A parable

“Teach me how to think like you think, please.” The college freshman requested of his philosophy teacher. The professor looked for a moment into the sky and said, “I could no more teach you how to think like me, than it would be possible to teach you to think like a baboon.”

The boy took a sigh and looked forlorn. The teacher sensing his frustration added, “I could show you how to think for yourself. So regardless of what you are you could be a thinking person. That would be much better.”

Answers

“Yes please kind sir, that would be a gracious gift.” The professor took a seat and began by speaking. He talked  about the differences between having thoughts which is common and controlling your thoughts in a civilized manner.

“The thing to be aware of is when thoughts create emotions.” The professor said in a matter of factly way. For instance lets say that I said something in class that makes you mad. And you stay mad and angry about what I said for three or four days.

Then the next time you come to my class, I say something else that makes you mad and you stay angry about that for four or five days. In essence what I have done is psychologically manipulated you into staying angry. If it makes you angry until you come back to my class, in which time the process starts all over again.

How to Grow

Now a wise person would let go of the anger and learn the lesson from the example instead of staying angry. But the emotional feeling of being angry keeps you from sorting out your thoughts. And as long as i keep making you angry then your thinking will not be able to change to learn the lesson.

The anger in your heart makes you have more thoughts that in turn fuels more feelings of being angry. Thus stoking a cycle of feelings and thoughts that if not stopped will result in your demise.

The truth is it’s no different than what the media of today’s world is doing. It’s designed to keep people stupid. It’s designed to keep their emotions stirred up to prevent them from thinking.

Keeping you from thinking a  thought through to completion. If you really want to know how to think! You have to move from ‘Just having thoughts.’ that pop into your head to actually thinking thoughts.

Going from having thoughts to thinking

That makes sense right?

Well when you explain it in that way, yeah it kind of does.

Generally a persons output matches their input, so if you get bad input then your going to have bad output. It’s like the computer programmers old motto, “Garbage in, Garbage out.”

The difference between us is that one person can learn to understand. If you are trained to know which is garbage and which is useful bits of information. Then you can be effective. Always take the good training you get a do better with it. While always remember the bad training you get and don’t do that crap.