Think for yourself, let others enjoy the privilege

"I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it." Jonathan Safran Foer. An American writer, best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and a work of nonfiction titled Eating Animals

Intelligence and logic is nothing but effortless common sense; and the human mind is not an empty vessel that needs filling; but is a fire to be kindled with thought - the product of thinking. Yet, how sad is it that less than five percent of the human race think, another ten percent think that they think; and the rest would rather die than think.

All truly great thoughts are conceived when the mind is open, even though, the trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things into it.

Thoughts, which happen without effort, are more often authentic, deeper, and closer to life than the results of careful progressive reasoning.

Maybe this is because they reflect not only the world, but also how we relate to it. Many more dimensions, beneath and beyond words, vague, volatile complexities, impossible to catch by hard work of linear thought, fall into place as if at once, when the mind moves freely.

When a surprise, a problem, a crisis, an opportunity is presented, the mind starts moving spontaneously; scores of possible scenarios unfold by themselves, exploring so many conflicting and contradictory alternatives which inform of what could occur with common sense, if this or that or nothing is done; or to be done. Such imprecision is much richer and often more useful among humans than the building of a few dry logical propositions.

Logical

To my knowledge, nobody has ever experimented about logical judgments happening in a human head. We do not know today how we think in our brain. Yet, when we sit down to think, we try to force ourselves to advance formally, like toddlers, step after step, still led by the hand of Aristotle and the likes; or more computer-like. This can become clumsy and poor when it comes to complicated and vital issues.

In fact, many a times we have observed how useless the carefully measured and verily justified formal planning of large organizations and nations, have become to the people.

How stupid have the pompous arrow-like strategies sold by greedy management gurus to alibi-seeking Chairmen of companies and by acquisitive and avaricious Businessmen to politicians have been. The result, in spite of all such meticulous planning, cost those companies and the nation dearly.

Opposed to this, the risk-taking thinking that thinks itself seems to me richer and, often, practically sounder than elaborate reasoning: Provided we check it frequently against reality and correct it swiftly to fit the never-ending flow of the river of reason.

Command

Unfortunately, the thinking that thinks itself does so when it wants and not when we want. There is no command "Be spontaneous and cast a good intuition, now!" It cannot be canned and sold like software. In fact, who the thinker is, also matters. You cannot belittle the thinker while exploiting his thinking.

This is elite work for gifted people who have time to reflect or whose reasoning moves freely. They generally would be persons fed with culture and with experience. This miraculous flow of thinking, or call it intuition, is an artist's work that happens when you are inspired, and in a right mood; not when you want it, as you want it.

The world, as we have created it, is the result of our thinking. Hence, to change the world for the better, we need change in our thinking because, as humans, we are addicted to our thoughts.

We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking. Just because we liked something at one point in time, it does not mean that we will always like it, or that we have to go on liking it at all points in time as an unthinking act of loyalty to who we are as a person, based solely on some past point in time. To be loyal to ourselves is to allow the self to grow and change: to challenge who we are, and what we think.

The only thing we are ever sure is to be unsure, and this means we are growing in thought, not stagnant or shrinking. Change is a constant that affects all life; and change in thinking is a sign of progression.

Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers is a wise old saying. Yet, the art of questioning is lost to us because our schools turnout only runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers; not examiners, critics, knowledge seekers, and imaginative creators. In fact, our schools hardly teach to think. Those responsible for the state of affairs of our schools do not know that thinking is an admirable exercise. May be because they do not know how to think or because they believe as Lao Tzu said: Stop thinking, and end your problems - a saying fit for mediocre minds because Lao Tzu knew most minds are that.

However, I would say that a third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority; a second-rate mind, when it is thinking with the minority; and the first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking - merited thinking.

Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.

However, many a religion has done its utmost to close the circle of thought and declared even doubt to be sin. Buddhism and Hinduism, on that score, have been exceptions. In most other religions one is supposed to be, cast into belief without reason, and from then on to swim in it.

Even a slightest doubt, even the thought of thought, even the slightest impulse of our thinking nature - is sin! It means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is, excluded as sinful.

It seems that what is wanted and held as moral is, blindness and intoxication and an eternal drowning of reason.

Enlightenment

Religion furnishes the mind only with materials of ethics and enlightenment; it is thinking that makes what we understand of religion ours.

Unfortunately, as with our people in charge of education, teachers of religion too want only to just make people think they are thinking in order that they will love them and their religion; and they know that if they really make people think, they will hate them and the religion for the irrationalities it preaches.

Thus, an unthinking mind, an unthinking people, is the strength of religions and politicians. I cannot imagine of a power that rewards and punishes the objects of its creation; a power whose purposes are, modeled after our own; a power, in short, which is but a reflection of human frailty; truly exists.

Sometimes we have thoughts that even we do not understand.

Thoughts that are not even true - that are not really how we feel.

Nevertheless, they are running through our heads anyway because they are interesting to think about.

If only we could hear other people's thoughts, we will overhear things that are true as well as things that are completely random; and we would not know one from the other.

It would drive us insane for who knows what is true? What is not? A million ideas, but what do they mean? I for sure, do not know.

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