Four magic words: tell me how you know.
There is nothing I want more, more constantly, more–than to know more about how you know what you know.
I would rewrite language itself, if that would make room in it for everyone to take time to tell me!
Tell me, please, tell me how you know.
Someone told me once, to be asked to tell how you know is the biggest compliment you can receive as a thinker.
Your reasoning, I like so much that I want to borrow it; Your conclusion, I like so much I don’t just want to frame it, I want to make sure that I hang it on the right place on my wall. It does not belong in this pile of others that I’ll never bother to sort–tell me how you know. I’ll put it there, in the pile, if I don’t have another choice, but I want to do more with it. Please, please, please, tell me how you know.
Master world divider mind, that magically splits all thoughts and ideas into the believed true and believed false, help me adjust. Reason, with eyes that look both ways at once, runs full speed through life, yet maintains a front yard full of ideas I can’t believe.
All that I think is wrong, in a lovely well-kempt pen; here I stand so proud in my invisible castle, looking over them petting the ideas I call true, waiting for those times when I can open up the big front doors in the bright sunshine (weekends, I call them), those times when the true runs out to play among the false. Dogs and unicorns; hammers and chimera; children who spit in dirt that spits back.
To the soul there is nothing more to life than to watch these weekend play dates, watch one of these outsiders climb onto the back of one of the insiders–him already standing on the shoulders of something else that once was false–
Reason weeping now, as here they come teetering, these Bremen musicians that are the equivalent and exact measure of progress; reason weeping with joy because it knows where they are bound. Here they come teetering, to chase shadowy intruders away with their yet discordant song. Watch, my soul, sing maybe a little, as that outsider is lifted so properly, in gentle measured steps, over the castle wall. And Ornette Coleman suddenly makes sense.
Now, how is that done? And undone?
Moving ideas into our beliefs we do ourselves; moving ideas out of our beliefs takes help. The problems you see out in the world are reflections of rotted old beliefs stuck on the wrong side of the wall, in so many strange heads, where magic works, where magic is real. You have the incantations to clean them out. I just gave you one. Ask! Ask everyone! Ask!