Putting the world upside down might be the best way to put it right

Being dyslexic, I consider this to be perhaps the easiest way to a desirable future. I realized I was dyslexic when I once heard one of my teachers say, in the confident tone one uses to state a truth: "There's no smoke without fire". And in my head, the sentence was reversed, with a little voice telling me: "The opposite is also true: there is no fire without smoke".

I don't know if there is fire without smoke. But what I remember is that it was fun to turn the world upside down and that, perhaps, the mistake is to forget the"opposite" Truth. Now that I am supposedly an adult, I LOVE my dyslexia! Partly because of Nils Bohr who said."The opposite of a fact is a lie, but the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."

Consider the traditional way of looking at things, attributed to St. Thomas:"I only believe only what I see." Now let's reverse it: "I only see what I believe. Don't you think that's much more appropriate? And that it reflects something very"true"? Without getting into complicated explanations of cognitive biases, we all know that we don't see what we don't believe. Or that we don't want to believe.

Vision Creates reality

Modern physics has now proven that"it is our mind that defines reality, not the other way around". The philosopher Bergson said it in a very poetic way: "The eye sees only what the brain is ready to understand". "Reality" is a story that we tell ourselves. It is what webelieve to be true or possible within the limits of our "perceptions"and our imagination. Thus, what we call our reality can easily become the"prison" of normative concepts and "conventional wisdom"that lock us into "routine thinking", if we can still call itThinking. Hence the need to approach things "upside down" and"right side up" to open new doors.

Now let's try a playful exercise:

• identify the most rigid concepts, mantras and seemingly forbidden practices of our times which start with an "UN"
• embrace them to the max
• see what breadth of freedom it opens in your mind

Here are some examples

• make the familiar UNfamiliar
• think the UNthinkable
• Imagine the UNimaginable
• adopt UNconventional wisdom
• Create UNorthodox approaches
• love UNprediactibility
• question the UNquestionable
• travel into UNknown territories
• start to UNdo

Now is the time for "Unreason", as described by Charles Handy:

We are entering an Age of Unreason, a time when the Future, in so many areas, is to be shaped by us and for us; a time when the only prediction that will hold true is that no prediction will hold true; a time, therefore, for bold imagining in the private life as well as public; for thinking the unlikely and doing the unreasonable.

Tell us, do you see how joyful this could be?

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