Mysterious and Puzzling

Transcript

Let’s talk about the mysterious and the puzzling.

I was thinking about this movie, I think a lot about this scene from Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.

In a sense it’s kind of a forgettable movie but this scene always sticks out to me where Jason is an accountant trying to make sense of the books of this toy store.

Natalie Portman the long time employee of the Wonder Emporium is trying to explain to Jason that this is not just a regular toy store, this is a magical toy store.

This might not be a strange toy store but it is just a toy store.

She says “I knew from the moment I saw you, you’re a just guy.”

“What do you mean a just guy?”

She’s like “You only see things just so. A bench is just a bench, a sunset is just a sunset, a toy store is just a toy store.”

What she is saying is it’s reducing things to sum of it’s parts and refuses to wonder if there’s something actually special about them.

There is a lyric from Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse where he says “I don’t wanna listen to a scientist.”

A much malaligned lyric because people think this is anti-intellectualism.

I think what they were trying to express there is that if you reduce things to their parts and say they are merely a sum of their parts then you miss the wonder and the miracle as ICP puts it in that song.

I have been reading as you might know Maslow’s Towards a Psychology of Being.

This interesting passage about these qualities of self actualized people. A lot of this book is just a description of what it means to by a psychologically healthy human being.

Maslow says here:

My subjects were different from the average person in another characteristic that makes creativity more likely. SA people are relatively unfrightened by the unknown, the mysterious, the puzzling, and often are positively attracted by it, i.e., selectively pick it out to puzzle over, to meditate on and to be absorbed with.

Come to think of it that reminds me of the concept from Robert Anton Wilson calls it being a neiphile. Someone attracted to new experiences. I quote from my description

“They do not neglect the unknown, or deny it, or run away from it, or try to make believe it is really known, nor do they organize, dichotomize, or rubricize it prematurely. They do not cling to the familiar, nor is their quest for the truth a catastrophic need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order, such as we see in an exaggerated form in Goldstein’s brain injured or in the compulsive-obsessive neurotic.

They can be, when the total objective situation calls for it, comfortably disorderly, sloppy, anarchic, chaotic, vague, doubtful, uncertain, indefinite, approximate, inexact, or inaccurate (all at certain moments in science, art, or life in general, quite desirable).

Of course we can understand that these qualities would be desirable in an artist. They have some chaos to enable creativity come out.

But also as Maslow points out it is necessary for a great scientist to be able to say Im not quite sure what is going on here. Or to our oneself to wonder that something truly novel might be happening.

To see something others might ignore and think that can’t be right. Instead ask why is that so?

That question that sparks so many revolutions in thought.

So as Maslow writes outlines here it is psychologically healthy and opens many doors for us when we wonder about the mysterious and puzzling.

Thank you for listening, thank you for being open to experience, open to wondering what is going on in your own experience and being attracted to new experiences.