Ideas We Aren’t Ready to Understand—Yet |
When you encounter ideas that you don't understand but feel important, take that as a clue and keep them.
Instead of cataloguing what you understood, start collecting what you didn’t.
Incubation and insight theory posits that the brain can shift to diffuse processing with a sudden "a-ha."
Discovery happens when different ideas blend and merge.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”—Marcel Proust
Have you ever read something and not understood it, yet felt that something important was written there?
This happened to me recently when I was reading Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein, a Buddhist and Freudian psychoanalyst who helped bridge these two disciplines of mind.
The title alone is provocative. When Epstein began explaining the deeper meaning behind it, I had a sense that it went over my head.
I followed the logic. Clinging to the ego and desire is the source of suffering. If we can loosen our attachment to the self—and separate the thinker from the thoughts—perhaps we can achieve greater equanimity and........