Genuine thinking is good for you.  Have you ever noticed that even when you agree with this, there is still a peculiar entry barrier into the realm of meaningful original thinking?  Somehow we get side-tracked into reading the great thinkers rather than developing some breakthrough thinking of our own. 

Another issue is that of relevant content of original thought.  What needs to be thought about is surely as important as being able to think.  Heidegger, for instance, constantly hammers us that it is Being itself that is the most important subject of thought.  Yet, we see a variety of issues occupying the great thinkers, such as problems of Free Will, Transcendental Mind Beyond Body, and Multiple Reality Belief Systems.  At one time, God was one of the big issues, but modern materialism tries to sneer at the subject of the definition or existence of God.  By what authority, fad or Socially Constructed Reality do we let it be decided for us as to what philosophical subject or issue is worth going into in an original way?  Clearly we need to also address the issue of philosophical authority and how it gets that way.  Is not the acceptance of authority over our thinking a refusal to do our own original thinking at all?  Only free thinking is real thinking.  How can we do meaningful original thinking if not freely in accord with the issue we decided from within ourselves is worth the effort? 

I and I alone decide what is worth my own original thinking.  You cannot tell me that, nor can I tell you that for yourself.  All authentic initiative in thinking means that you will have to pick the subject and get on with it.  Right now, I am concerned about the issue of thinking-in-itself.  That is my choice and I am in the space of forming original insights of my own about this.   So, your job is, once you have read this little essay, to ask yourself what is your own most important subject and then go ahead and produce something original and stimulating of your own.  You read my essay, someone reads your essay, and all serious, original thinkers are members of their own natural network or brotherhood of Meaningful Original Thinking.  All contributions are welcome and no one is right or wrong.  It is not an effort of trying to dominate all original thinking with some supposedly ultimate original thinking.  If I am doing it well, if you are doing it well and unnumbered others are doing it well, then that is the good thing about thinking and philosophy.  We are all unregistered members of this wonderful club of those who appreciate real thinking and like to participate.   

In one of my past lives (!), I was the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates.  I do not have to "prove" this.  Phenomenologically, "proof" of this or any other such claims lies wholly within the cognitive system that can access it.  If you understand reincarnation of the transcendental cognitive faculty, and if you have a knack for direct perception of such things, you will recognize my deathless Original Questioning Faculty as having a certain character, a sort of fingerprint of the soul.  If you have a hard time with the prospect of Reincarnation as a philosophical subject for investigation, if you are prejudiced against it and have decided that you "know"(?) there can be no such thing, then you will just have to struggle along as best you can and catch up with the rest of us later in some future lifetime of your own.  In the meantime, you can at least try to become an original thinker and not let yourself be endlessly hypnotized by the false philosophers of the modern technological atheism.  Try reading Robert Anton Wilson's The New Inquisition.  It will help you clear your head so that you can join us "qualia freaks" (people who think of themselves as real subjective souls and not merely biologically mechanized bodies of Eliminative Materialism) and thus question the authority of the current High Priest of Materialism, Daniel Dennett.  I can easily imagine Dennett saying about me,  "How can we take seriously anyone who claims to be a soul and Socrates reincarnated?" My natural rebuttal, of course, will be, "How can I take seriously any supposedly thinking biological robot that keeps claiming to be a Bright Self?"  Anyway, your job right now is to decide for yourself whether the debate of Folk Psychology (reincarnated original thinkers) versus Eliminative Materialism (short-lived flash-in-the pan biological robots) is the real deal as a philosophical issue or just a useless distraction from something far more important.  What say ye?  Anyway, whatever you decide, the Gabriel Chiron website is now here for anyone out there who needs this acute challenge to the current philosophical establishment of Scientific Digital Materialism in America and its ugly twin of Critical Realism in England.  These two highly dubious forms of philosophical authority are clearly the intellectual background or cosmological sanction for the freedom-destroying and lying governments of Bush and Blair.  If all citizens are nothing but biological robots, then there is no "sin" or "bad karma" that will come from programming them through government propaganda and disinformation.  Robots are simply programming robots and there is no need for folksy ethical issues to be raised.  There is no such thing as "conscience" so there is no Conscience to appeal to in Government, Science or Post-Modern Philosophy.  It is "dog eat dog and God save the women and kids."

