My mind unravels like frayed cotton,
It jumps, it stumbles, it starts, it stops,
An unreliable witness and a faltering friend,
It gnaws at the bone of my identity,
As if it's activity were the key and the touchstone,
My, it is so high and mighty,
Yet perched on the cliff edge of it's own arrogance,
My, it is so convinced and convincing,
Spinning out half lies and half truths half heartedly,
We fall together wrapped in stale question marks,
Fall together forever poking at our pointless wit,
The 'I' and the 'me' and the grasping for the future,
Like Job and all his learned, impassioned friends,
Casting out pronunciations on this, that, the other,
Like we know, like we could even touch the hem,
Of the intricate blazing glory that doth surround us,
The crushing detail of each second's magnificence,
The sea of heaven's complexity in which we swim,
Yet we dare not drown, dare we?
We who are lost, so lost, in the supremacy of human ideology!
(This a poem about the human mind. it asks the question whether our mind is our friend or our foe. It challenges our habit of forming opinions based on limited data and yet holding to these opinions as facts. it reminds me of the work of Professor Chris Argyris on what he calls the 'ladder of inference' ( see http://www.solonline.org/repository/download/ladder.html?item_id=456358 ). Argris states 'We live in a world of self-generating beliefs which remain largely untested. We adopt those beliefs because they are based on conclusions, which are inferred from what we observe, plus our past experience. Our ability to achieve the results we truly desire is eroded by our feelings that i) Our beliefs are the truth ii) The truth is obvious iii) Our beliefs are based on real data iv) The data we select are the real data.' Why does this human habit get in the way of us achieving what we truly desire? I think the clue to the answer to this question lies in the last five lines of the poem ('Like we know...') - our mind needs to create boundaries and limits in order to give itself a separated identity. It has to do this in order to form any opinion at all because it needs, at an absolute minimum, a subject and an object. It needs an 'I'. Yet the moment it seeks this identity it loses its sense of awe and its sense of unlinmited possibilities. As we set our New Year goals and resolutions let us be aware of this tricky character - the monkey mind!)
