Moving on from how we experience within the physical and semantic environments, we come to what may be our most noble activity – the consideration and development of a process that uses and consolidates all of our perceptive and emotional faculties within both the physical and semantic environments, which we know as our awareness. J. Samuel Bois, the French Canadian philosopher, greatly influenced by Alfred Korzybski invented the science/art of epistemics to understand and attempt to influence and improve our levels of awareness. One of the first dramatic lessons we learn from him and from his school of epistemics is that there are profoundly different levels of awareness between individuals. These are so great that an individual at a higher level (and even the expression ‘higher’ is inadequete and perhaps should be changed to ‘expanded’) can be as different to one at a different or more restricted level as an 18th century gentleman would be from a savage. These two individuals simply do not and cannot agree on certain complex issues because their ways of making meaning differ.

A greatly simplified description of the levels could be as follows: at the very basic is the individual who responds mainly to the day to day physical environment and more or less ‘does and believes what he is told’ within the semantic environment. At the next level are the managers, academics, social workers, psychologists, police, judiciary and government that create the doctrines and dogmas accepted and largely believed by all at the first level, some of whom may be well educated and read the ‘best newspapers’. The levels beyond the second become complex and will not be considered in depth here but suffice it to say that, although very much a minority, there are a significant number of individuals who believe that the doctrines and dogmas used at the second level are perverted by bias, deceits, prejudice and are largely based on political aspirations, profit or used as a means of control. For example, these individuals will have a jaundiced view of the ideology of sexual correctness and will see much of the legislation which supports it as a means of political and social control. At this level, as both Korzybski and Bois might have pointed out, individuals will see both the authors of the doctrines and dogmas and themselves as part of the problem. They will not accept the concept of the censor and policeman/judge who pontificate on the sin being themselves beyond tempation. Indeed they may see their very loathing as an act of disavowing something hated within themselves and projected onto hated others.

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