There are two ways to process information; Specialization and generalization.

Currently we live in a world of specialists, where only experts are given any respect. Yet the overall effect is a global Tower of Babel, where everyone has very well considered views, but they talk past each other.

So what about generalists? There are reasons why the people leading armies are called generals and specialist is about one rank above private. Sometimes that broader view is necessary, to see the bigger picture.

Though in this day and age, the children most interested in everything and likely to sense the connections, are usually diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in the box.

Is reality really that complicated?

What if we formulated it in terms of energy and the forms being manifested. Consider galaxies are energy radiating out, as forms coalesce in.

As these biological organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through and orders the forms precipitating out.

Which does mean that when we trying thinking through all the information, it is forms, rather than the processes generating them, that we focus on. Objects, rather than context. Nodes over networks. Organisms before ecosystems.

For instance, we see ourselves as entities moving through our context in a linear fashion, from past to future. So we are focused on goals, rather than the positive feedback driving us, or the negative feedback holding us up. The ends get our attention, but the means are the reality.

Since our experience is a sequence of perceptions, necessary to navigate and having a narrative based culture, we think of time as the point of the present, moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated, the forms, go future to past.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts it manifests go future to past.

Yet it is our gut and heart processing the energy, feeding that flame within, suggesting the mind is more lens and filter, than source.

We are driven by our desires, while the the mind has to plot the course. Cycles of expansion and consolidation.

Even societies are that cycle of organic social expansion, coalescing into cultural and civil patterns.

I could go on, but hopefully this gives some idea of how to thread the needle.