Finding new intellectual world leaves me feeling like a novice

I’ve recently discovered color. And sound. And motion. It’s changing everything.

Metaphorically speaking, I’ve been living in a world of black-and-white still images for most of my life. I didn’t realize what I had been missing.

I’m slowly starting to see the world as a full-color, three-dimensional sensory experience with amazing sound — intellectually speaking.

I’ve always thought I was a bright guy. I’ve always considered myself well-read and well-educated. I’ve probably been a little smug about it.

About 10 years ago, I started adding to my intellectual diet. Although I had read a lot of fiction when I was young — mostly science fiction — the bulk of my real reading diet had been very factual and very practical. I’d mostly read about things that seemed pragmatic — business, economics, politics and psychology.

I started reading classic literature and essays. Leo Tolstoy. Hermann Hesse. Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Montaigne. Alexandre Dumas. G.K. Chesterton. Even Charles Dickens. The more I read, the more I realized how ignorant I had been.

I suddenly realized that these people made me look like an intellectual pygmy — and the fact that their work had been popular with masses of people in their own days made me realize how far our intellectual standards have fallen.

I fell further down the rabbit hole when I started reading more difficult non-fiction. That’s when I consciously realized that my intellectual world had been truly limited. The tipping point was when I finally read Iain McGilchrist’s mind-bending book, “The Master and His Emissary.”

It was McGilchrist who convinced me that I had been ignoring at least half of reality — simply because our culture is so biased toward one narrow materialist way of thinking.

This journey has been incredibly exciting and I still have a long way to go. But I have a serious problem. I don’t know how to talk to you about it. I don’t know how to talk to anybody about it.

And I desperately need to talk about it.

For years, I’ve been begging people to read various books that have given me wisdom and insight about how individuals think and how human societies operate. I was just as indoctrinated as everyone else to see the world through a standard cultural and intellectual lens, but I’ve found transformational ideas from great books and great writers.

That doesn’t mean that the ways I’ve learned to see the world are The Truth — the kind of perfect knowledge and wisdom that can’t be questioned — but it does mean that I have a different point of view that I believe can lead to a better life for those who want to find it.

Unfortunately, I’ve found that very few people are interested in ideas. They’re really interested in various forms of entertainment. They’re very interested in mindlessly scrolling social media. They’re very interested in different forms of fun.

But even the ones who consciously know that there’s something wrong with the culture around them mostly don’t seem interested in digging — just a little bit — into ideas that could help them understand their world and understand how they might be able to transform their own lives.

I don’t mean to sound as though nobody cares about ideas. I’ve met a few people over the years who do. I almost married one woman who was a sponge for such ideas and divergent thinking, but that was a long time ago.

Today, I seem to struggle to find people who want to break out of the bleak mindset that has us “amusing ourselves to death.”

I’ve shared lists of books over the years that I wish more people would read, but few people are interested. And now, I’ve gone to a more difficult intellectual place, one that requires even more investment of time and energy and thought than the things I’ve recommended before.

And that leaves me frustrated, because the things I’ve learned over the years are like different layers of building blocks. If someone doesn’t have a foundation in some of the things I want to explain, his eyes are going to glaze over — and he’s going to tune out.

I don’t want anybody to blindly follow me down my own intellectual path. I don’t have everything figured out. And I’m not the arbiter of truth. I simply want and need other people who see some of the same things as I see — and who are struggling down the same path.

I feel like a caveman who’s discovered new knowledge — maybe new tools or technologies — that can benefit everyone. I desperately want to take the things I’ve learned to more people and have them see some of what I’ve seen.

Nothing I’ve found lately is a rejection of the scientific thinking that has brought us so much progress and wealth. It’s more of an understanding that there’s so much we’ve been missing — but missing in a way that is consistent with all that we already know.

It’s as though we’ve been exploring a giant space and we’ve learned a lot about that space — but I’ve discovered there’s a huge adjacent space with entirely different properties and values. And there’s a massive amount of truth we can find in this adjacent space — truth that can make human life more satisfying.

But I understand that it’s easier to live as we’ve been trained to live. To see the world as we’ve been trained to see. And to avoid the difficult work of exploring new intellectual territory.

I really do understand. I’m not angry at the people who have no interest in the path I’m on, especially since it requires becoming an intellectual beginner all over again.

I just desperately wish I’d run into more people who are making the same journey, because it feels lonely on this path by myself.