The kinds of individual and collective creativity through which innovative responses emerge to the problems of society depend largely on the ability to shift to perspectives of a significantly different order. The much sought "paradigm shifts" appear to call for a conceptual transcendence of some of the more obvious attitudes and behavioral processes by which we are collectively trapped.
1. Experiential phases and modes
The contents of the core sections of this Encyclopedia might be understood as linked over time in terms of the problems and values encountered under different challenges to human development. There are many concepts of the phases of human development (Section H). The possibility of such an ordering might best be illustrated through one which links such phases to value dilemmas.
1. Resonant exchange between opposing views
There are a number of metaphors of human development and consciousness (Valle and von Eckartsberg, 1981) and various authors point to the dangers of being trapped by them. A related problem has also been explored by theologians (S McFague, Metaphorical Theology, 1982).
1. Technical metaphors
It is a matter of personal experience for many who work with different languages that things can be said in one language which cannot be adequately expressed in another, if at all. It is extraordinary that so little attention is paid to the significance of such observations. Their implications have been largely neglected by the academic world and by the world of policy-making bodies whose views they reinforce. The problem is left to the technicalities of interpreters if multi-lingual discourse is accepted.
1. Drug abuse as a reaction to sterile human development
The anthropologist Edward T Hall (1976) states that "Western man has created chaos by denying that part of his self that integrates while enshrining the parts that fragment experience". This is echoed with other words by the poet Kathleen Raine: "It may be that modern man's sense of chaos comes in part from his loss of that pattern of which his necessarily fragmentary individual life is a part."
1. Selective expansion of scope of human development
1. Entries
1. Shadow of humanity
1. Degrees of immediacy of pain
Awareness of problems could be characterized in terms of the directness of the experience of that problem as a pain or a painful tension, with which it is possible to identify. Degrees of immediacy might then range as follows:
