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Thinking for me is my devotion, devotion being the thing that each one of us does as a more or less primary thing in life, for many it's building things, an empire, a huge bank account, an animal sanctuary, a monastic retreat, a personal hell or a personal heaven, it's how we behave in our minds.
When you think you begin to come up, almost automatically, with your own, your very own personal set of aphorisms, here you just witnessed this one being born, just add my name and etch it in caligraphic style and sell it on a poster and send it to me, but truly, you did just witness the birth of this one, it just 'happened' then, now, in that split second, while I typed, frame it in gold:
It's hard work (thinking), it must be because mostly people prefer not to do it but to choose instead to take an off-the-shelf cliche-idea, a standardized thought that quite often is absurd actually but don't worry, no one will ever know, no one will ever find out because it takes a lot of hard work, a lot of devoted time, or even just a lot of time, to find out.
Although, there is actually a shorcut to discovery which doesn't require much thinking, if any, and that is to learn and learning is what thinking is usually all about, by paying attention to someone (someone else) who has done that work for you already and, by an amazing facility broadly known as teaching, he (no, sorry I don't know of any 'shes' in this, sorry again, okay maybe there are a couple), he or she then (reluctantly), can actually impart knowledge without the recipient of that knowledge having to do all the thinking work that the teacher did.
In fact it isn't even required that the teacher do that thinking either, nor indeed for that matter, for his or her teacher before him or her.
So, very largely, we go along in life with very few people actually doing any real thinking, and 'thinking for oneself' is implied with the word thinking - it doesn't require such a qualifier or if it does then please explain the other kinds of thinking as I have yet to discover one and I am keen to learn new things.
Of course the phrase 'thinking for oneself' is meant just to underline the term 'thinking' but it complicates a simple idea too and implies there is 'thinking as a group'. This is not thinking - it is adopting a policy and politics is what this kind of 'thinking' is and it is not thinking by any stretch of the imagination - it is feminised pseudo- thinking, thinking with lace curtains, flower borders and buckets full of garish cosmetics to fill and cover the cracks in the pavement.
While thinking is work and it is obviously hard work, otherwise everybody would do it in preference to off-the-shelf pseudo thinking, it is also fun and amazing in the results achieveable. For me it is almost an addiction as well as a life devotion.
People also shy away from thinking because they assume, wrongly so, that it is all about being serious - it isn't, you can incorporate a lot of humour and it just comes along all by itself like a stray dog that followed you home except that my kind of humour is clean, doesn't smell bad, won't bite you, doesn't mess up the pavement (ok, ok, sidewalk then), and if you tell it to sit it won't automatically add an h and do something a lot worse and on your carpet too. But it is true, really, and thinking is actually like that, it comes bundled with humour and if you thought otherwise then it's because you associate thinking with the 'world of learning' or the world of education or the world of schools and universities and many, sadly, teachers and professors but if you think about it weren't your favourite teachers the ones who had a nice human touch and your less favourite were the ones who lacked such a human touch and wasn't that because of a sense of humour and weren't those the teachers that were more successful with you, didn't you actually learn most from those teachers who had some humour?
So stop associating thinking with lack of humour; the pair are long divorced and gone separate ways, lack of humour now living among the criminal fraternity, dealing drugs, in the gutter of their minds whilst humour is dancing on the roof smiling at the sky, ecstatic without ecstasy (a drug) or artificiality of any kind. Thinking and humour only seem unrelated because very often the people who want to be taken as serious, not humourous, make a point of being serious and these are very often people you might describe as seeming to be thinkers but thinkers and thinking are not really synonymous. Thinking is very much a creative act and is not a kind of factory process. Evidence of thinking is not indicated by the seriousness of the scenery but by the content of the thoughts, the ideas themselves. If ideas lack any real value then usually the positor, the person positing the idea, will try to bolster it's importance by adding an atmosphere of seriousness but real thinking people don't behave like that.
But even if it didn't have humour I would love it just the same for several reasons, one is that it just fills what could easily be a kind of prison time. Think of being in school - daydreaming as an escape - daydreaming is a branch of thinking and haven't' some famous authors produced priceless work in that way, daydreaming? "Treasure Island", if I remember rightly, was the product of a boy's imagination busily at work because he was ill and confined to bed for quite a long time, weeks I think if not longer. You might not associate that kind of thing with thinking but it is just a variation, it is part of the same overall package really - the creative use of the mind.
