“Okay Louie, drop the gun. We know it’s full of blanks.”
A man’s innate, temperamental mind is not constructed to recognize that his thoughts are fungible.
Within his own body, units of blood, insulin, (etc), obviously are, but to his mind, the products for which it is deemed responsible, (thoughts), seem to it to each be unique, thus of individual importance. This assumption serves collective humanity well, but interferes directly with a single person’s line of sight.
Thoughts confined to representing the status of something material are not fungible. The thought-come-comment that plants must have water to live, or that objects roll downhill cannot be replaced with any thought to the contrary. (Not sanely and safely), but any thought or statement or professed fact, about matters that have no material backdrop, and exist only in the sense that men’s words say they do. They say it is interchangeable with any other thought about the matter, (one way or the other), without the subject suffering any damage, without it in fact, being affected at all…in that the imaginary cannot be injured.
Life has however, programmed men’s collective minds to perceive to the contrary. They do wrangle seriously over thoughts-about-thoughts; over the thought that Homer was an actual person; the thought that liberalism is superior to conservatism; that rap brought an end to real soul music. And always most popular of all, whether god’s correct name is Abe, Al, or Abdullah, (and whether, after the move from Brooklyn, the Dodgers were ever the same again).
The mind with which one is born; the mind controlled by one’s genetic temperament, is inherently pushed to profess that thoughts about incorporeal, thought-matters are indeed less agreeable to fungibility than thoughts about rock solid subjects. An everyday, apparently sane man will say that when it comes-down-to-it, having the correct thought about one’s afterlife is more important than having the correct thought about how gravity works. A casual, unbiased momentary consideration makes this ridiculous, and which, (at the hormonal level, speaking symbolically), everyone realizes.
J.