The thinking of typical modern Man, and indeed of everyone here-and-now for most of the time; is a mundane business - a shallow, superficial, and malign affair.
Mundane Thinking consists of little more than semi-automatic processing of materials given us from externally (eg from mass and social media, or some other form of totalitarian propaganda) in accordance with theories and ideologies given us from these same sources.
Mundane Thinking persists relentlessly to fill our consciousness because it is easy, because it is what fits into the nature of public discourse - and from some mixture of sheer habit with addiction.
But Mundane Thinking is a curse - a killing-curse of modern Man; all the worse for having become largely spontaneous as well as imposed by the conditions of officialdom. workplaces, and friendship groups alike.
If offers us nothing substantive, it cuts us off from people the world, and matters of the spiritual and the divine.
We moderns "live in our thoughts"... but these thoughts offer - at best - transitory stimulation or palliative therapy from fears and despair; but without even the possibility of profound fulfilment or hope.
Mundane thinking is, indeed, a kind of living-death, or death amidst Life.
Consequently, there is a powerful urge to escape Mundane Thinking - somehow. But mistakenly or with deliberate intent to subvert, mundane thinking gets equated with thinking-as-such.
Therefore; most of modern spirituality is concerned with getting rid of thinking - the escape route of stopping thinking-as-such; one way or another.
At its highest, the method is to practice some kind of oneness spirituality by rigorous meditational training - this derived from Hinduism, Sufism, Buddhism or the negative theology type of Christian mysticism.
The goal is to Stop Thinking and Just Be; to stop the relentless internal chatter of everyday matters; to reduce responsively- and attachment-to external stimuli...
Also to reduce awareness of the Self -- to seek silence, peace, contemplation, passive immersion in reality, or assimilation to "the divine" when the divine is conceptualized as everything-that-is.
But I regard the ideal of stopping thinking as itself an evil. It is to seek a kind of suicide, or not-being.
It is to go against what I understand to be God's primary creative will, of creating children of God and enabling these children spiritually to grow us to God's level of loving goodness and consciousness, by following Jesus Christ to salvation.
So that anyone who personally desires to follow Jesus Christ to post-mortal resurrected eternal life in Heaven, cannot do so by the suppression then elimination of thinking.
But given the nigh-intolerable horribleness of Mundane Thinking - what can instead be done?
If Not not-thinking - then What?
The answer (first discerned by Rudolf Steiner, I think) is that we accept our destiny to live in our thinking - but seek to to transform that thinking...
To strengthen our thinking so that it become deeper; more powerfully motivating and emotionally evocative...
To recognize that this thinking is connected directly with other people, other Beings of many kinds; including connected with divine creation itself. (Because creation consists of many living and conscious Beings, with whom we can connect in thinking.)
Connecting in our thinking with Jesus Christ/ the Holy Ghost.
To conclude: In recognizing the intolerability of a life spent trapped in Mundane Thinking; instead of trying to escape thinking altogether, we ought to accept and embrace that thinking is basically Good.
Thinking is Good in the sense that we modern people are destined to live in our thinking.
God wants this from us, in this time and place, and has set-up our situation thus.
Our goal ought therefore be to work on our thinking: which means better to understand what thinking can be and should be; and then to work on the nature of our thinking in hope of making it align with God's creative intentions and our intent of salvation.
Including a conscious relationship with reality - a relationship that happens in our thoughts.
Primarily; to live in our thoughts: and make those thoughts worth living-in.
Well I suppose it could be argued that those rigorous ascetic practices were designed to develop 'reality-connected thinking'. I can agree that this 'cessation of thoughts' is akin to a form of 'self-death' - however my understanding is that it's only a temporary state which allows the practitioner to 'glimpse the divine' and achieve the awareness that most of what passes as 'thinking' is just chatter generated by our physical embodiment.
ReplyDeleteFrom memory one of the earliest meanings of 'Aryan' was 'twice-born' implying that an individual had gone through some sort of trial or initiation where death was a real danger. However I suspect that this path has been closed off to most of us for quite some time, hence the need for Jesus' message.