Snapshot
Often times when I read my old posts on this blog, I cringe at them for multiple reasons. Usually because I have changed my thoughts, or started to think about things differently. Many people on the internet say that they write to think. But I think writing is a reflection of what's left after you've done the 'thinking'.
By releasing the writing into the public it creates a snapshot of your understanding of something at a particular point of time. In the future you reference back to it and correct your understanding of that thing.
What does it mean to 'think' about something. Is it even possible to find out the truth about something by 'thinking'? The words that come out of your mind are based on your conditioning. Your experience of the world. Which is only one lens of viewing things.
Your mind doesn't capture every single lens. Because it cannot capture every single lens. It is simply not possible. So what does it mean to 'think'? Is it largely a waste of time?
When you have a certain problem or situation that you want to find the answer to. You can say that you have found it when that problem or situation no longer exists. It could be by chance, that the circumstances changed, or it could be through something you understood about the particular situation.
But does this understanding happen through 'thinking'? I don't know.
And I don't mean this from some kind of intellectual philosophical perspective. I'm talking about real non-mechanical problems, things that we face in our lives.
Their solutions don't lie in thinking. They can't because when the person is in the situation, he does not have the tools required to see his situation accurately. It's like he's staring at a programming language that he has never learned.
So the only option he has is trial and error, where he goes through a thousand iterations of that and the stumbles upon the right answer. But this is inefficient. What if you spent 20 years searching for the answer to something and never found it?