Meaningful original thinking is good for you.  Join the real philosophy club.  Give it a whirl. 

You know, as I am thinking and writing along just now, I could not help but think of the Armenian esoteric philosopher, Gurdjieff.  Gurdjieff said that most men and women are indeed biological robots subject to Eliminative Materialism and that only some rare individuals actually have genuine free will and thinking and authentic consciousness, conscience and soulhood.  He said that it is only through very hard work on oneself that true Qualia or subjective faculties are developed.  So Folk Psychology only applies to those of us it applies to.  Thus, in this issue, it turns out that people(?) or, biological machines, like Dennett, are useful for evaluating the masses, our neighbours and even those close to us.  Prejudice is biological regional neuro-conditioning and Propaganda is the rational tool of the leading biological machines we erroneous call "people who lead people".

According to the Hindu Idealist philosopher, Aurobindo (who, by the way, was the immediate reincarnation of the English poet, William Blake, rather than an Avatar of Vishnu, just as Da Free John is the immediate incarnation of the German philosopher, Freidrich Nietzsche, rather than an Avatar of Vishnu), in his book The Life Divine, describes Eliminative Materialism as "materialist denial" and Folk Psychology as "ascetic denial".   He brilliantly lays it out that both these dogmatic imbalances of the intellect are an emergent cognitive exercise of the material and spiritual conjoint evolution of humanity.   Compare this to Gurdjieff and you have a dynamite inspiration for some fresh thinking of your own.  What do you think?

Fresh thinking about a big issue is good for you.  Take it up.  Why wait?  If you have a real original thinking reincarnational intellect and not just a clever brain of scientific materialism as a robot, the sky's the limit! You see, there is a real question as to whether you actually are a real self with genuine consciousness or just a set of digital sub-routines in the cytoskeletons of your bodily cells where the atomic and biological factors interface to support the possibility of authentic and resolute self-awareness of Being Here (Dasein).  In fact, existentially and ontologically, there are some heavy issues of Being and particularly of the real nature of Human Being.  Since most people probably are the Heideggerian "They Self" of collective hypnosis, idle talk and superficial curiosity (including spurious interest in thinking  and philosophy)  or units of Gurdjieffian mass automata in a pre-soul state of non-evolution, or mere "Guests" or Zen rather than "Hosts", or mere "Social Selves" rather than "Cosmic Selves" of Aresteh, or mere "Tonals" rather than "Naguals" of Matus, we have us a recursive issue that has been popping up in a variety of cultures over a very long time indeed.

Where am I really at on this issue?  Well, I believe that we lose an awful lot of physical memories when our body dies, which means that at death part of us, the physical self, really gets wiped out, but that some of our experiences have gotten themselves registered on subtler, higher dimensional levels of our being, which preserves them a whole lot longer if not permanently, and that permanent memories are on suprasubtle or causal levels, which enables reincarnation.  So, only the causal body of pure cognition has permanent memories and is thus the storehouse of previous personalities (Socrates, Blake, Nietzsche, whoever).   So death is a confirmation of both physical bodily materialism and subtler bodily spirituality or psychism.  What dies, dies; what goes on living, goes on living.  It is not an either/or except perhaps the Either/Or of Kierkegaard.  I also believe and even perceive at times that there is a fourth level, a supracausal or divine level of memories and experiences that is so far beyond most philosophy and thinking as to make a viable philosophical discussion on these matters virtually impossible except perhaps in India, though even in India the authorities are so dogmatic and prejudiced, so robotic, that you cannot get a real discussion with them.  They have some truly profound ancient philosophies dealing with the fourth level of memory and even beyond that, but today they just want to be authorities and not thinkers, which makes them subject to all the faults of Folk Psychology when it has not understood the all-too-real robo-biological states of their cognitive neurosystem.  It was only in the long-dead days of early Samkhya Darshan or Delinated Viewpoint, that they could really think.  When Shankaracharya defeated them in debate and installed dogmatic Vedanta, that was indeed the End of Original Thinking in India.  Poor buggers.  But the potential is still there, and they have some very high clues to work with if they can wake up.  If they themselves will read Heidegger, Gurdjieff, Aurobindo, Samhkya, Vedanta and the Hua Yen Sutra, as well as everything else that is relevant, following my hints here and there, and stop pretending they are some sort of Ultimate Uptight Gurus, they might be able to regenerate some Real Intellect, Sadbuddhi.  Of particular interest should be the Rajneesh commentary on Heraclitus called The Hidden Harmony.  But they should keep in mind that Rajneesh was a reincarnation of the Sufi, Lal Shabaz Qalandar, and not an Avatar of Vishnu.   There are too many Avatars of Vishnu in India these days.  It is like a hydra-headed serpent of Maya or Socially Constructed Reality of Hinduism.

