KORZYBSKI: A BIOGRAPHY - UNSOLICITED, UNPAID ENDORSEMENT I JUST FOUND ON FACEBOOK DWAYNE POLOWAY

From the Stray Thought Bin - "Thinking About Thinking"

My endless inquiring makes it possible for me to achieve something at any given date— I get to think about my own thoughts of the situation in which I find myself. 

I even think that I think of it. 

This gives me the power of flexibility to go with change. 

I embrace the infinite progressive sequence of abstracting myself to a higher level of abstraction, of mapping a map, mapping myself, a process I seek to continue indefinitely. 

I don't call a halt to the process, because I momentarily have to stop at a given point in it. 

I accept the 'infinite' and accept that though I'm a part of it, I can't possess it. 

I don't identify myself with one fixed point along the way. 

I look 'down' from my viewpoint at a date and appreciate the  broader view. 

Because I  don't reject the  knowledge that I do have because it always has some degree of uncertainty, I take courage. 

I can pinch my finger. 

I can feel my breath.

I can feel the ground beneath my feet. 

It is not words. 

Whatever I say it 'is', is not it.     

"Let Us Consider" by Russell Edson

In his poem "Let Us Consider" Russell Edson is talking about us, our human potential for nuttiness and identification (in the korzybskian sense of the term) not just about some 'strange' wackos. You can read in Korzybski's book Science and Sanity about the continuum that he saw from objectification of higher order abstractions, to delusions, to illusions, to hallucinations. You can also read about the fuzzy continuum from 'sane' (and who is fully sane) to unsanity to insanity. I know many so-called 'normal', so-called 'sane' people who are clearly going in the 'wrong' direction along that continuum and are not as far as they think from frying roses and scraping shadows. Some of them have thought of themselves as 'general semanticists'. I, of course, am not excluded from consideration. "Let Us Consider", indeed.