Thinking inside the box, by MARVELL LAWSON

Everyone is encased in their very own safe three-dimensional cubes. In this cube, they see the world. They see the physical world, they see the imaginary world, they see the world of total abstraction. Everything about the world can be, no, is seen from within each individual’s cube. All available information, knowledge, and understanding are only accessed from inside each individual’s cube. Why is this important? Everything each individual comes in contact with, every thought, every idea, and every decision is first filtered through the bias of their cube. We can only know and understand that, that we can be conceived of through our personal or inherited experience. This is where our perception is created and our perception is the only possible reality we can know.

We are born with a certain amount of information already imprinted inside us. Carl Jung calls it the collective unconscious. Passed down to us from generation to generation from the very beginning of our ancestral archetypes, we are the sum and total of everyone who has gone before us and marked us with the genetic patterns passed to us through their genes. We add to that DNA strand yes, but we build on the shoulders of every one of our ancestors who came before us.

With that thought in mind consider the fact that we can only see the world from the position inside our cube. We can never fully understand what anyone else is thinking because we can never see the world through their filters. Even identical twins, although alike in many ways, they are not the same, nor do they have the complete identical infusion of the exact same makeup. They are very similar, but not the same.

We are constantly bombarded with abstract ideas from all around us. Ideas from other people, ideas from our senses, and ideas from our emotions constantly keep our minds and our bodies decoding a continuous stream of stimuli 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, year in and year out, until death stop the machine from processing, and the machine starts to decay into memory. We don’t know how we can do these things, but somehow, we can receive ideas from the cosmic plan into our cubes and expand our knowledge.

We expand our knowledge by taking new ideas into our cube, analyzing it, and forming our personal thought of what that idea is and what it means to us. We say we understand what others tell us, but in fact, we only understand what our filtering system tells us. We can never know for sure if what we understand to be the true thoughts of someone else are in fact true thoughts or just another manifestation from inside our cube.

What of the size of our cube? Is it infinitely small or infinitely large? Does it grow with the assimilation of new information? When the new information is added to what we already know does our knowledge expand exponentially, or does it just grow by adding the new information? Well, we know our knowledge grows more than the level of new information because we view the information from many different perspectives. We use our past knowledge, and experiences to form different ways of view the information as we determine new ways to use it. So, we are growing at an amazing rate. Just as our physical selves are growing stronger, so too is our mental strength. The knowledge we have now so much surpasses the knowledge of the wisest minds of past civilizations. Elementary school children solve problems that only the very learned people of ancient cultures could barely dream of.

The bottom line is, we cannot think outside of our boxes. We are not prisoners, for our cubes are what give us the foundation on which we can grow. Through that growth we are building more information to pass on to future generations, thus expanding the possibilities for understanding the cosmos and how we fit and how we can contribute instead of destroying. Instead of thinking outside our boxes, we should be expanding our boxes to encompass more of the information available in the universe.