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 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