posted March 10, 2010 07:29 AM         

The creative scientist analyzes a problem slowly and carefully, then proceeds rapidly with a solution. The less creative man is apt to flounder in disorganized attempts to get a quick answer. Indeed he is! How often have we seen our answer-grabbers get into trouble. The fact is that problems and answers are simply different ways of looking at a relationship, a structure, an order. A problem is a picture with a piece missing; the answer is the missing piece. The children who take time to see, and feel, and grip the problem, soon find that the answer is there. The ones who get in trouble are the ones who see a problem as an order to start running at top speed from a given starting point, in an unknown direction, to an unknown destination. They dash after the answer before they have considered the problem. What's their big hurry?

Here are Elaine, the answer-grabber, and Barbara, the thinker, at work on the problem 3/4 + 2/5 = ?

Elaine (adding tops and bottoms, as is her usual custom): Why not 5/9?

Barbara: 5/9 is less than 3/4. She saw that since 2/5 was added to 3/4, the answer would have to be bigger than 3/4; so 5/9 could not be it. But this went right over Elaine's head.

Elaine: Where's the 3/4?
Barbara: In the problem!

Yet I doubt that any amount of explaining could have made Elaine understand what Barbara was saying, far less enable her to do the same kind of thinking for herself.

The poor thinker dashes madly after an answer; the good thinker takes his time and looks at the problem. Is the difference merely a matter of a skill in thought, a technique which, with ingenuity and luck, we might teach and train into children? I'm afraid not. The good thinker can take his time because he can tolerate uncertainty, he can stand not knowing. The poor thinker can't stand not knowing; it drives him crazy.

This cannot be completely explained by the fear of being wrong. No doubt this fear puts, say, Monica under heavy pressure; but Hal is under the same pressure, and maybe I am as well. Monica is not alone in wanting to be right and fearing to be wrong. What is involved here is another insecurity, the insecurity of not having any answer to a problem. Monica wants the right answer, yes; but what she wants, first of all, is an answer, any old answer, and she will do almost anything to get some kind of answer. Once she gets it, a large part of the pressure is off. Rachel was like this; so was Gerald, and many others. They can't stand a problem without a solution, even if they know that their solution will probably be wrong. This panicky search for certainty, this inability to tolerate unanswered questions and unsolved problems seems to lie at the heart of many problems of intelligence. But what causes it?

Some might say here that this is all a matter for the psychiatrists. I am not so sure. A person might well be distrustful in personal relationships and still have a kind of intellectual confidence in the universe. Or is this possible? And if so, can it be taught in school?

I find this ineteresting also...a friend of mine was talking about children yesterday. Intelligent children that is... and the difference in them and other children. One thing we see in our intelligent children is that they are intensely involved with life. These children don't withdraw from life; they embrace it. We spoke once of a love affair with learning. These children seem to have a love affair with life. Think of the gusto with which a child tells a story about himself. Intelligent children act as if they thought the universe made some sense. They check their answers and their thoughts against common sense, while other children, not expecting answers to make sense, not knowing what is sense, see no point in checking, no way of checking. Yet the difference may go deeper than this. It seems as if what we call intelligent children feel that the universe can be trusted even when it does not seem to make any sense, that even when you don't understand it you can be fairly sure that it is not going to play dirty tricks on you. How close this is in spirit to the remark of Einstein's, "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the universe."

posted March 20, 2010 06:54 PM         

you mentioned einstein, and i have noticed that MOST of the brightest, most rational, scientific minds i have read or studied came to basically the same conclusion. as buckminster fuller put it, he made up his mind never to "believe" anything he had not tested or experienced, and after 50 years of study and research and work, he came to the conclusion that there is far too much order in the universe for it to be put down to coincidence. and so he RATIONALLY decided that god, or a power that some identify as god, does actually exist. not a personified deity, but an invisible force much like the more modern version many are coming to believe in....

posted March 22, 2010 08:28 AM         

and he believed that Universe, as he called it, always supported whatever contributed to the constant regeneration and evolution of the universe...

posted March 23, 2010 02:14 PM         

I am convinced though that we are here just to be...as it were and nothing else. Whatever happens, happens. Its like surrender, you give up your life but you gain the world as it were.
Of course there is much more to that because of free will, destiny......but we must give credit to Gaias energy and she is not one to hand over everything to fate. There does exist I think a sheer force of will in some humans to win at all cost.

Quite simply though we came to experience something....and as a kid we remembered that.

@Kat:

I loved what you wrote....as of late I seem to relish the Energetic connection with people whose frequencies are close to mine. Or maybe I'm just able to concretely and consistently see it now.

I absolutely loved Fullers conclusion. So sterile but solid. And that is where we need to begin if we are to find our way back home again.

posted March 24, 2010 03:22 PM         

Have you always been that way or did you have to learn, some of my friends were born not trusting I admire them as well.

And how do you feel about not being able to trust people does it ever sadden you that you can't trust more people?

posted March 24, 2010 05:40 PM         

I think what we learn to do in incarnations is harness that unconsciousness by bringing it to consciousness, to rationalise the feeling, the impulse, the drive, so that the mind knows the soul and vice versa.

posted March 25, 2010 09:59 PM         

yes i have(learned to trust again), though there are still times when i forget to!! [probably like you and randall said, because PEOPLE can be very untrustworthy and i had to learn not to hope for them to be otherwise!] but in many ways i never lost that trust... a psychic friend once described how my "boundaries" looked, it sounded kind of like one of those shark cages, only spherical, bars to protect me and spaces to connect through. she said she thought i could get run over by a truck and just bounce off...and funnily something like that has happened SEVERAL times in my life so i knew exactly what she meant. though i have my paranoias and buttons i have also always had a feeling of indestructability. for awhile the ego structures took the upperhand but like i said, i made the conscious effort to rise above them. it works. and the layers of programming that created those structures are really amazing to understand too...

i have to agree, life's a gas! even the hard parts. in fact it is when you run hardest up against your ego and fear that you stand to gain the most ground ...