Still picturing the thinking-within-thinking as being a core within a shell,
the outer covering composed of the totality of humanity’s ordinary thinking,
and the inner core, the unidentifiable, silent heart of all man’s ideas,
it can then be symbolically said that it is the normal, noisy activity of the outer shell, continually interfering with the inner core’s line of sight
which keeps the core --  the sole site for such  --
from  the unencumbered realization of what is really going on in life --  ergo:
to be of normal functioning mentality and consciousness,
you must have both the inner core and the outer shell of thinking,
but to experience the full potential of the core’s extraordinary sight,
it must get loosed from the outer shell’s distracting (though normal) activity.
 

The core, the thinking-within-thinking is all a human has before they reach the age of functional consciousness (exemplified generally by understanding language) –
with a child’s burgeoning consciousness-come-personality begins the inevitable, necessary development of the outer thinking (the shell),
for it is only there that language and the mental manipulation of symbols operates;
an ordinary person has no need for (thus no interest in) the activity of the initial core beyond the essential services it silently provides entirely beyond the pale of consciousness.
To get along in a world of ordinary minds,
attention need be given only to the outer shell of thinking:
all education takes place there --
the full complement of being sophisticated, literate and hip happens therein;
all normal displays of men’s presumed, intellectual and artistic, individuality
comes therefrom   --  all in all:
every single thing that men find significant to their lives,
which must be spoken of to be experienced, are products of the outer shell of thinking;
from a mortal perspective, it is the single source from which all the materials that construct civilization and culture come.
Obviously this thinking serves man well (speaking of man-the-collective) –
for the certain man however, a different internal scenario.
 

Up to a point, he develops like everyone else,
having the outer shell of thinking appear and grow so that he can converse in symbols with adults and begin to use same internally to his own advantage,
but he born with that particular peculiar neural potential
soon becomes privately disturbed by something going on in his head;
he does not know what it is bothering him, and several quick verbal interludes
with parents, and other adults and ostensible experts
reveal to him quite forcibly that they do not either (or, as he may look back on it:
they were simply neurally incapable of admitting and commenting thereon  --  in any case):
there he is, less than dual decades old  --  reasonably intelligent,
passably normal, but with an impossible-to-shake, tilt to his thinking,
not sufficiently, visibly eccentric to harm his life or have him seen as less than sane, but certainly strong and persistent enough to make him want to pursue the matter.
 

Mind being what it physiologically is --  the certain (young) man begins with
the scrutinizing of the thinking known and available to him:
the thinking (as recorded) of men deemed by their peers to be geniuses --  deep-thinkers of all varieties, but in short order (just a burger & fries, please) discovers that
behind all of their often quite enjoyable, even provocative words,
they know no more what is going on than does he (in fact less,
since they insist on appearing oblivious to that fact).
 

If he does not wander astray (becomes an accountant or parent or something), the certain man ultimately realizes (more accurately put would be to say he eventually --  in some weird way  --  “feels”
[in gigantic quotation marks]) that he is, in some quite unidentifiable fashion  --  on his own,
that no other human understands what is going on in his brain/mind --
and if he is really good --  he
(now in a fashion that makes, “unidentifiable” the universe’s premier understatement)
begins to edge up on the fact that his own brain does not.

We are now  -- at least semi-figuratively and demi-literally -- in a whole other reality within man’s normal one:
an indescribable realm wherein your brain obviously knows a particular thing
or else it could not be thinking about its validity --  yet --
simultaneously and persistently it is unable to see --  to say – to conclude that it does.

No other group of words could sound more deranged, nor the situation they propose, more impossible, yet they point directly and honestly to an actual occurrence
in the human brain,
albeit one that only a few can grasp even momentarily, first-person, in real-time.
 
 
 
 

The certain man determined to see what is going on
has a simple challenge before him  --  in him  --
to somehow feel and realize that there is in his thinking  --

What you see by the extraordinary inner sight of the realization
is what has been ordinarily keeping you from seeing:
like a flashlight with a cover over its lens which, if it could shine its light,
it could see was blocking its light and could remove it,
                                          and thus free its light to shine.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The difference between metaphor and symbol is the difference between
knowing what you're talking about and knowing what you're doing.