Shouldn't you be afraid to like the half understood?

Creation is driven by fascination. Fascination is driven by desire. Desire is driven by discontent. Discontent is driven by desire again. To pull ourselves out of the 'Desire' and 'Discontent' deadlock, we need good choices. We are all familiar with how important choices are in our lives. With good choices, we can desire, fascinate and create things to our liking. Decision on choice is too complex to channelize. But we have to follow our heart and mind by ourselves and be careful when we choose. Because we need to worry about what things we are going to like.

We are born with a mind that is like an empty chip with just the operating system. Whatever data is collected through our senses gets categorized and stored. Whatever we store, is a creation of thought. Beyond a point, we can no longer create them unless you destroy (more like loosing reference to the data) a less important data. Some techniques* help us expand our mind's capacity to store data. But that too has limits. Creation is coupled with destruction.

* If you have to memorize say 20, 3 digit numbers. It will be hard. But if you find a sequence or connection between numbers. If becomes easy. Similarly, if you have to remember a set of 50 random words or objects or things, you can probably create a story in your mind and picture each of them in the story. This way, if you remember the story, you can list down all the words. These are a few examples of some very basic techniques.

The more fascinating things we like, we are involuntarily, no longer liking something that we had liked earlier. A simplest example of such scenarios known to most of us is something like this. we go to buy a television set, or shopping in general. We see the first one, we like it. We see more and more and we start liking more sets. We struggle to accurately measure our like meter on each set on display. Until we reach THE set which beats everything by a mile. Instantly, our new found liking clouds the fact that we have just stopped liking everything else we liked just a few minutes ago.

There are sometimes a structure, like a family tree, to the things we like. If we happen to not like something in the middle of the tree, or worse, the top of the tree, that is carried on to everything below. That is why, as we get older, we have lesser things around, which we like. Mostly, it comes down to just family. I cannot say if it is good or bad, but what I CAN say is that our liking is now narrowed and we are left with little or nothing to fall back on to.

So, to preserve your liking, you should either stop learning about advancements or improvements of what you like. Which sound absurd. Or you can control your thoughts and learn to isolate them so that one thought doesn't influence another. Which sounds probable for somebody with a lot of meditation skills. If these are beyond the realm of our understanding, we are left with the last and best option. You have to learn to make the right choice to choose what you like. An infant may not like a painting, but over the years, he/she can learn to understand and like it. Similarly, you can choose what we want to like. You can choose to like things that are eternal and cannot be changed or made better. Once chosen, you can learn to like them. This will last forever with you. The earlier you choose, the stronger it stays. Good luck!

Here is some slight relevance in an extract from the movie, The Hurt Locker.

JAMES :
You see, the thing is, son. One day you’ll understand that when you start out like you are now, you love everything. You love your Mommy and your Daddy. You love your bobba. You love your blanket. You even love your little crib, and these dumb toys. But as you get older some of the things you love don’t seem special anymore. That bobba is one day just going to look like an ordinary plastic bottle to you. And the older you get, the more this happens and the fewer things you love. And by the time you get to be my age, sometimes you only love one -- or two -- things.
James pauses.

JAMES:
With me, I think it’s one.

Bcozazedzo