Seeing Around the Mind

I can see into the future, but just the near ‘what if’ future. I mistrust elaborating too far in my mind. As a small child I lived in my own fantasies, wandering far astray, entertaining and comforting myself. I now go just a little ways, before testing out a thought.

I admired great thinkers of critical thought that can imagine fabulous idea towers, piling thought on thought to crowning conclusions. But, one can get lost in a maze of ideas. Sometimes critical thinking is focused only outwards, judging and breaking down everything and everybody. The dislocated parts are then fitted into a much-defended system. The system’s creator is transformed into a tyrannical defender, violently disturbed by whatever the will cannot fit. Sometimes, the critical lens focuses only inwards immobilizing one with paralyzing feelings of inadequacy. In either case, the critical tool loses its value for seeing, and becomes a dictator protecting its ideas.

It is so frustrating the tools of the intellect are both our only means to process experience and a system that limits our insight. Where is the line that the mind crosses from insight to bully? The desire for knowledge seems to arise from some primeval need for protection from the unknown. And if the unknown can’t be understood, its disguised is defended until an acceptable explanation is found. Is there a way around this protection? Is there a way to see?