Deconstruction exercise

[Alien]

Can you give me a tip on how to deconstruct concepts, ive seen the episode from leo. But it would be nice from you anyways 

[Joseph Maynor]

I don’t really agree with Derrida, so I have my own method of contemplation.

1.  Use the Socratic Method.  So, we’ll take your question: Can you give me a tip on how to deconstruct concepts?  Here’s an application of the Socratic Method:

What is a question?  What is you?  What is me?  What is a concept?  What does it mean to deconstruct concepts?  

I have basically targeted all the major concepts you have taken for granted to even ask this question.

2.  Contemplation has 3 uses:  

(a) Define all of those Socratic questions in your own words.  Better yet write a short paragraph defining each of them in your own words.  Do not write what you think you should write, but rather write what you already believe.

(b) Contemplation can show you the limitations of conception.   Notice how different what we say and think about reality is from simply watching reality.  For each of your Socratic answers above, can you see how those meanings differ from awareness of reality in the moment?

(c)  Contemplation can give us principles that we can use to help us maintain keen-awareness.  For each of your Socratic answers above, can you mine any golden nugget principles that might help you maintain keen-awareness as you go through your day?

Edited January 8, 2018 by Joseph Maynor

[Nahm]

@Alien Write two columns on a piece of paper; belief and experienced.  Write everything you could ever have any question about in one of those columns. It works well if we are absolutely honest. 

[Alien]

@Joseph Maynor thank you so much 

[Faceless]

What are we trying to deconstruct? 

[Akim]

 I find it useful to deconstruct concepts when you experience strong negative emotions. You have the motivation and can see results immediately. For example, after some problem at work I may feel bad and think how horrible life is. So I dig deeper and try to understand how this problem triggers negative thoughts like "People will think bad about me" or "Reality is unpredictable and I don't know what to do with it". I investigate what this actually means to me. What I usually find is a complex interrelated system of ideas, evaluations, emotions and so on. A computer analogy would be you playing an open source video game and getting repeatedly hit by a sword, each hit make you lose real world money. You can't stop playing that game for whatever reason but you can tweak the game. You study the game code, how all the game mechanics, your game avatar and enemy are programmed. After some time you are able to change the code so hitting doesn't not occur anymore or it doesn't lose you anything. In the process you learn programming.