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I remember my grandfather telling me about an immense forest in the Gran
Chaco, a region of Argentina, which is called “El Impenetrable”. He said that there were no paths and the only way to advance was to use machetes to cut your way through. —Then I imagined that forest to be mysterious, the home of goblins and creatures of the night.

There are imaginations of children and others of adults, the subject I want to tell in this note. A fellow student who knew about my practices in the Gurdjieff line, imagined that there were secret techniques, only accessible to the initiated, and that I would not reveal them. To my surprise, I could not convince him that there were no secrets.

Belief in magic words or secret methods is common to all cultures.

Continue reading Imaginary secrets

I quote an old fable: Someone asks a philosopher what the world is like.
—The world is one big ball resting on the back of a big turtle.
—And what does that big turtle lean on?
—On an even bigger turtle.
—Well, but… where is the second turtle leaning?
—In a bigger one, sir. There’s always an other turtle underneath.

It’s an idea of the world based on an endless pile of turtles. You can’t say it’s
a consistent mental model because it’s based on infinity. In this case, an
infinite number of ever-larger turtles.

When the infinite appears, we’re in trouble. Continue reading Mental models