MAKING THE THINKING CHOICE

 

Given that "mind" is not only a noun (actually, a nominalization), it is
also a verb (#42), mind is not a thing (as an object, entity, or substance),
it is a function.  Mind is what you do-and what you do is think.  When you
"mind the gap" you are thinking about the fact that there is a gap.  When
you "mind" your mother, you pay attention to, listen to, and comply with
what she says.

 

With a mind, you have thinking power.  While you can think passively by just
perceiving things, and let in all kinds of thinking, true thinking is a
choice.  It is a choice wherein you expend effort.  This means your ultimate
consciousness is a volitional consciousness.  And because you can choose to
avoid thinking, to not focus your attention, you can choose to not do the
work of thinking.  Lots of people do precisely that.  You can also let your
thinking powers deteriorate, weaken, and become nearly useless.  Yet when
you default on thinking, and drift in a will-less passivity, the result is
that you end up evading the adventure of life and the true joy of activating
your potentials.

 

This is the problem with all of the social media platforms-they encourage
you to adopt a policy of defaulting on thinking.  Instead they encourage you
to think what is Politically Correct, and to disparage any thoughts that
disagree with their conventional wisdom.  The end result-if you reject the
work of thinking, all that's left is to become a zombie.  Once you abandon
your thinking powers, all that you have left are your emotions-how you feel.
So you now substitute your feelings for your mind and with it, your ability
to detect reality.  This is the pathway to neurosis as Nathan Branden (1969)
noted:

"One of the chief characteristics of mental illness is the policy of letting
one's feelings -one's wishes and fears- determine one's thinking, guide
one's actions and serve as one's standard of judgment.  This is more than a
symptom of neurosis, it is a prescription for neurosis.  It is a policy that
involves the wrecking of one's rational faculty." (p. 71)

 

To surrender your mind to others, to an ideology, to what's politically
correct (PC) is to choose to not think.  It is to seek to be unaware, to
give up your humanity, to sell your cognitive potentials and
self-actualization short.  And all of that is a loser's route.

 

If your childhood home was convolutedly complicated or dysfunctional so that
understanding what was going on, and what it meant, would require a a degree
in psychology, sociology, an philosophy- it was probably easier to give up
even trying to understand.  It is easier to turn off your mind and retreat
into dreams and fantasies.  And because emotions are so strong-fear, anger,
guilt, confusion-it's easy to get lost in an emotion.  Yet in doing that you
develop the habit of not thinking.

 

When you surrender your mind to emotions or to the social environment, you
cannot develop an adequate contact with the world outside, or for that
matter, the world inside.  When you give up real thinking, you are left with
no tools by which you can make contact.  In the long-term this will deepen
your sense of helplessness and hopelessness.  We see this in
poverty-stricken communities, in lots of the college protests currently
going on, and even in corporate America.  Regardless of the context, people
have give up the ultimate human choice-the choice to use one's mind to do
actual thinking.  Instead, they default to the non-thinking uses of the
mind-

           automatic thinking

           reactionary thinking

           shallow thinking

           borrowed thinking

           agenda thinking

           certainty

           and expectations.

 

The solution is to develop your mind's capacities for thinking.  It is to
identify and cultivate all of your mental powers.  The good news is that we
now have modeled "thinking" and "mind" so that we have specified three major
thinking categories (essential, eureka, and executive thinking skills) and
14 thinking powers.  This, in turn, enables you to deliberately practice
these thinking skills until you develop them as key resources in your mental
capacity for thinking.

 

The Essence of Thinking

              1. Considering

              2. Questioning, Exploring

              3. Doubting

              4. Detailing, Indexing

              5. Distinguishing

The Eureka of Thinking

6. Inferring

              7. Organizing

              8. Creating

              9. Synergizing

The Executive Development of Thinking

              10. Learning

              11. Deciding

              12. Discerning

              13. Reflecting

              14. Sacralizing

 




 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.