“The emphasis on life marks a shift away from the deconstruction of layers of textuality, and toward an understanding of the inextricable entanglement of material, bicultural, and symbolic forces in the making and unmaking of the subject.” (Smelik, Lykke, xii-xiv)

During this weeks reading I felt my mind as amagnifying glass, zooming in on details of life that were previously washed over. In The Secret Teachings of Plants, Stephen Harrod Buhner talks about dendritic patterns in nature, and this image of the repetitious, branching and growing patterns became a thinking tool. This pattern shows how growth in life is non-linear, but fractal, bended, curved and non-mechanical. In the quote above from Bits of Life, she seems to agree with this way of thinking as not just a linear process, but a process that combines many forces as an“entanglement.”I find this way of thinking much freer and relevant to life, rather then the concrete mechanical way we have been taught to think in our culture.

When I brainstorm “thinking tools” I cannot help but mention meditation as the ultimate and ancient thinking technology. Studies have proved that meditation increases grey matter in the brain over time, and increases thought flow. It is fascinating to me how a process of stopping the internal dialogue, will over time optimize the internal dialogue. It seems as though in our culture we leave little time for rest, and are in a constant business. This increases material productivity, but we lose the conscious awareness behind our productions. New ideas and perceptions of the world opened in front of me, especially with the dendritic diagram in mind, as if peering through the same world through magnifying glass.

One article on meditation increasing grey matter density: