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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Structure vs. Content:

A common example
of mind-imposed conceptual structure,
the half-empty glass
 

return to the main-page article on "Clear-Thinking"

It's a proverbial question: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

We are tempted to answer one way or the other - usually, half-empty. But why should this be so? It's the same glass, the same quantity of liquid.

Kant's mind-imposed structures on sensory data come alive in this little thought-experiment.

The "glass half-full or empty" becomes microcosm of a grand systemic issue:

What about other areas of life? What else are we viewing as "half-full" or "half-empty"?

Do I see my own life as "half-full" or "half-empty"?

How do we view the past? - was it "half-empty" every day? What about the future? Is there fullness there? are good things assuredly coming? - or is it all just variations of emptiness?

 Let's be more realistic.

There are very few people who live their lives seeing "half-full glasses." Fullness, abundance, wholeness, and completeness are concepts foreign to the Small Ego - because in that dark world of perpetual lack, there are only degrees of emptiness; and even when "the glass is full" we don't really see it as full, as to make us happy, but only as a new threat against losing what we have. 

structure vs. content

All this "insanity" manifests as distorted view of the universe, wherein, ironically, God and Goodness are All-Pervasive; but, to many, living in a private hall-of-horrors, the threat of loss continually looms large and burdens one's spirit -- all glasses in life are forever perceived to be "half empty" -- as we suffer under draconian mind-imposed structures which filter and sort the in-coming sensory data.