Complexity
While the movement from 1 to 7 in its meaning is different from the one from 8 to 14 and 15 to 21 and so forth, it is essentially in all cases a movement into more complexity. So we are assuming when we evaluate a person’s thinking that the lower thought forms down the table testify to more complex thinking.
Procedural Emphasis: Pointing To
In Table B1 Table of Thought Forms with Contrasts (p. 590), we have the numbers of the thought forms, and we can distinguish these in their procedural emphasis, the emphasis in the procedure when we use these thought forms. The initial thought forms in all these classes do no more than pointing to. So thought form 1 and 2 and 3 point to process. Somebody who is not going into much detail about the process he has in mind, or she has in mind, will just be pointing to there being change and emergence and all that, and the same for describing stable contexts, 8 and 9 and 10 and 12. But the higher we get in the numbers, the more specific the thought is getting. And we want to exercise that, and I suggest doing that today.
Applying Dialectical Thinking to a Practical Example: E-Learning
Let’s take a practical example. I’m suggesting that we are focusing our attention today on the concept of e-learning. That’s a concept discussed in the literature. What does e-learning do? What are its limitations? We all know what is meant by e-learning, because it’s exactly what we are doing here, e-learning. And what I would suggest we do is that we focus our attention on this concept of e-learning.
Bring More Details to the Concept by Starting From a Logical Basis
Let’s assume we would like to understand this concept better, and we would like to understand more details and bring more details to the concept. That’s the exercise we want to do. We can do that by starting from a logical basis, like the Wilber Quadrants, which are simply logical distinctions between what he calls four quadrants.
He is telling us that we can look at the world, and that’s his epistemological perspective on the world. He’s not dealing with ontology, he’s not dealing with what the world is like, he’s dealing with what we are seeing in the world, what meaning we make in the world.
He’s suggesting, in order to be comprehensive in our approach to things, we can distinguish these four quadrants, which he calls the Upper Left, Lower Left, Upper Right and Lower Right.
Applying the Quadrants to E-Learning: Examining e-learning through each quadrant
Upper Left: Theoretical Learning (individual intention)
The Upper Left quadrant for e-learning, we could say, is theoretical learning. The Upper Left is about intention, and about individuals having intentions. If it comes to e-learning regarding us as individuals, we would be concerned, for instance, with theoretical learning. Learning some theoretical concepts about the world through e-learning.
Lower Left: Knowledge Culture (collective understanding)
The Lower Left Wilber quadrant has to do with “We,” whereas the Upper Left is “I.” This we quadrant has to do with a collective, a community, and if we see e-learning as part of a community or collective, we might call that aspect of e-learning knowledge culture. What kind of a knowledge culture do we have? Is it based on books? Is it based on the internet, and downloading from the internet, and so forth?
These Left quadrants are interior and have to do either with the individual relating to e-learning, what the individual can learn about the world through e-learning, and what the collective can learn. So in the collective, we can talk about what is the impact of e-learning on the knowledge culture of the community that we are living in.
Upper Right: Practical Knowledge (application of theory)
When we go to the Upper right quadrant, here seen as practical knowledge, we are getting into what is more closely related to what the world is like. It’s not ontology, but we are saying we are interested in what the exterior world looks like, and there, in terms of knowledge and learning, we are interested in what are the applications of the theoretical knowledge that we have been talking about in the Upper Left quadrant. What is the practical knowledge we can obtain through e-learning?
Lower Right: Knowledge Systems (societal impact)
And the fourth quadrant is the Lower Right quadrant, which is about systems, so we can talk here about knowledge systems. The knowledge system that we might see a society putting in place through e-learning is very different from the knowledge system that our schools have so far been trying to establish, and that was based on books. We are focusing on some new knowledge culture that is given to us through the technology that enables us to work on the Internet. So these are four aspects.
Four Aspects
One might say that Wilber would say, well, if you want to talk about e-learning and you see that it’s related to knowledge, there are at least four aspects you can talk about. You can talk about the learning of theory through e-learning, and what kind of culture comes from that endeavor, and you can also ask, well, is there any practical use for this theoretical knowledge, because that’s what we are ultimately interested in, living in the world. And knowledge systems, we can all think about what that might mean, because we are interpreting these concepts. It’s up to us what they mean. They have no fixed meaning; our mind works out meanings for us.
