How our sense of what is nourishing and what is junk got atrophied
I like reading and watching investigative, detective, police procedural books and movies.
I have noticed a new trend: when I ask myself at the end of a show, for example, I have no idea what exactly happened, who done it… minutes after the show.
So how is that possible? Am I the only one, the only stupid person? And if not, how come the millions of viewers don’t cry bloody murder… to set the creators of the shows straight?
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I watch people. They go to their minds to have a conversation, solution to a problem, answer a question. They leave the conversation, leave the problem, leave the question and go to their minds.
Result: the conversation limps… and halts. The solution they bring to the problem doesn’t fit. The answer they give to the question is disjointed, disconnected from the conversation.
Your mind is a tiny piece of the brain, where you store the things you think you know. But all the answers that matter lie in the conversation, the problem, in the question.
Nothing worth accomplishing, nothing worth doing ever comes from the mind. Not even telling a joke…
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I started emptying my mind when I was an architecture student.
I noticed that when I wanted to use a floor plan of a famous architect in my own project, my creativity was completely leaving me, and all I could do is try to remember the plan I saw in the library.
All inspiration, all joy, all discovery, all spirit was gone. And suddenly I started to hate my life.
Luckily is saw the connection between the mind and the lack of joy, and from that point on I refused to remember anything. 1
In architecture you need to know formulas to quickly calculate the weight bearing capacity of elements, but they fell to the wayside, as did phone numbers.
I remember being taking an oral exam, and didn’t know my formula. I told the teacher and then proceeded figuring it out, not from memory, but from thinking. I got an A instead of failing.
And that is what you get in life, A’s… for staying in the conversation, for using your brain for seeing connections, for getting the clues from the problem instead of trying to remember.
Often when I connect to you, I can feel the feverish work being done in your head, even when you sleep. Trying to remember… looping in the file storage system, not getting any rest.
The solution to your issues is not in the mind, it’s out there.
The gap between the brain that sees and the mind that recognizes (meaning: remembers) is nine whole seconds, much like walkie talkies have that time delay between you speaking and the answer coming.
When you try to answer from the mind, you live in a walkie talkie universe… and people run from you. Unless you talk s-h-i-t, irrelevant gossip, repeated, rehashed, reheated food masquerading as nourishment… then you attract all the machine people, and only I run from you.
- Well, it’s not 100% true, I still remembered tiny bread crumbs, pebbles to be connected to the past, to my personal history. Smells, sounds, feelings on my skin.
