The world suffers from perceptual inertia. We in this world suffer along with it. No insight. We see, think and feel too automatically. We are victims of our own biases.
It’s like we don’t listen. We just fill in the checkboxes of our own persuasion while hearing. We aren’t alive really. We just go through the motions of living out our own beliefs and damn all else.
What if you could teach yourself to see things differently? To not automatically fall into your default position, vision? What would the world be like if we all did this - saw things anew? See like Blake - a tree full of angels? Eternity in a grain of sand?
Metaphor is the basis of all intelligence. Not the intelligence that is banking knowledge but intelligence that is “insight”, merging information into a new whole. Wisdom. It is from the Greek for “transfer”.
“Metaphor is thus imaginative rationality.” - George Lakoff
Do you know who invented TV? Philo Farnsworth. The thought came to him while plowing his field and not seeing just rows of turned over earth but electrons zooming along a field, an electrical field. A lot of science, if not all the great discoveries of science and even the social sciences are due to this kind of “seeing”.
My thesis is that we all should possess this possibility of “seeing things anew”. It would be a great dose, a refreshing dose of positivity for this world.
Ceci n’est pas un pipe! - Rene Magritte
Synectics is a problem-solving methodology that stimulates thought processes of which the subject may be unaware. It is in part about looking at ordinary objects and seeing them as something different.
Today, I walked on my treadmill. Went out to grab a coffee but had no place to put it. Holders are only good for water bottles. But voila! I saw. It isn’t a treadmill. It is a desk!
I think we all should have ourselves, our children take ordinary objects and see them as something else. It’s the proper attitude for life, our thought. We’d have a lot more solutions if we did and a lot less problems. We’d have less feeding of our biases. Less automatic thought, allegiance to abstract ideas.
So - it’s not a box! It’s a rabbit hutch! It’s not a stick! It’s a sword. It’s a hiking pole.
And try it with people. They aren’t my enemies. They are possible friends. They aren’t homeless. They are people I need to help.
Give it a try. Try it daily. You’ll be better for it.