"Thinking without a box"

This is a phrase I created 15 years ago. I had buttons. The buttons illustrated this and directed people to the website I had at that time.

For some people such free thinking would scare them beyond their limits. Conventional thinkers might color in the lines or outside the lines and even occasionally and accidentally color over the lines — oops.

Thinking without a box could be just coloring a whole different picture than what the lines are or imply. You could be a contrarian and color a summer beach scene in a snowman design. However, by doing this it seems like there is still a box in the room.

To look at something in a perfectly fresh and unbiased or non prejudicial way is (somewhat) what it means to “look at something with a child’s eyes.” This is the sense of fresh innocence and ignorance. When we are taught to see certain things, we often can not and do not see anything else. Our sight blinds us. Insight make us outright blind.

There is no guarantee that such a fresh “brainstorm” view of a topic won’t just make us even dumber about it, but it can help us to see the underside of a coffee table the way a baby does. This is why some businesses mix people of specific and different or divergent fields of expertise. These businesses are hoping that these groups will ask each other wild questions that they could never see because they have been blinded by their servile conventional thinking.

Sometimes it is best to leave the box completely outside the room.

Is this lateral thinking? Is this just the element of creativity called novelty? Is this how “flow” leads us to new discoveries? Is this just another way to explain emergence theory? Is this just how new things are born out of juxtaposition? Are ‘boxes’ just Plato’s forms? We use the word constructs, but the Greeks said logos (words). Logos (like language) float between words and pictures/icons. Is it a word — phonetic, ideographic, or an old-school pictogram? ‘Text’ can be words or pictures. Memories, pictures, words, and stories spontaneously arise from our subconsciousnesses.

Is the box real? True? There at all?

Houses are essentially boxes. Cars are similarly boxes too. Families are boxes. Ever feel boxed in? Banks are a box. In the bank safe (a box) they have many boxes of different shapes and sizes that you can rent — security boxes.

We need boxes, but we shouldn’t imprison ourselves in them.

It is true that today we have “deep fakes” and extreme skepticism. Maybe humanity will soon all fall out of their own minds. Can anyone save us?

When a person learns to think rationally, existentialism, nihilism, emptiness (Sunyata), flux, the Dao, and flow can all overwhelm them and leave that person in a dark meaningless corner of the universe seemingly devoid of hope. They need not despair. This meaningful “raison d'être” (reason to be) that they need and seek may not be too far beyond them — it is just waiting to be ‘found.’

It might be something that is of their own creation — or in their own hands. Does the birdhouse come from the tree, the mind, or the hands? When we create it we find it that it is in that tree, just like how Renaissance artists went looking in marble for the statue that was living in there.

The mind you create inside your own head is a box. How might it be blinding you? Facts do exist. Gravity will drop you. In a world stacked full of boxes, we can go to Rumi’s sacred space…

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."