When we encounter a person or situation, a process or unknown object… we begin to use a specific array of skills to determine its meaning, identity, whether it represents a threat or an opportunity, its potential value, and so on.

This is a process I call disambiguation.

It is as if we take a mysterious ‘cloud-like’ (i.e. totally ambiguous) mystery… and, by applying various habits, framings, and perspectives… in a process we can at least imagine as stepwise, we arrive at ‘what’ it is or means, whether it is neutral, good, bad, unknown, and so on.

This process can be called evaluation as well. But evaluation implies we are doing it well, or the only way we can, or the way we should, or the best way.

None of that is usually true. What we tend to do is use the methods, perspectives, purposes and ideals… most familiar or habitual to us.

One of the framings we learn to use in childhood is gender. Another is race. Another is age. Another is role. Another is ‘us or them’. Another is good or bad. Another is ‘class’ or ‘position in familiar hierarchies’.

And so, when we begin the process of disambiguation, we generally traverse a series of ‘steps’ where ambiguity is reduced by framing. This is, for example, how people end up in a fight. Or having sex. Or conducting a communications or commercial transaction. Or ignoring each other.

And with each move in which we assert some quality, function, or property… we are usually denying some polarity. For example, if something is good, it is not bad. If some being is male, they are not female. If someone is kind, they are not mean. And so on.

Although we learn that this is how we ‘know what something is’, this idea is at least half backwards for a simple reason. As this process proceeds we are not merely determining the identity of the target or subject…

… we are simultaneously determining »our own identity (role, relationship, meaning… etc.) because as we disambiguate that with which we are relating, we are at the same time collapsing the cloud of possible relational partners… that we ourselves become.

And so it is that the ways we employ to ‘know’ phenomenon, either limit or expand the possibilities of our own persons, relationships, intelligence, mindedness, insight, ignorance… and so on.

Thankfully, once we are aware of this, we can begin, hopefully with intelligent and creatively heartful others… to experience forms of awareness and humanity that are otherwise disposed of… by the relatively undeveloped habits our culture and peers are most likely to expose us to.

We do not have to cling to the lower rungs of this ladder. Or even understand it as a ladder… at all. We are fully capable of establishing habits of disambiguation so astonishing that, to those uninitiated in them… they would appear to be other-wordly, magical, from the future… or from a nonhuman intelligence.

So I ask that we consider this matter together, deeply. For it is one of the pivots on which many of the problems that presently face all people… depend.