Task for dialogue
Let’s examine the task of synthesizing my views on reality with your views on reality. I mention this because it might be a useful way for empathizing with the Iraqis as they tackle the problem of putting together their constitution.
I write my essay based upon my understanding and you write yours based upon your understanding and then through dialogue and dialectic rationalization we synthesize into a new essay comprising our two thoughts. I can imagine such a task to be almost insurmountable. Take this a step further and add fifty others and I think we can get an idea of their problem except that we must add to the thesis on reality the subjects of religion, economics, education, etc.
One can, by reading the papers, discover various opinions that others might have regarding the matter. However, it is up to the individual, in the solitude of her intellect, to provide the various actors. The enlightened individual must create the multifaceted argument internally. The individual must empathetically create the dialogue and the dialectic within her own mind.
Imagine the number of “frames of reference†one would bring to bear on the issue of the democratization phase of the Iraq war. If one becomes conscious of this issue and brings his/her intellect to bear on this issue s/he might be surprised by the possible ways to analyze this matter.
American culture is very pro-education and anti-enlightenment; it is anti-intellectual. It is ant-intellectual because such a position favors the interests of the plutocracy and the religious community. A pro-education anti-enlightenment dominated society is easily manipulated.
One conclusion I have come to be that if the ‘intellect’ is given no task by the ‘will’ the intellect just wonders around, constantly busy, just picking at random some activity. Often I suspect the activity ‘it’ chooses is to worry. Our faculties of the brain play the same worry tape over and over in the head.
My point is that if the will does not assign a task to the intellect then the massive potential of the intellect is wasted. We waste our intellect because we have not prepared our mental functions to choose worth while tasks for the intellect.
We waste our most precious gift, the gift of intellect, on nonsense. We have been given, at birth, the greatest ‘machine’ in the world—with an ability that is “ faster than a speeding bullet, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound†etc. etc.—a ‘machine’ of vast potential that wonders about unused because we lack the necessary consciousness to recognize its unparalleled dimensions and how to put that potential to work on useful tasks.
I am convinced that if the intellect is given tasks it will solve those assignments when we are about our mundane tasks of the day. While asleep the ‘sleep fairy’ works out all kinds of solutions to matters I have been consciously mulling over. Sometimes I find that the sleep fairy presents me with ideas that I have no idea of their origination. I have on a few occasions tried to reenter slumber because my dreamer actor was saying something that I decided I wanted to hear the rest of because it seemed so relevant and important but I had no idea what it was. While I am digging up a tree stump my intellect is developing this essay. All I have to do is go to the computer and start typing. All of this you see herein is what my intellect has created while I was sleeping and going about my daily routines. What a terrible waste, this intellect left to wonder undirected.