The first step is to deconstruct everything you have read that purports to be serious thinking, but the second step is to reconstruct it all in the light of your own original thinking.   In fact, you should deconstruct and reconstruct your cosmogony on a regular basis, not just once, otherwise you are still fudging toward what Rorty calls "final vocabulary."  The danger is always there that real inquiry and thinking will cease so that you can feel like an authority.  Once you are a respected authority on something, your learning process is dead, just like your brain will soon be dead in the grave.  And if you have not developed any valid higher dimensional experiences of your own, there may be nothing left of your present bullshit existence.  Did you know for instance, and I personally can testify to this, that very tiny dosages of hemlock can get your spiritual self out of your body for awhile with you able to come back?  It was the K-space of ancient Greece and that was the sure way to get yourself happily entranced for soul-verifying higher experiences.  No ancient philosopher worth a shit would try to do original thinking without awakening the true intellect beyond the body.  Why do you think hemlock was the choice of natural self-execution for Socrates?  He just took a bigger than usual dose for a bigger than usual trip.   One has to pity the modern materialist philosophers who refuse to do the one thing that would set their original thinking free for the real thing.  A little mild anaesthetic can do wonders for the soul.  Of course, brain-in-a-jar characters like Dennett would claim that such Out-of-the-Body Experiences are epiphenomenal projections of the chemically altered neuro-system and that "flying dreams" without chemicals are nothing but hallucinations in sleep until the biological robot is decommissioned.   At any rate, one should make every effort to get out of the trap of the post-modern believe/disbelief brain pattern into a higher cognitive space for truly creative thinking.  If this feels too risky, then one should at least study Edward de Bono's books on lateral thinking and Idries Shah's books on contemporary Sufi learning processes.  So, even if you are unable to access higher dimensional consciousness, you will at least learn to stop denying and suppressing it.  You can become at least a slight beginner in original thinking, which is beyond prejudice and no longer totally subject to propaganda.  Why, hell, you might even register the significance of crop circles and extraterrestrial intelligence along with millions of other pre-thinkers. 

Real thinking is good for you.  It has always been good for me.  I want to testify to this.  It is very, very important to ask the big questions and not fall into the vanity of intellectual dogmatism.  And, yes, G.W. Bush is intellectually retarded along with the majority of the population of America, but that is not our direct problem.  Our direct problem is to develop philosophical and metaphysical ability. The retards are lifetimes away from Thought and will only learn from Shock and Downfall, not "shock and awe".  Most "souls" or causal bodies are empty with inert original intellects.  Only shock learning can create the beginnings of authentic Thought, Consciousness and Conscience.  This is how Evolution works.    

If Philosophy is not for you a personal cognitive revolution, you have been listening to the wrong explanations of it from retarded professors or hypnotized sociologists.  This is no bromide of "think for yourself."  Be a Self who can truly Think.  Develop some real thinking initiative.  Wake it up.