The ego is only a bit of consciousness swimming upon the ocean of dark things.
We are an enigma unto ourselves.
-The Mentat Handbook
The ego is only a bit of consciousness swimming upon the ocean of dark things.
We are an enigma unto ourselves.
-The Mentat Handbook
You will learn the integrated communication methods as you complete the next
step in your mentat education. This is a gestalten function which will overlay
data paths in your awareness, resolving complexities and masses of input from
the mentat index-catalogue techniques which you already have mastered. Your
initial problem will be the breaking tensions arising from the divergent
assembly of minutiae/data on specialized subjects. Be warned. Without mentat
overlay integration, you can be immersed in the Babel Problem, which is the
label we give to the omnipresent dangers of achieving wrong combinations from
accurate information.
-The Mentat Handbook
Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise
to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and
specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit
picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the
other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not
cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He
must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the
moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct
that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything
which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But
the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own
specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles,
knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the
characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There
can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must
look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what
is this thing doing?"
-The Mentat Handbook