1. Group, religious and community pressures contribute strongly to our unexamined paradigm paralysis, because the spirit of questioning and enquiry is often seen as a threat to the system, and anything that does not fit into the ruling paradigm of the day is shot down.
2. Most of us tend to slot and classify people even on first encounters on the basis of images we have formed in our minds about good, bad, ugly, indifferent people, and resist the commonsense urge to realise that the stereotype in which we are trying to fit another is as limited as the other person's interests and impulses are unlimited.
3. The problem with the educational paradigm of our times is that it blocks rather than fosters learning, and makes us argumentative, defensive and contentious, rather than open and inclined to listening without any reservations or preconceptions.
4. Education fosters a stuck paradigm in another novel fashion, by tending to make people stuck on concepts, formulae and jargon which they have picked up alongwith their degrees.
5. We need to remember that these are explanations or ideas of brilliant individuals, but what is good for another individual, howsoever great, is not necessarily good for you.
6. Unless we stay alert to the process all the time, there is a very real danger of unconscious hardening of our mental attitudes and biases by adopting such ideas wholesale, hence their validity for all people and all times is not to be taken for granted.
7. Relevance can be sought through critical challenge and questioning so that such ideas don't get converted into norms, rules and routines, thereby losing their vitality.
8. Again, it is important to listen to other people without filtering their message through concepts with which we are familiar, as we will lose out on the meaning and variety which others have to offer, by trying to reduce everything other people say to our own familiar concepts.
2. Most of us tend to slot and classify people even on first encounters on the basis of images we have formed in our minds about good, bad, ugly, indifferent people, and resist the commonsense urge to realise that the stereotype in which we are trying to fit another is as limited as the other person's interests and impulses are unlimited.
3. The problem with the educational paradigm of our times is that it blocks rather than fosters learning, and makes us argumentative, defensive and contentious, rather than open and inclined to listening without any reservations or preconceptions.
4. Education fosters a stuck paradigm in another novel fashion, by tending to make people stuck on concepts, formulae and jargon which they have picked up alongwith their degrees.
5. We need to remember that these are explanations or ideas of brilliant individuals, but what is good for another individual, howsoever great, is not necessarily good for you.
6. Unless we stay alert to the process all the time, there is a very real danger of unconscious hardening of our mental attitudes and biases by adopting such ideas wholesale, hence their validity for all people and all times is not to be taken for granted.
7. Relevance can be sought through critical challenge and questioning so that such ideas don't get converted into norms, rules and routines, thereby losing their vitality.
8. Again, it is important to listen to other people without filtering their message through concepts with which we are familiar, as we will lose out on the meaning and variety which others have to offer, by trying to reduce everything other people say to our own familiar concepts.