FOOD FOR THOUGHT: PICKLED BRAIN

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

—Volaire

Someone challenged my perception of the invisible prison within which western civilization lives by saying, “The whole thing is in your mind.”

I could only reply, "That’s the difference between you and me: it’s in my mind, so I can think about it while it is your mind and you can’t.”

Recipe for Pickled Brain — or — Thinking About What We Think With

Test for Ripeness:

1) Can answer all questions likely to be asked within 40 miles of home.

2) Hasn’t asked a question arising from curiosity for the last five years.

3) Takes authority to represent truth from pulpit, podium or plutocrat.

4) Never read a book voluntarily.

Preparation for Pickling:

1) Sever nerve paths capable of reporting unique experiences to conserve the energy normally required to ignore such messages for use in healing injuries caused by the same mistakes endlessly repeated.

2) Surround organ with an environment about which certainty is impenetrably dense.

3) Fill container with a fluid mixture of faith, trust, hope, belief and wishful thinking as a cushion against any latent instinctual resistance to the container.

4) Put on a shelf to ferment for the rest of life in isolation, within warehouses full of mindless millions pickling in their juices in the invisible prison.

Serving Instructions:

1) After aging long enough for all the heresy and doubt to be leeched, the once clear cushioning fluid will gel and turn as opaque as a proven fact. It is nowready to serve reliably.

2) Care must be taken to release the gas pressure of desiccated curiosity extracted in the fermentation process before handling individual brains.

3) Served individually they are digestible as paper pushers, bean counters, assembly lines and lifetime retail clerks. Not recommended for dealing with the vagaries of nature.

4) Served in mindless masses they delight the palate of the democratic process, tax base, demographic retail, preemptive war fodder, righteousness of the mostest and other forms of mob rule by deception of the willingly ignorant.

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I always wondered how the active verb, “ignore,” lost all sense of personal responsibilitly when the adverb form “ignorant” was applied while “unaware” serves a more precise definition of the condition of not knowing. Ignorant always carries the major context of having willingly and knowingly ignored that of which they are ignorant and their situation is self induced.

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A sure sign one is outside the invisible prison is inquiries begin searching for something truer than the answers that form the prison walls. Certainty is the border patrol around comfort zone zapping any illegal curiosity. Labels conclude the curiosity of the taught and are springboards into the unknown for those actually learning.

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The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
—Leo Tolstoy