| You describe thoughts as if you are in receivership of them, like a mom receiving a work of art from her child. I can direct and focus my thoughts beyond their capacity to perceive the world, like channeling attention and sculpting potential words when I am typing out this comment. I can direct myself to imagine worlds that never existed and solve problems in the future, which requires directed thought. Your mind is trivially easy to improve, conceptually. Focused improvement on a hard skill will drag your mind along. Deciding to get better at cello will require you to learn higher concepts of music reading, fine motor skills and playing in a band that will form a structure in your mind. That will make thinking and directing thoughts in new directions much easier. It's much easier to ask someone to imagine what it's like working in a construction team building a shopping mall when they know how people work together in a band, compared to a blank slate that knows nothing. That imagination can be used to prune off bad ideas and thoughts that go nowhere. The educational institution that is supposed to be good at this is the humanities. Philosophy will train you to express your mind through language at such an articulated level that you will know yourself better and be able to navigate a very wide array of arguments with precision. Thus giving you a much better source of material for your mind to sculpt it's thoughts with. The mind simply has to be pure to sort signal from noise, that's a fundamental part of what it does. The mind is also incorporeal, it has the least matter. The higher you think, the less quantities of properties and details you can focus on. Their totality is summed up as categories that start doing all that heavy lifting for you in implied abstractions. Keeping track of hundreds of different sized numbers and the properties of each item you are counting in one holistic picture is difficult. Purifying that into abstractions and relations between them is incredibly powerful. Do you centre your being on the spine, rather than the mind? Framing and receiving the output of the mind is what a lot of people do and I hazard a guess the ability to balance the difference between quantities and directions is a lot easier when you hang that task on the spine, with limbs that protrude out from it. |