The hungry mind

Subject: The hungry mind.

 

If we were to accept that the mind is who we are and the body simply an inconvenient necessity, it would free us up on so many troublesome assumptions. Much of our angst comes from our state of mind and the assumptions we arrive at by the sight of other people and their strange absorptions. Our world of yearning and entitlement would be countered if we could knew that we only meaningfully exist in our mind and that the solitude of our thoughts is a proper nirvana, not the illusion of finding a soulmate to trade them with.
Our thoughts are so personal and nuanced by our own experience, it’s impossible to envisage sharing them in their totality let alone finding someone to understand them. The independent and philosophical solitude of our thoughts, one person compared to the next, makes discourse often nothing more than a set of false assumptions as to what we are hearing  and even then in the telling, another series of mis-assumptions arises by the language we use.
Language is simply a conduit for the mind to express itself in terms of (in the first instance), danger or fear, a gasp or cry is not a product of thought but an instinctive response but language is often inadequate when it comes to the finer points of disseminating to others what we think and we only reveal a dearth in our capacity to explain what we think.
If the complexity of our minds is coarsened by the needs of our body, especially in the need of others to send us conflicting signals then it might be better to train ourselves to assume less about the people around us since their judgements of us must also be greatly flawed.
This mental island can be a lonely place on which we force ourselves to live but is sometimes made rich by the perspicacity of the self evident truths we bring to the table.

Just popping out to the shop.  I know you will think me mad but the existing mental constraint on what I spend is one of the few bridges where the mind and the outside world coexist. The comfort and sense of security which arises when I act within my budget would alter if I won the lottery and spending became just that. The value we place on things in money terms is fundamental to who we think we are, it’s a lifeline to anchored to our reality and relates to certain fundamentals in upbringing which make us think and feel satisfied as to who we think we are.