Now Wilber would probably say, if we can cover these four aspects, we can be sure to be quite comprehensive about whatever we want to talk about, whether it’s e-learning, or the house we live in, or the train we took this morning, if we did take a train. If we can cover these four aspects, we are thinking in an integral fashion.
Look At Each Of These Four Quadrants In Terms Of Four Moments
And Laske is saying that’s not true, because each of these four quadrants we can look at in terms of process, context, relationship, and systems in transformation. So for instance, about this knowledge system in the lower right quadrant, that we were looking at as something that society is putting in place, and what kind of a system is that, and what is the impact of it on our culture. We can think about this knowledge system that we are living with, and are part of, in this society in terms of how it emerged, and how it is changing, that is process; and in terms of what is its structure, what is it like as a system, when we think in context thought forms. We can also think about it in terms of relationships, namely how the elements that compose this knowledge system of our culture, once we have established which elements they are, as context thought forms, we can then think about what the relationship is, and what they share, what is the common ground, and how they differ, and how as different they are related as a totality. And finally, we can think about the transformation this system is undergoing, the causes of this transformation, and how this transformation affects all the elements that make up the system. If we do that, if we dive into each of the Wilber quadrants, in terms of the dialectical thought forms, then we are beginning to think dialectically. So that would be a simple, almost logical definition of dialectical thinking.
Wilber’s Aqal Help In Taking Into Account All The Aspects Of The Content
Now, for instance, Adorno and others, dialectical thinkers, didn’t of course start with Wilber quadrants. They would have said, well, that’s just a scheme. We don’t need the Wilber quadrants, but for those who are strongly nourished by logical thinking, as most of us are, this might be helpful. And indeed, Bruno Frischherz speaks about going from AQAL to AQAT. And AQAL means all quadrants, all levels, and comes from Ken Wilber. And AQAT is his name for all quadrants, all thought forms. By which he means, we need to dig deeper than Wilber tells us we need to. We need to go to the dialectical thought forms. So therefore he says, Wilber’s quadrants help us size up the content of thinking, in terms of the four dimensions, and also aid us in taking into account all the aspects of the content, in terms of all quadrants. That just means, you cover all possible aspects, all aspects of the content you are talking about.
Distinguishing The Topic From The Base Concept
In speech, as an expression of thinking, a topic or subject matter is always represented by a base concept that underlies the topic. So we can distinguish the topic from the base concept. The topic is e-learning, and the base concept is e-learning, but the topic is much broader than the base concept. The base concept, if we use it and look at it dialectically, is an attempt to get into the depth of what the concept stands for, which is the topic or the subject matter.
In dialectical thinking we focus on the base concept carrying the topic as part of a network of related concepts, without which the base concept does not make sense. So what would be some concepts that we would need that are related to something like e-learning? Well, clearly we couldn’t understand what e-learning is if we didn’t have a concept like computer and internet and other concepts. So these concepts form a network, and it’s important to see that no concept has any meaning by itself. That’s a very good entry or gate to understanding relationship in the dialectical sense.
If you think that e-learning has any meaning at all, you are mistaken, because it is just one concept within a large network. It’s a single node in a set of nodes, that without the other nodes like computer, internet and many other concepts like, for example, content is another, you know, internet content, content management, all of that stuff.
Whatever concept we are looking at and using in our speech, we are always firing up all these nodes that an interlocutor who does a cognitive interview with us could make us aware of, or we could become aware of them ourselves, through reflection. And we do that in dialogue. We reflect on the concepts we are using, we are asking, what did you mean by that concept, I see that differently. That’s the kind of reflection that brings us into dialogue and brings us ultimately, if we go far enough, into dialectical thinking and listening.
Wilber Quadrants Can Be Thought About In 28 Thought Forms
So the Wilber Quadrants all have a dialectical structure, which means they can be thought about in all of the thought forms, the 28 thought forms that we have. What looks like a simple quadrant in Wilber, like this theoretical knowledge that we acquire through e-learning, we can think about in terms of 28 different thought forms. So if you had the task of writing a paper or whatever, or designing a website about the theoretical knowledge of an e-learning site that you were administering, you could take 28 thought forms to think about what you want to say and, of course, what you want to think.
Now 28 is a manageable number, but the quadrants or the moments of dialectic alone would be a first step to say, OK, I have a topic, it’s called e-learning, what can I say about e-learning in terms of process, context, relationship, and transformation? And when I can do that, I can then take another step into the thought forms that are associated with this knowledge, with this concept.
