If the student is unable to adopt both disciplined and also critical postures, both linear and holistic thinking, he will not be able to perceive that which is to be perceived.

 

—   Idries Shah

 

 

Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.

 

—   Martin Heidegger

 

 

There seem to be two choices.

Thinking is like walking or breathing.  There is nothing we need to do about it.  There is nothing we can do about it.  Any interference with it will only make it awkward and artificial and inhibited by self-consciousness.  If you are intelligent you are a good thinker.  If you are not intelligent it is too bad and you should listen to someone who is.

Or, thinking is a skill like driving a car, juggling, cooking, skiing, playing darts or knitting.  Some people will be better than others.  But everyone can acquire a reasonable amount of skill if he or she wants to.  That desire, or will to do it, comes first.  After that comes attention, practice and enjoyment.  Sometimes there seems to be more practice than enjoyment.  As the skill is mastered, the fluency and effectiveness with which it is used become enjoyable.  The more practice, the better things get.  Perhaps thinking as a skill is more like riding a bicycle or swimming.  At first there is an awkwardness and the activity seems both unnecessary and unnatural.  Later it is impossible to believe that there ever was an awkward stage.

Those seem to be the two choices.  If you prefer the first, then you resign yourself to your present level of thinking in the belief that there is nothing you can do to improve it.  Alternatively you may be satisfied with your present level of thinking that you cannot conceive of any further improvement.  Both these attitudes seem to indicate something about the thinking used.  Whether or not you believe that thinking can be improved through attention and practice, it seems worthwhile to explore that possibility because that is the only way you are going to find out whether it is just a possibility or an actual opportunity.  Exploration is the best way of finding out whether exploration is worthwhile.  Hope may be more appropriate than belief.

 

—   Edward de Bono

 

 

 

Our intellectual faculty, which originates in our timespace causal body (immaterial soul), and which is actively reflected in our human material brain, which can give our brain the ignorant notion that there is no such thing as an immaterial soul, is only a part of our total being and our existential functions, whether we place these functions on all subtler levels of existence or merely on our physical level of our human bodily neurocognitive system.  However we cook it, one part of us, the reasoning faculty, cannot possibly control the whole, though in certain types of people — scientists, materialistic philosophers (post-moderns) and the like — there is an hypertrophy that tries to suppress their emotional, sexual and action faculties, thus making themselves “dead from the neck down”.  But, if in attempting to prevent such a spiritual suicide, we become hyperemotional mystics, Tantric magickal sex-maniacs or hard workers for an idealistic social cause we have identified ourselves with, the underfunctional or even dysfunctional intellect, the lack of real thinking, is going to be a problem, which is bound to lead to suffering, disappointment and involuntary disillusionment from shock.  The development of genuine, authentic, individual and originary thinking is not the whole of necessary human development (which includes intuition, psychic powers and Cosmic Consciousness), but without it, there will be an inevitable and distinct learning disability (in fact, a whole set of them) that will prevent yet higher developments.

 

One major Learning Disability is the tendency of most aspirants for human development to try to exclusively identify with an incomplete religion, mystical tradition or occult school which pretends to have “all the answers” when it only has some answers of real use, which are inevitably intermixed with mystifications and social belongingness.  This happens not only because of emotional attention needs or the desire for social self-esteem, but because of a very strong intellectual laziness, a failed search for greater truth, a fear of the deconstructive phase of a paradigm shift that threatens loss of faith and so on.  The material brain of the evolutionary aspirant is trying to avoid the pain of Thought.  Blind following of a traditional authority thus becomes a sort of personal gamble about one’s developmental possibility or ultimate destiny.  It is akin to a tournament chess-player who has faith in an inferior opening system with which he keeps losing his games, but refuses to learn a better system or do full-blown research in a variety of promising systems.  That too is intellectual laziness which cannot be overcome by natural talent for chess.  And, again, the possession of a well-researched set of opening systems for use in different circumstances is not a substitute for tactical perception or endgame technique.  All the necessary functions must be working for success in the enterprise of even the minor development of chess capacity.  Hence, by analogy, these principles apply to the development of superhuman capacity of a human being.  That is why Gurdjieff once said, “Whatever a man does well, that is his preparation”, (for higher human development).

 

Certain popular “Gurus” often like to endlessly tell their dazzled and dazed emotional or psychosexual “disciples” that they should all go immediately “beyond” thinking when genuine thinking has never occurred in the consciousness of such people.  Dullness and lack of Learning (or Search For Greater Truths on a periodic basis) are no foundation for a quiet brain of Heightened Awareness, Zen Enlightenment or Rajayoga Samadhi.  The entire socio-political disaster of the Rajneesh Cult in its time was based on this kind of problem.  Rajneesh had many great insights into cross-cultural mysticism that are well worth study and reflection, but that is a higher function of intelligence than belonging to the Rajneesh Cult as an emotional or psychosexual obsession.  As J. Krishnamurti once said, “The leader destroys the followers and the followers destroy the leader.”  Hence what distinguishes a “Way” and a “Cult” is the presence or absence of Extended Thinking.

 

Now, if we have come this far, it should be obvious that the next natural step in all this would be to truly enter somehow into Metathinking, which is thinking-about-thinking, or even more importantly, better-thinking-about- better-thinking, which is the point of view of human evolution, which on infinite other planets in the Universe must be better-humanoid-thinking-about-better- humanoid-thinking, which transcends the local and insular quality of attempted thinkers as members of a particular planetary race of humanoids.  Without the attitude of the Cosmic Self, the Social Self is too limited in perspective to get much Metathinking up and running.  As Thomas Nagel puts it so succinctly in his book, Mortal Questions, in the chapter, What is it like to be a bat?:

“There are no comparable imaginative obstacles to the acquisition of knowledge about bat neurophysiology by human scientists, and intelligent bats or Martians might learn more about the human brain than we ever will.”

 

Is there Intelligent Life on Earth?  is more realistic than the question:  Is there Intelligent Life on other planets?  when there is mounting evidence from known Alien Abductions and Contacts that human beings of the Earth are comparatively retarded.  This fact in itself should provide food-for-thought in thoughtful people who have not been programmed by the Absurd evolutionary superiority of Earth humanity depicted in the Star Trek television and movie series.

 

Efforts toward Metathinking on our present self-destructive planet are still at a rather primitive stage even among the social elite club of supposed “leading intellectuals”.  Academics and scientists are often backward in genuine thinking precisely because they are unbalanced people in their total being as brain-in-a-jar types, plus their higher intuition is weak because they consider all higher faculties as below their overworked and physically egomanic brain-intellect, which wants to eliminate even the idea of a human evolution or possible future superhuman development.

 

Human beings on the whole do not want a Cosmic Perspective for the same reason that they do not do Metathinking.  Robert Anton Wilson, in his excellent and highly provocative book, The New Inquisition, rightly points out:

“Now, this is not to endorse what might be called Absolute Relativism — the idea that one generalization is as good as another.  Some generalizations are probably much more accurate than others, which is why I have a lot more faith in the chair I am sitting on than I have in the Virgin of Ballinspittle.  But these generalizations remain in the area of probability.  They never attain the certitude claimed by the Pope, Dr. Carl Sagan and the priests of other Idols.”

 

The first step in developing one’s thinking happens precisely when one suddenly sees that one has not even begun to do that yet.  What is most urgent therefore is to begin to begin.