Learn focused, systematic thinking!

As with so many other things, this ultimately comes down to awareness. And I’ve thought a lot about the importance of what is going on inside our heads. What I’ve thought less about, is how we consciously direct these processes. How we can do so to focus and sharpen our thinking. 

Now, this happens spontaneously as I take the time to sit down and write down my thoughts on a daily basis, as I do with this blog. But I can definitely be more careful and stringent in my approach. I can be more deliberate in how I practice this skill. 

I believe that focused, systematic thinking is something that also fosters more present moment awareness. The question: “What do I really mean with what I say?” is not a trivial one. Because this is in no way obvious. To be clear, I’m here talking about both what we say in our day to day speech, and what we write. Which is two separate things, but also two things that overlap to a large degree. If you, for example, become more clear and focused in your writing, it will have an effect on your speech, and vice versa. But there will not be a perfect causal relationship, mainly because speech is direct, is generally a dialogue and entails a completely different kind of connection. This while writing is generally a one way communication that gives room for more afterthought and separates the sender and receiver in both time and space. 

What I’ve realized is that it does not really matter how smart we are. If we acquire the habit of being sloppy with our thoughts, the thoughts that we produce will be sloppy. And even thought our thoughts is not the only tool that we have at our disposal when we try to understand ourselves and the world (there is also emotions, intuition and direct sensory experience), they are an important one. One that is indispensable if we want to orient ourselves in the world properly. And it all starts with being aware of what we are actually saying and thinking and what it implies. If you think that this is obvious, you probably engage in sloppy thinking.

How we label things and people PART 2

Another thing that we label is behavior. This can also include speech. It goes something like this: “This is what you’re doing is called.” And we often add: “And that means this.” And perhaps: “And that makes you such and such a person.” We can even discuss the label that we’ve slapped on someone with our friends, what it means and get them to agree that the person is bad because of it. 

A funny thing is that we can even do it in the following manner: “What you are doing right now is called labelling. That makes you a labeler. And labelers are bad people.”

What I’ve come to realize, is that the less you label, the more open you become to the world. It does of course not mean to indiscriminately say yes to everything. There are lots of things in the world that I’ve chosen to reject after careful consideration. And some after not so careful consideration. There are certain beliefs that don’t need much deliberation to be dismissed, such as racism or the belief in authoritarianism. But what we should be careful about, is slapping the label “racist” on someone that doesn’t consider him- or herself as such. 

We can even develop whole thought systems around why we are allowed the luxury of labelling someone while someone else is not allowed to do so. Why not, instead, just meet people with an open mind and assume that they mean what they say about themselves. In an existence that is so governed by unconscious forces anyway, it’s better to turn one’s eyes towards oneself to see if what one says or does means something else that what we think, than to try and extract the hidden meaning behind someone else’s actions or words and slap a label on them. And you can ask yourself how many times confronting someone’s behavior with a label. 

But by not labeling, you try to look at things simply as they are and not through a filter of pre-conceived notions about them. This is difficult and I’m certainly no expert at it. It is rather a habit that we need to keep reminding ourselves of over and over again. But with time, just with any change of perspective, we become conscious of it more and more often. The first step is of course to understand that there is such a thing as labelling, that we engage in it and that it affects how we treat other people and life in general.

How we label things and people PART 1

We use labels to judge things or people as good or bad. When we label something it invoke images in our heads with different degrees of clarity. 

This is a part of our inner life that I find interesting. Because when we attach a label to something we can dismiss it without looking into it any further. I like to use examples that have relevance beyond just serving as an example. Therefore I would like to use the label “New Age”. “New Age” is a label that has been attached to a variety of works within spirituality, of which many have very little in common. If we stick to books, they can be anything from books about interdimensional aliens, lost civilizations or spirit guides, to very practical books about mindfulness or how to release emotions. 

I’m very skeptical towards the whole “smorgasbord” approach to spirituality that we often find within the New Age. Because if we can just discard anything we don’t like, we risk missing learning hard but valuable lessons about how things work. And we also may end up with a lot of width without depth in our spiritual lives and hence end up going nowhere.

But this is just my experience. It might work well for someone else. In the end, all we can really talk about is our own experience. And even that is subject to loads of potential for error.

But I’ve also found much of the more practical stuff in the New Age very helpful. Because there are a lot of teachings that have just brought out the essential of much older teachings. And these can quite easily be tested. I will not get into too much detail about how very different teachings get labelled New Age, since this is not the topic of this post. So I will just mention briefly that this in itself is another problem with labels. That they easily become very broad, so that very different things get dismissed under the same label.

The thing is that for a long time, I tended to dismiss anything labelled New Age as a bunch of mumbo jumbo, practiced by people that have very little understanding of what they are playing around with. I equated it with more or less living in a fantasy world. And so I missed out on a lot of things and judged people before hearing them out.

My point is simple. What I said above can be applied to anything in life where labels are involved. Especially if we attach a label to someone that does not define him/herself as such. Labels close us off. They make us stop listening. They make us right and others wrong. They make us think that we know what others stand for and what they are going to say. They affect how we interact with other people in a very negative manner. I know. Because I’ve done a lot of labelling throughout my life. 

Debating...

What I’m saying here, is not to say that an open debate is not important. In fact, I believe the opposite. In a world in crisis with loads of differing opinions and views about what is going on, it is crucial that all voices can be heard in an open, uncensored debate. That is not exactly what is happening today, but that is not the topic of today’s post. What I am saying, is that debating is very far from a reliable way of getting to the truth.

In debating, in the best case scenarios, the one that has the best arguments and the best rhetoric wins. But it also depends on the audience. Does the audience favor one debater over the other, for irrelevant reasons, such as that one view is simply more popular and cool than the other? Can the topic be objectively proven by logic and rational arguments? What of issues that fundamentally are about subjective experience, such as God or spirituality? What about the fact that everything ultimately is subjective experience?

When we form beliefs and opinions

I’m going to go ahead and sound really dumb here. But maybe it becomes one of those the-emperor-is-naked moments to some people. What I’m going to say is that when I analyze how I’ve formed a belief or opinion, it has often not been because of some rational deliberation. 

I don’t have a concrete example, so I’m going to make one up that is representative of this: I hear someone whose judgment I trust express a belief or opinion about something. I find what the person says fairly reasonable and a few of my own experiences actually support what he/she is saying. Maybe it’s one possible conclusion that can be drawn from what I already know. Here I want to pause for a second, because this is important. Here, I believe, is where many people go wrong. We know A and that from A B might follow. But not necessarily. Then someone might offer some ideas that contradict B. But since I’ve already made an emotional investment in B, I find reasons to discard those ideas. And instead I find other ideas, that I don’t at all put under the same scrutiny, that support B. And so I hold on to B for reasons that are in no way reasonable. 

Seeing it written out like this, this looks pretty absurd. But in reality this is, at least in my case, how my beliefs often are formed, when I don’t pay attention to what is going on inside my head. Which is something that happens quite regularly, even if I’m becoming better and better at it. And if you say: "This would never happen to me", chances are that you haven't really payed attention to your thought processes.