Credo Take this neat analysis: “We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids. A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle. Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory [and is known as the Aneristic Illusion].” I believe that this is certainly true of most intellectual abstraction (science, critical theorising, religion) but maybe not quite everything – that damn gravity looks like a pretty compelling general pattern to me; maybe things will change when I learn to levitate. On the other hand I also believe (perhaps over optimistically) that there exists a hardwired predisposition in the human mind towards self-development and ultimately even, dare I say it, spiritual growth – as has been articulated by the likes of Maslow, Jung and Hillman (he of the acorn theory). I don’t see any conflict between these two theories: the first describes the human attempt to perceive the world around them while the second is a purely inner dynamic. What I find interesting, however, is what the combination of both of these together produces (apart from ever more abstract and complicated grids). Therein, I think, we find some interesting motivations.