Out of Box Experience:

In his Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley proposes that our capacity to reason and even our senses are governed by mental patterns, perceptual sets, that determine the limits of what the mind can conceive. The mind uses a taxonomy--a set of categories--into which it squashes the somewhat messier occurences of life, that not only shapes what we think but what we can think. Everywhere, polar categories such as liberal and conservative, cosmopolitan and provincial, A-Type and B-Type, believer and secularist constrain both the public conversation and the interior monologue. And to have different categories, or different categories of categories, would make of us a different people.

The author Borges, being a librarian, was an aficionado of classification systems. In his description of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, he notes that it contains a taxonomy of animals that bears no relation to our scientific concept of kingdom, phylum, class, etc. Instead there are "those that belong to the Emperor," "those that tremble as if they were mad," and "those that resemble flies when seen from a distance." The first order of business in trying to think outside the box is to be able to see the box.