The Tao of Systems Thinking: Exploring the Parallels Between Eastern Mysticism and Systems Thinking by McCurley Michael & Tzu Lao

Author:McCurley, Michael & Tzu, Lao [McCurley, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Tags: Mysticism, Taoism
Publisher: Three to the Fourth Power Publications
Published: 2016-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

8.72 Know yourself

This refrain has echoed throughout the ages—it seems so simple and yet is so difficult to do. Why? –—Because there’s a dichotomy within us, which is divided between our egos and the persons we really are—also between the creative and destructive aspects of human nature.

Although your ego helps to preserve you as an individual to survive, there are uncontrolled tendencies of the ego, which bring suffering to mankind. Its darker side produces negative human traits we know well, such as avarice, cruelty, envy, greed, larceny, revenge, selfishness, violence, and war. In certain circumstances, your ego tends to complete your personality, but in others it competes with your own personality until it becomes difficult to express who you really are. [22]

Who you are doesn’t depend on what you have, how important you are, or what you do.

It’s no wonder then that human ego is responsible for the worst kinds of dictatorships, for abuses of human rights, and for forcible occupations of territories which have no real owners. What gives people the right to control what isn’t theirs to take?

It’s easy to confuse ego with who you are.

The human ego easily becomes a tyrant without limits. This happens often enough in real time for us to be aware through what we can observe every day. Ego justifies the unjustifiable because it strictly limits perception to itself—but it’s not the real basis of your identity.

The essence of who you are is within you. There’s no need for you to have, possess, do, or be more or less than who you already are. The essence of your identity requires none of this. You have nothing to prove other than to be yourself. Anything less subtracts and diminishes you, just as anything more does the same. Ego does this if you allow it to. Your ego can suppress and replace who you really are with mere selfish desires that become fixed on empty relics, material possessions, and of course, money. But money has no real value or power except for what we ascribe to it—what we think or say it’s worth. Otherwise, it is only paper and shiny pieces of metal with images, letters, and numbers. [23] Think of what people will do for money, and then consider for a moment that it’s really nothing.

The power of such things is within our minds—but is worthless outside of them. So this brings us back to the influences of thinking and perception. Your mind can cause you to believe or do almost anything. The results depend on your motivation and purpose.

This isn’t limitless, even if it seems to be. There are mental and physical limits to your mind, just like anything else. For that reason, Systems Thinking provides more objective ways for us to model systems and use visual models, which allows others to track or examine how we think. It also allows you to reflect and review how you think yourself.

The Dark Side

There’s another side to us we never mention, unless we speak out against others.

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