#liminal thinking

in chapter 14, the narrator describes Chris, who says you can’t get angry while holding a cup of tea.

before that, he described the almost forced ritual that comes out of making a cup of tea; and how that small breath of time—in all it's forms, outside of making tea—is literally the ideal response to anger.

Read: About Liminal Thinking – “Moments or periods of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination, construction and destruction.”

Liminal Thinking owes a great debt to Jainism and Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, the practice of mindful meditation, reflection on experience and getting in touch with the reality of experience. Gautama Buddha was teaching students how to understand their own minds more than two thousand years ago. Jainism is also the source for the story of the blind men and the elephant, still the best parable for the nature of belief and reality that I know of.

Liminal Thinking also owes homage to Socrates and Plato, especially Plato’s metaphor of the cave.

This is one of those books where you sit there nodding and thinking, “he’s got it!”. Or you’re going to be utterly puzzled by it. It’s going to depend on how your brain works.

Others have tried in the past to explain this kind of mindset, but Dave’s effort does a good job of aggregating some of the thinking out there on working this way, bringing it together and making sense of something that’s been inadequately described previously.