We Europeans, should learn some subtlety from the Chinese before they come to teach us; our technical culture fell into the strange belief that what we cannot grab does not count so that we can safely neglect it; even as we know well that there is more than what meets the eye.

Are we still of such stuff as dreams are made on? Not anymore; we are trained with reason to sweep away everything which is not manifest, material and explicit; the non action and the absent are too elusive to be serious; as for the potential of the not yet being, it is too protean for statistics. Impressions and hunches based on lack-of-signs are baseless superstition; common-sense or good-sense about what is missing is folklore. As for imagination, it is for arts and entertainment.

This attitude is born from the faith that everything is determined by matter, by vectors...and by money; the rest - spirit, mind, feeling, memory, intuition, beliefs, dreams, will, even who we are - are mere glittering, not to be trusted.

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There is hope though; quality intellect can be educated to account with intangibles and negative events. We can learn from the East to be haiku poets, to use the present and the absent, the precise and the subtle, what is and what we want, at the same time – to understand, to decide and to do. This needs not remain Chinese for us.

There are alternatives to our standard model of reasoning, ways in which you acquire a rich non-linear movement of mind complementary to analysis and explication:

You emulate the understanding style of Lao Tzu, you imitate the Tao of water, you check the rules of Sun Tzu, you chance the ruses of the 36 Strategies; the same way you refine your mind with the Sufi turns of mind of Nasreddin Hodja, the myriad recipes of the folk sayings of the world, the ever-returning destinies people live according to the archetypes of the great myths, religions and masterpieces of the world literature canons.

We fill our mental coffers not only with ideas and procedures but also with forms, shapes, mental tools and choices of emotion, skill of looking and understanding, angles and points of view for looking at the World, balances for weighing the importance, the goodness lenses for beauty and ugly.

If you feel this is interesting, click here.

Thoughts which happen without effort are more often authentic, deeper and closer to my life than the results of careful step by step reasoning. Maybe this is because they reflect not only the world, but also how I relate to it.

In fact, understanding jumps and logic follows [1]. 

Living thought - the one able to embrace complexity and also to make our own sense from it - appears to us as effortless common sense, not belaboured reasoning.

I hurl a concern through the unconscious rich abyss of my mind and it comes back dripping with the honey of everything I ever forgot. 

I see, grasp a shape, a family resemblance, a meaning and suddenly I understand.

I throw a glance to an obstacle and the way around it shows in a blink, if ever. 

I lean back on my memory of the past, see the present, imagine what on earth will or may come and shapes of the future, possible scenarios emerge and branch out in my imagination, as if by themselves, an amazing ivy of the mind which spreads by its own rules.

I guess boldly, start wherever I please or can or must - most probably astray from fact. This imprecision is most frequent, alas some fail to understand the fickleness of our facts and certainties. I start boldly but armed with open-minded doubt. After this, my mind will home-in like a missile, relentlessly, by successive corrections when facing facts, until my guess fits and follows the lineaments of fact and meets my "reality" goal of success or truth.

Often, I reverse engineer reasons which explain causes of the effects I observe and after that I proceed to turn my guess into more probable knowledge or "rational" justifications [1a] 

I dream away with idle hands... images flow or follow contiguously, half-words and turns of grammar pass by, ghosts of movements, shadows of sounds chase each-other, sudden bursts of abstract concepts pin down vague thoughts, feelings, sentiments, arising like tips of icebergs from the unknown of my mind, attitudes steer those representations impossible to word, uninvited discoveries crystallise suddenly... then, that special mood comes, and the ripe forbidden apple of "something else" plops from the tree of Paradise, right upon my head.

In the end, only in the end of that whirl, sometimes, tame, well thought propositions and arguments fall in place, if I feel inspired to express -  in colourful common places of common sense language, simplifying to be understood - and I justify, more or less accurately, the living representations that grew in the mind like a tree, settled like sand or trickled like a rivulet... or whatever else, provided the metaphor is complex and living.

In fact, what gives me power to foresee or invent things other people do not consider - so that sometimes I offer valuable advice - is this: when a surprise, a problem, a crisis, an opportunity is presented, my mind starts moving spontaneously in its more or less natural ways; scores of previous experiences, representations, common places, possible scenarios and narratives unfold by themselves, some unawares, some in my conscious imagination, exploring so many contradictory alternatives which inform me with the intuitive inferences and common sense narratives of what could occur if this or that or nothing were done. What I need to do in this disorderly richness is to chose right with critical sense and moral purpose. This is where intelligence and heart make the difference between wisdom and vulgar received ideas.

Among humans, effective imprecision checked by good sense is much much richer and often more useful than the building a perfect and complete house of cards model made of dry logical propositions requiring complete true information which nobody can have.

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I let so many unkempt thoughts come to me because I do not need to prove them or agree with all of them; first, To start, I do not agree, nor disagree, just marvel and observe the thought, maybe I find something interesting; then, I judge some thoughts unacceptable or useless to me or untimely for other people so that I oppose to them counter-thoughts or confine them to a moral cage in the back of my secret garden; I know, I know I should always keep a distance from the beast... but I am so weak, and I live among people; watching the beast inside helps me understand the beast; finally some of the newborn thoughts deserve to be nourished and grown until they bear fruit worth to be turned true or at least shared... I look at some of the fruit and I see that it is good.

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We are rigidly schooled to mistrust the deeper, internal, informal, ancestral workings of our brain and imagining and also our quick-judging building blocks and moves of shared common sense. Instead we learn to conduct the work of thinking like building domino lines, brick walls or Lego towers. Like counting prayer beads in a permanent whisper, to avoid, to keep away the temptation of divergent thoughts, to be protected from our own barbarian intuition and creativity. 


We are bullied that we must prove we are right while we think. We must sweat over artificial propositions following operations prescribed by philosophers, to give regular results, "fit to reality and to proper reasoning" after the fashion of the day. We must think in predefined words and in chains of statements; what then about thinking in sequences of evolving narration, image, sounds, touch, taste, relational feelings and non-verbal flows which I cannot even describe in words?

Is it that people convinced that fantasy is sin, who are never inspired want us to think like them? Like cogs? Isn't this effort of solemn ratiocination some kind of alien thinking with someone else’s head intent to devalue our trust that we can judge well with our own head? [2].  


Dry rational thinking is convincingly correct, but is it real among us humans, fit to this practical world of action, mind-size for us? 

Nobody ever experimented logical judgements happening in a human head. Between the electrical and chemical processes observed in the brain and the objects of folk psychology there is still a vast explanation gap. We do not know today how we "really" think - even consciously - in our brain, yet we try to force ourselves to advance our judgements formally, step after step, like toddlers, still led by the hand of Aristotle. Or computer-like. This is clumsy and poor when it comes to complicated subjects and to vital ones requiring warm moral choice. Many more dimensions, beneath and beyond words, vague, volatile complexities impossible to catch by hard work of linear thought, fall in place as if at once when a reasonably intelligent mind moves freely.

Did you observe how blind can be the carefully measurable and justified formal planning of large organizations and nations? Did you see how stupid can be the pompous arrow-like strategies sold by greedy management gurus to alibi-seeking chairmen?

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[1] Writes Montaigne: "It should seem that the nature of wit (esprit in French - my note) is to have its operation prompt and sudden, and that of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow." Of Quick or Slow Speech, in The Works of Michel de Montaigne, Vol. I, tr. C. Cotton, Edwin C. Hill, New York, 1910,  p. 135

[1a] Like Monsieur Jourdain, I was doing prose without knowing; I discovered since that Thomas Bayes, in 1740 and after him Price and Laplace, made out of this kind of guessing the foundation (often defamed) of statistical thinking. See Sharon Bertsch Mcgraine, "The Theory that Would not Die", Yale UP., New Haven.., 2011

[2] Schopenhauer discussed this in a very interesting essay abut reading too much instead of thinking, which, as he observes, leads to thinking with other people’s head instead of our own. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Art of Literature, (ON THINKING FOR ONESELF)

[3] Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, Science 185, no. 415 (1974): 1124–1131 in Kahneman Daniel, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, new York, 2011

[4]"I do not find myself where I seek; I rather find myself where I meet myself than by the inquisition of my judgment." Montaigne, Essais, NRF Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, 1933, Livre I, Du parler prompt ou tardif, p. 56