A brief reflection on Mental Fluidity

"It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” - Bruce Lee

Don’t interrupt your mental fluidity with self-admiration. The moon is always in stream, but every time we take to admire the finger or wonder how others might look at the instrument of our awareness, we’ll have to refocus on the light falling from the moon. All those wonderful sights and limitless observations, curiosities, or patterns we notice between the passing beams of light can only happen when we’ve picked up some momentum in our mental fluidity. When we're swimming, It’s easier to catch a stream once we start moving in the water. It's also easier to change directions when we’re moving compared to when we’re paddling in our corner of the ocean. Our minds work the same. Your intentions and objectives become apparent to you as you begin to move forward, a mind in motion is a flexible, adaptable and wide-reaching mind. The moment we stop to admire the finger pointing at the Moon, we interrupt this fluidity. Skaters learn this the hard way. My homie Moe once gave me a tip about dropping into a halfpipe, that if you think, it’s already over, you’re automatically eating shit. Any thought that separates you from your experience, any doubt, or second guess, and that’s it, might as well not drop in at all. When Moe is in it, without thought, grounded in his senses, wholly attentive to the experience of riding, the feel of the board, the ground underneath him, everything rides smooth. He’s chilled out, in his element. The moment you look at your supposed reflection on the eyes of passersbys, or get in your head for that matter, you eat shit. 

In his first letter to Marcus Hertz in 1770 Kant writes:

“You know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the intention merely of refuting them, but that in thinking them over I always weave them into my judgements, and afford them the opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs. I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impartially from the standpoint of others some third view that will improve upon my previous insights may be obtainable.”

In the second letter written by Kant to Marcus Hertz in 1770 he says: 

“The mind needs a reasonable amount of relaxation, and diversions to maintain its mobility that it may be enabled to view the object afresh from every side, and so to enlarge its point of view from a microscopic to a general outlook that it adopts in turn every conceivable standpoint, verifying the observation of each by means of all the others.”

You can view an object:

• From an "enlarged mentality" through which Kant considers the various views of absent or present perspectives to complete the picture which an individual mind is always incapable of cognizing alone. Thinking for Kant, while private, is a communal activity that can only happen in conversation with the other perspectives in the 'public' (our linguistic communities, in Wittgenstein's words). This active and communal activity requires the fluidity of our beliefs rather than their rigidity. It requires us to allow our views to be overturned or supplemented by different perspectives if we have good reason to. 

• From different angles and perspectives, different frames of relative reference. 

• From a microscopic perspective. I took this to mean the metaphysical and ontological principles and assumptions the object or its viewership takes on. Like considering the cogs of a watch rather than the face of the watch. 

• From an increasingly general outlook, an object taken in its immediate, geographic, global or universal context. 

• From different temporal outlooks too! Concepts or objects take on different life and meaning based on the epoch they’re being considered in, historico-social conventions alter a concept significantly as these conventions change over time. As they are considered from the lens of different paradigms or futureities. 

• A synthesis of these all these perspectives with one another.