Lately, I've been very interested in what people have been thinking - just in general. It's amazing to me that someone can be thinking so many thoughts and yet not share any of them; amazing in the senses of both awe and perturbation. The brain is so minuscule. Thoughts are so immense.What really do people think about all the time? People you know. People you don't know. People you may have said one word to. People you hate. People you love. I recognize that there is an entire field devoted to the understanding of essentially what I am asking. But if I have learned anything about life, I know that there is almost always an exception to the tendencies. And as much as I admire psychology and its applications, it just seems so shallow - shallow like a deep puddle. Whereas, I believe the mind is an abyss of memories, thoughts and computations. And to really know the mind means to know the person and apparently the world. But much easier said than done. Many people have a hard time simply understanding what their own identity is. Just take a look at one of our own better attempts at this idea:
Know Thyself
by Alexander Pope
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Among all the literature I found regarding "knowing thyself" much of it alluded somehow to God. This I find ironic since apparently about God we know so much. But the truth is that we really know squat and want to think we do. My point then is that explaining how one "knows thyself" in terms of how/what God even is or represents is like trying to hike the Grand Canyon while having your legs tied together... and blindfolded. However, Pope does come to the honest conclusion that this task is "the riddle of the world." Alright, so that didn't go over so well, did it. Moving on.
The fascinating part about the mind is that not only is there so much inside to be understood, but it can also be expressed in so many different ways - through simply thinking, talking to oneself, talking to someone else, writing things down, drawing an image, making a gesture, forming an art (and I know I'm leaving plenty out).
Here's another interesting thing to note. It is that the more you open a mind, the larger it seems. It's the same idea with mouths or caves. And sometimes there are times when you're inside a mind, mouth, or cave and you find another tunnel that leads to another new place; kind of like seeking untreaded and uncharted lands. And sometimes these lands are vaguely familiar in a way - like somehow we've been here before, in a dream perhaps. I think that in an alternate reality where thoughts are tangible, dreams alone would positively drown us all with even greater alternate realities.
So I suppose in a way the mind is a vessel. It is its own vessel traversing itself and the journey is never over.
Though I feel Socrates said it best: "I know that I know nothing."
Photo credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki, http://www.dreamstime.com/
