Perceiving and Understanding

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

Attention and Will, Simone Weil

Different cultures have different ways of understanding truth, each with its own biases. The Athenians had a great respect for first principles and the structure of rhetoric as a way of organizing evidence to arrive at truth. Our own culture tends to focus on extensively on numbers and data rather than feeling, experience, or rhetoric. (following N