Instruments of Thought and the Inflation of Expectations

instruments of thought and the inflation of expectations:

our thoughts form a large part of our identity, even though the content of our thoughts may not be unique, they may seem highly personal to us. of course thoughts may be expressed in words and imagination in pictures and drawings. language is an instrument of thought. if only all thought could be expressed in language! language could be criticized as a blunt instrument, that words often express only what is obvious and clear to us, that they describe only that which is manifest, an extreme condition metaphysically.

very obviously so, no one wants to be crazy, to be a victim of insanity! however, whatever its shortcomings, language can still be used to express an infinite variety of thoughts. perhaps not infinite in every direction or area, but still infinite in others. therein lies the problem, infinite thought in a finite reality!

the human being is a social creature. and the mind naturally wanders. true thoughts about people mutate into untrue thoughts about people. that is inevitable in the thinking process. as we effortlessly make up our own fictions and add to that those of others, surely we must sometimes be living with a rampantly inflated concept of human activity in the universe?

imagine a little girl in a single room in a reality somewhere. this is a simple reality. to start with she knows nothing of language but as her imagination grows and her inventive nature dominates, she create words and then a whole language. and she draws pictures, lots of them. eventually she can imagine earth. but there is no earth in her reality and there never will be. it is all in her own mind. at best, she has overestimated things a little, though with the sense that it is her imagination, and is only somewhat crazy. at worst, she is insane, has hopes that could never be realized and she has grossly overestimated herself personally and everything else in her reality.

a word conveys a meaning. now whether a word was discovered or created or merely happened upon, it first changed our thoughts to form a concept, it channelled our minds through a certain pathway. perhaps there is no satisfactory explanation as to why a particular word means what it means, that each word is a peculiarity of this reality. it does not stretch the mind to imagine an alternate reality where the same word means something completely different.

some words we use a lot, some very little, if we use words at all to think. what is the current state of the language in the most real, metaphysical sense? words and phrases come in and out of fashion. can a word ever escape its original meaning? does precedence always determine validity?

like a musical instrument, where we can try different notes, in language, the act of randomly combining words together may not form a coherent concept to the conscious mind, but perhaps this is what is happening at the subconscious level anyway all the time? we are slowly trawling through the infinite space of thought! of course, all this is not to suggest that we began at the start of time with our minds a clean slate, for yes, there is the concept of original craziness!

CLEARCHARGE