Slippery ideas

We can feel ideas. When we feel a particularly good one, “hmm” or “a-ha” slips uncontrollably from our lips. Often we hear an idea and we can’t quite hold onto it. It might be a bit of wisdom, or a story with a profound moral. We desperately want to remember it. But it keeps slipping away, like a word we can’t quite define. We do well to rein these ideas in: the slipperiness arises from feeling that an idea is true before knowing that it is.

Children live, Adults learn

Children ask questions and chew on pieces of wood because they need to grab hold of the immensity of life. They need to learn. Why is the sun bright? Why are trees so tall? Why do people live in houses? The subject matter could be anything. To a child, everything is striking. Everything is new. As children get older, however, they come to believe that learning involves facts, that it occurs in a classroom, and that is realized only as a result of a long and determined effort. They cease to ask question. Learning becomes difficult. It is removed from everyday necessity. This is the main difference between adult learning and childhood living: Children learn because they need to; adults learn because they choose to.

The Mental Variety Show

Meditation requires us to STOP and pay attention to our thoughts. When it works, the lights go out and there is stillness. When it fails, the mind can be deeply disturbing. Our thoughts might sound like a motor vehicle department: incessant chatter with sudden muffled announcements over the loudspeaker. They might be a blurry movie: fragmented images flittering in and out like an early Tim Burton film with a drape over the screen. They could be a New York City Subway Platform at 6pm - everyone rushing, rushing, rushing. If meditation shows the power of mind, then failed meditation shows its limits.

Abstracted Ideas

We’ve read novels, seen movies, watched plays, and we’ve learned from them all. The problem is: we do not realize that many of the things we know, we learned from fiction. For example, if you have an image in your mind of how people interact in the bedroom, it is probably based on what you have seen in movies and read in books. When else have you seen people pillow-talking?! When we watch a movie, we know at the time that it is fake. But when we assimilate ideas from it, and apply them to our lives, we abstract the context, removing all traces of fiction. Over time, the idea is completely cleansed of its sources. And, because we have no idea inventory that tracks the source, freshness and expiration date of our beliefs, we cannot say definitively that they are not constructed from fiction piled upon fiction.