“Perspective has two primary meanings or connotations. The first relates primarily to the visual; the second to the conceptual… or »purposive nature of mental experience.

It is obvious to most of us (though poorly appreciated in its impact) that changes in the angle of visual approach to an object of visual perception transform the result dramatically; viewed edge-on, for example, a circle appears as nothing more than a line. This noticing is trivialized by conceptual consciousness; it’s actual implications are electrifying. Spin an actual line rapidly enough around its center and the result is a disk. But ‘what’ then, ‘is’ the phenomenon in question? A disk? Or a line?

It is neither.

From the secondary connotation, we may observe that our »angle of approach to meaning, identity and relation does not so much derive its results as it does generate them. Again, the implications are staggering. For it is not so much »what we obtain by our conceptual or mentalistic derivations that actually matters. It is, instead, the purposes with which we direct or shape our attention and concern.

From childhood, most of us are trained, both overtly and covertly, to find accord with many common habits of naming, identifying and evaluating which are, in their basis, at once absurd and crippling. These represent the least common denominator of our cognitive and perceptual potentials. In part, this is due to the imposition of ‘putative’ or nominal forms of reference and participation. But the actual nature of our minds, and their potentials, so far exceed these tepid habits as to render them diseases.

My concern here is not complaint, but invitation. Once we begin to recognize the profound potentials that are our human inheritance, we can begin, together, to recognize and explore these potentials… which transcend science, religion, philosophy and language… because these ways of knowing are relatively narrow derivatives not of our potentials, but of the purposes for which we are trained to inhibit, filter, limit, or amputate them.

These observations point up the fact that the actual frontiers of human potential lie not in space, physics, mathematics or even philosophy… but rather in our acquiring sufficient understanding of the natures and possibilities of our minds — particularly when they form unities around purposes that are more than nominally true, and thus, more than nominally noble.”

— an intelligence agent