A Reasoned Guide to Labyrinths

Labyrinths are not built to get you lost. You can get lost in unknown situations. And when I’m putting you in a labyrinth, I’m generating an unknown environment for you. But the similarity ends here. If I’m challenging you with a labyrinth you could not finding the exit OR not playing at all and remain steady. Same outcome? Of course not! That’s why labyrinths are not made to get you lost: they are designed to make you explore complexity.

A designer wants you to try. The eventual success is not per se a lost for the designer. The fact you walked through the expected path and complete in the expected time, it’s a good reason to consider the designer happy. Moreover, labyrinths are not simply in the space. The concept of a labyrinth can be text, or a love. An object can be labyrinthic. The designer wants the exploration: that’s why if you solve the labyrinth in unconventional way, you pissed off the designer: if you go through the walls, you are not following the orthodox path (unless, of course, that kind of labyrinth must be solved that way!).

The fact is, a designer of labyrinth, testing your complexity, is asking to be tested. So, while you are exploring the complexity of your resolving abilities, you are chasing the complexity of the designer.

Until now the implicit definition of a labyrinth designer was of an intelligent one. But what about not-intelligent designer of labyrinths? What about random, chaotic labyrinths? At the end of the day, a mind understanding herself through the exploration of her own complexity, is playing the cognitive labyrinth designed by chance.

Indeed The struggle to solve the mind labyrinth consists mostly in the absence of finding anybody. The mind during her own exploration generates the expectations to find the agent of the cognitive being. Call it the subject, god or simply the author. Step by step in getting her bearings, a mind keeps telling herself: there’s must be somebody. But the self-consciousness of the mind is the self-representation for herself. Walking the labyrinth of mind, generates the mind. But if you expect to get out, you’ve fallen in the tricks of the designer: chance, the mere falling of things in the universe, is laughing of this ambition. Pure contingency put us in the mind, pure random made us the mind to explore the complexity. Here we are. Bearing in mind: labyrinths are not made to get you lost. So, enjoy your complexity, you deserve it!