The Illusion of thinker and thought
Clive
The fundamental assumption behind the construction of the mind is that
there exists a thinker. This translates in different situations into
the analyser, the censor, the controller, and so on. But the common
underlying assumption is that this thinker is separate from the
thoughts that produce it. So the mind proceeds as if the thinker can
alter, control what is thought.
Because the mind is conditioned this way, it has built around itself a
society, based on the same principles. In particular child raising and
education is arranged on this principle. A young person is encouraged
into seeing himself as a separate individual. Thus he is encouraged
into ambition, into the competition of one thinker against another.
And to achieve this, he is expected to make effort to control himself
Effort of the thinker to shape his thought is lauded. And when he
passes out of the education system, his place of employment is
similarly based. Every aspect of life reflects the construction of the
human mind as controller and controlled.
The problem is, it doesn't work.
Without going deeply into WHY it does not work, it clearly can be seen
that it does not, because of the chaos that human beings live in. In
actuality, one cannot even determine what the next thought will be.
The effort to control thought, to shape it into unnatural modes of
behaviour, to achieve eventually the ideas it has been conditioned
into, to become other than it is – these are all futile movements, and
worse than futile, because they bring about an enormous amount of
stress, of conflict in individuals. So much pain, so much
psychological disease.
So both individuals and society, being based on false premises, are in
chaos, and MUST be in chaos while this illusion holds sway.. And there
is no way the mind can resolve its problems by the application of the
usual methods, as the usual methods are all based on this fundamental
mis-conception, that there exists a thinker separate from his
thoughts, who can act on his thoughts and emotions.
If anything puzzles me, it is that this is not seen. There appears to
be a monumental blind spot, with even the cleverest philosophers, the
most adroit of politicians, simply not coming close to glimpsing this
one truth that is capable of transforming mankind and his societies.
Clive
David Lynch
I am, therefore I think!
david