Search for intellectuality-college essay

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Art is not just a means of expression; it is also a tool for exploration. At the high school level, many courses are just pipelines of information drawn from the teacher into the student's head and regurgitated onto a Scantron. The great teachers do not teach disciplines, they teach how to learn a discipline. In this sense, art is the greatest teacher of them all. It allows for lateral thinking rather than critical thinking. It forces me to exhaust every perspective for a given topic until I find the one I wish to discuss.

I hope that people realize the possibilities of this lateral-thinking philosophy as they look at my work. I hope they realize that by trekking off the beaten path their chances of finding that undiscovered paradise increase greatly. The ones that make change walk the opposite way down the one-way street which has become the deferred life-plan. According to entrepreneurial expert Carl J. Schramm, in a time of economic insecurity, the greatest security is risk: proactively push the boundaries of conventional intellectuality and reap the rewards while the rest of the world catches up. Author and lifestyle designer Timothy Ferriss adds to the conversation by acknowledging that many of today's greatest companies started in a time of economic peril: Microsoft, Apple, Virgin,{find more examples}, and many with their CEOs either dyslexics or college drop-outs.

From this, the question becomes: How do college drop-outs and dyslexics possess the ingenuity to start multi-billion dollar corporations? My belief is that they inherently possess conventional intellectuality, which acts a a platform for building true intellectuality.

Conventional intellectuality is the ken of the well-read individual, conventional wisdom for smart people. The ignoramus follows conventional wisdom but does not understand it, and he scoffs at conventional intellectuality. The well-read individual knows better than to blindly follow conventional wisdom, but he takes conventional intellectuality for granted. The intellectual, however, develops true intellectuality through simplification of life's complexities. {confusing paragraph? too much word repetition?}

What, then, is true intellectuality? Unfortunately I cannot answer that question because I do not know. Great philosophers have said it is "living according to nature." Thoreau lived in a garden and grew or killed his food in order to live as simplistically as possible, as isolated as possible, in a search for intellectuality. My search, however, begins with art and moves through art, taking me through different perspectives until I find the one for which I am looking.

I imagine true intellectuality as a form of enlightenment. Personally, painting is a deviate Tao from Saṃsāra, an eschewal Penance from the Jihad; a way to become closer philosophically to the in-born true intellectuality that is human intuition and a baring from the politics of Darwinian human behavior {run-on?}. Painting isn't just an act of applying oils or acrylic onto canvas, but an experience that requires the full attention of the artist.

Thus, from the first brush stroke, the artist births a child which grows with each application of paint. My piece Don't Take This So Seriously or Isolation Is What You Make It went through many thumbnails, figure subjects, compositions, and color combinations until I successfully conveyed my perspective of the artist's isolation and the repetitiveness of what Buddhists call Saṃsāra.