Many humans seem to think that thinking is our greatest accomplishment. Descartes famously took it one step further and penned down the line “I think, therefore I am”, suggesting that if you don’t think, you don’t exist.
So why would I be making a statement such as that we should all stop thinking? I could go on a Buddhist tantrum here and argue that this is exactly in line with the concept of non-existence, but I am not going there. Not today.
What I want to talk about is the use case for thinking in general. When we say thinking, we are usually referring to a broader use case of anything where we use our brain, as opposed to our heart or our gut.
There is a narrower definition of thinking however. Because much of our thinking we don’t do in the here and now, we do it in the past of the future. Think about it, when we are thinking it is mostly in relation to the future (“where shall we go for lunch tomorrow?”, “How do I figure out what university to go to?”) or to the past (“I really should not said that to him.”, “was that Sally that walked past just now?”).
My point here is; doing so never makes any sense. We have this dogma that we have to learn from our past and think about the future.
But when do we ever learn from the past? Civilizations have rising and collapsed for thousands of years and we never managed to stop that cycle. In relationships we keep falling for the wrong person. We keep applying for jobs we hate. Besides, no current situation is ever the same as the benchmark from the past that we use. Why else do we sometimes get an awesome outcome the third time after we did exactly the same thing twice before we horrible results?
And when did we ever accurately anticipate the future? We make so painstaking preparations as to where to study or who to marry, yet most of us end up finding our study useless for our career and almost half of us end our marriage in divorce.
So what’s the alternative? Gut feeling all the way? Sometimes that is indeed the best way, after all situations may get very complex and gut feeling is so much more that a feeling in your stomach; if is the combined force of all memories and experiences giving you a proposed solution. See it as our innate deep learning capability. When are brain just can’t come up with an answer, gut feeling is usually best.
However, our brain should be the first resort. How is that not thinking, you may ask? The difference is in a sharp awareness of all things present and a firm intent to NOT include the past or future into our view of the present. The result is a drastically different way of looking at things. There is only now and we observe now in all its detail and beauty. We are acutely aware of the all the conventions (stemming from our past experiences) trying to blur our view on the now and consciously boot them out of our brain. We are painfully aware of all the hopes and fears related to the future, which we hold, and we tell them to wait outside.
I may sound emotional here but what is left is profoundly beautiful here and now. I picture it similar to a person who only sees gray scales and is suddenly healed from their colour blindness. By taking this view, we eliminate expectation and disappointment, we get rid of regret and embarrassment. And with that out of the way we see all those little details of life that we would normally miss.
Denying the past and future a seat in the hear and now, is a level of awareness that you may not be used to. It takes practice to identify the past and the future in our vision of now, but hey, you can see it as a game of spot the differences, did you see that future hope hiding behind the land post? Did you see that past frustration standing at the counter? I have been playing this game for about a year now, and it has been a real oasis of calmness for me, like the silent eye of the storm.
Perhaps you join me there in the eye of the storm one day?