Another is the magical results and then there is the process itself. Thinking, in my view, is an art, an invisible art.
Others, someone else said...
It's the same. One person's creativity is another person's drudgery and boredom. Bottle half full, bottle half empty, a way, a way, a way of looking at the same thing. Thinking need not be drudgery - the boy who dreamt up "Treasure Island" could have focussed on fear-making mind-stuff equally but he chose, he CHOSE, instead to use his mind in a better way. Each option, positive or negative basically, is ours to choose just as we want.
Thinking is a process, it's hard work, it takes time, it takes a lot of time, it can't be cheated upon, you cannot look up the answers and defeat the need to think. You can bypass thinking in several ways, "No one knows" is a popular one, "I don't know, + or _ what do you think?" is another, pass the buck kind which is the same as saying "I can't be bothered to think, you do it for me", "We're not meant to know" is another popular one especially for use with the most profound and serious of all questions that man can ever produce so quite ironic that one. "We'll find out when we get there" which means god will sit us down and explain it all to us. The phrase "Grow up" comes to my mind when I hear that one. And then of course there is devils advocate which just produces a stock "I don't want to agree with you openly nor do I want to consider you idea so I will just say that nearly everybody thinks and states the opposite to what you said". But it is said in order to pass a question back to make the person do some more thinking. Get it? Offer a valuable idea for free that cost you a lot in thinking time and devotion and these people will firstly fail to recognize it and acknowledge it and secondly they will refuse to take up the challenge to think for themselves just as you have set a fine example in doing, and finally they dismiss your thoughts with a scant and virtual "It CAN'T be true". How very easy, and how very lazy. I am wise to these people now so when they pop up an off-the-shelf response to me I don't explain anything else to them if I can help it, I try not to fall into that trap. Let them stay in the dark. Their future is not bright, it's dim.
Here, incidentally, on this web site I have said a few simple and basic but contentious and controversial things concerning extremely important issues. Moreover, already, some of those simple but definite and clearly stated and essential ideas have been silenced, censored. That can and does only happen because it is rare, rare, to be able to clear away nonsense, aburdities that are universally held to be true as if they are holy and sacred but in reality they are cancerous and extremely dangerous. That is why I am being censored; because I pointed out, what will finally be obvious about christainity. I am happy to be silent, actually I prefer it. I accept being silenced, being censored, too. You see, I KNOW these things, these important things that I have been trying to share with you, so what benefit do I gain in sharing them with anyone else when I already grasp what they mean and what they portend for us all? I do not lose the information from my own mind, it is you who are prevented from considering it in your own mind, and that has to be more your concern than mine, surely, but if it is of no concern to anyone then I would be a fool to be bothered about it for myself and I am not so bothered about it, just observant to what it means in the broader context.
So I won't be fighting or challenging the censors, well not on this web site anyway, or not much anyway, and I won't be drawing their fire, if I can help it, and the most I will offer, and it is really all I need to offer, is my complete willingness and preference to be able to share all, ALL, these ideas with you. How will I do that. It's a moving target basically and one that I am currently working on.
Thinking - when it produces radical and profound realizations makes a person dangerous in the eyes of the "establishment" but it is only by society recognizing the pricelessness of it's best thinkers that it can make any real progress - politics and military might cannot do it on their own and neither can religion. It all comes down to thinking, ultimately and in this moment, the moment we call now, too. Thinking, for me, is enough in it's own right; I have destroyed nearly all my writings. I think not to prove that I am, I already knew that without having to think and if the existence of anyone depends upon whether they think or not then the world would be much more sparsely populated and humans in fact would be a very rare species on the planet. So it's just as well that it is absurd to deduce that the essence of existing lies in the function of thinking, it doesn't, so don't worry on that score the only penalty for not thinking is that you will probably turn into a vegetable or leastways people will begin to say that you have and then you may actually wish that you didn't exist so thinking might be considered not so much a proof that you exist but more a reason to exist. I hope that clarifies it for you but let someone else know if you have any questions.
By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
22 May 2007
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