oneness – happiness / 7 commandments | identity | thoughts | beautiful people | gender equality | sustainable living
From what I wrote in my paper on Sense-Making at the ASIS&T History conference – October 2012:
“The various influences, my approach and purpose in life have been about synthesis – in trying to reconcile apparent contradictions and differences, instead of seeing the world in the form of stereotypes and labels. While classification is natural and necessary to apply broad strokes in understanding the world, I’ve realized that it is a simplistic exercise and devoid of reality, something best understood as stereotyping. It has always been my endeavor to find commonalities among differences, and to respect differences among commonalities. Thus, when I see differences, I try to look for what’s similar and common. When I see an attempt to paint everything with one broad stroke of color, I try to look for differences – a concept of looking for ‘one’ in the ‘many’ and to look for ‘many’ in the ‘one’. Some of my writings in the past have reflected this. In Agarwal, Xu, and Poo, (2009), I try to reconcile the apparent differences in the 3 major schools of thought on what context in information behavior means. In Agarwal (2009), I propose a theory of Expanding Circles of Identity and how Identity can be used to unite rather than to divide [see videos based on the paper below]. In a blog post (Agarwal, 2009b), I try to reconcile the differences in the names used for God by adherents of different sects and religions. In an ongoing work, I am trying to reconcile the contradictions in the various commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita (see Agarwal, 2012). The theme is also tied to the various talks on happiness and my 7 commandments in life that I’ve given to different audiences (see a recent video of a talk on how to be different similar – Agarwal, 2012b [attached below]). A close parallel to this thinking is in the fundamental principle of hermeneutics (see Klein and Myers, 1999), which suggests that ‘all human understanding is achieved by iterating between considering the interdependent meaning of parts and the whole that they form.’ (p.72)”