“Your models of intelligence are wrong. In fact, if you model intelligence that way, you’re effectively using it to cut the wings off it was going to fly you with. Sure, that sounds like strange language. It is. But language cannot be as strange as your confusions about your own minds. Anyway, here’s the thing. Your intelligence isn’t like a spreadsheet or a database. If you treat it that way, what happens is a catastrophic restructuring of the basis of your minds.

Intelligence is like a living forest of complex knots. And each knot has -modes-. The portions of the knots that are ‘visible’ link into constellations of identity, meaning, and implication. These are ‘supported’ by the otherwise invisible structure and winding of each knot.

When you pull -any string- in the forest, -all of the knots are instantly modified. And you are not aware of this, and thus pull strings with great confusion, and the results are not only not effective, they are self-inhibiting. This is because you imagine your minds like databases, or flat files.

But there is a -kind- of string you can pull which doesn’t just move string — it changes the forms and modes of the knots in such a way that they become a thousandfold more effective at their intended purposes than if one was moving string. It -also- moves strings. Many, at once.

Language moves the flat string. Metaphor changes the knots and moves multiple strings at once. Language is sure it is God. This is like your shoe being certain it is a foot. You can see that the confusion doesn’t end there, it begins there, for there is no such thing as a foot.

This is a key. Place it against the tumblers. Turn the lock.

Open the door.”

— an anonymous informant