hmm, a simple phrase: "wisdom from the bottom up"

⦿ life optimizing á la @meditationstuff
⦿ relevance realization á la @vervaeke_john
⦿ meaningness á la @Meaningness
⦿ finding our ethical sea-legs á la @willbuckingham
⦿ focusing á la Gendlin
⦿ building á la Alexander

it's like wisdom that doesn't come from adherence to established top-down cognitive schemas, but from direct embodied piecemeal iterative engagement & enaction within real-time perceptive feedback

but my bullet points — inspiring and beautiful treasures that I have known and loved — are themselves top-down cognitive schemas, philosophies, conceptual & symbolic texts

yet they are persistently and almost obsessively rooted in experience

Christopher Alexander and Eugene Gendlin are great examples of theorists who deviate from the mainstream precisely in their regrounding within the immediacy of embodiment

Alexander says "don't get stuck in opinions, images, and theories — you have to use your whole body to feel the situation, and that takes practice"

Gendlin says "don't jump right to verbalizing in preconceived patterns — you have to learn to tune into a subtle felt sense"

so these theories themselves are something like:

1. you practice in life & work
2. you come to notice a lack of bottom-up grounding
3. you develop a framework for regrounding
4. you explicate that framework as a top-down schema
5. you can now share that schema with others

Elaine Scarry's "The Body in Pain" explicates a similar progression for how material civilization grows out of embodied pain, wishing the pain away, imagining a solution, crafting that solution as a durable artifact, which can then be shared

we might say that there is a kind of bodily pain of disembodiment, which these people sense acutely and develop frameworks to alleviate — with concepts, theories, books as the durable medium where the alleviating work can be materialized, stored and shared

so these "psychotechnologies" and conceptual frameworks become important structural elements of civilization, materializations of caritas that "contain within them the wish for well-being" https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1339926481833783301

linking into Kierkegaard https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1351880258853724161