The four pillars of clear thinking
I talk about the four pillars of mental functioning crucial to the next stage of our spiritual evolution
Clear thinking is not easy. And what do I mean by clear thinking? It is the sort of thinking that allows you to truly understand what you are thinking about, and react based on that knowledge to the best of your ability.
In modern society, we typically only engage in one sort of thinking, and that is of the analytical kind. Emotions and instinct may guide our option but we hardly ever engage our brain in those domains. But actually, there are four different ways of thinking that go beyond the analytical in today's supposedly rational world.
If you want to understand yourself in the context of modern society, you must expand your mind to include these four ways of thinking so that you can clearly understand existence.
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Analytical
The analytical method of thinking is computational thinking, and it is the most primitive way of thinking. It operates by taking facts and analyzing them with logic, mathematics, and rationality. It is the sort of thinking with a series of facts and deductions from those facts.
Analytical thinking is the sort of thinking we are taught at school and the sort of thinking we are supposed to engage in to solve problems in our life. From an early age, children are taught that if they have serious interests, they should pursue those interests by selecting a predefined path such as a degree at school and then selecting a job from a finite and well-defined set.
If you have problems and see a psychologist, they might tell you about personality types and ego. That is the analytical approach. Today’s approach to “green” energy as a response to climate change is mainly based on analytic thinking.
Many people never go beyond the analytic method of thinking, and that makes them automatons. The analytic method is the perfect accompaniment to filling in predefined roles in society and operating within its rules.
But analytical thinking is blind because by itself, it makes a person robotic. It does not have access to wisdom and it cannot go beyond the scientific.
Naturalistic
The naturalistic way of thinking is merely the act of perceiving your existence in the context of the rest of the universe. It is the infusion of the nature of the universe within your own body and mind. It can go beyond analytic thinking by connecting your human insight to nature.
In modern society, the love of being in nature is often distilled into some sort of hobby: hiking, bird watching, and camping. But the true love of nature goes beyond being a hobby. It originates from our very existence and is crucial for a fully-functioning mind.
Naturalistic thinking is to allow your own thoughts and knowledge to exist alongside our fundamental connection to the universe and to all living things. This accompaniment cannot be obtained by analytic thinking as is taught in school. It must be obtained by simply being surrounded by nature and perceiving the nature of all things.
We have surrounded ourselves by technology, and of course, from a philosophical point of view, technology is part of nature since we are natural. But, technology is a manifestation of our own nature and it is an egoistical manifestation in the sense that it obscures the connection with other living things and the rest of nature. Therefore, technology obscures our naturalistic thinking. Hence, naturalistic thinking involves frequently disconnecting from technology.
To think in a naturalistic way, we must surrender to nature and allow ourselves to exist without analytical thinking in nature. We must feel the love of nature while being immersed in it. This love is independent from what people may call intellectual admiration. It is a fundamental spiritual strand within us that must be nurtured.
Once we combine naturalistic thinking with analytic thinking, we will gain wisdom.
Meditative
Even though analytic thinking and naturalistic thinking seem complete, they are not exactly. The third pillar of a clear and true mind is the meditative thinking. Meditative thinking involves complete focus and awareness on breathing as it is done in Zen Buddhism and some other practices.
Whereas naturalistic thinking is the experience of the fundamental connection to all of the universe, meditative thinking is a way of describing the process that refines the mind through meditation. In a sense then, meditative thinking is not actually a mode of thinking itself, but a way of being that comes from meditation.
And yet, it is only through meditative thinking that we can center ourselves in the universe given that we have achieved the ability of analytical and naturalistic thinking. Therefore, it is crucial to incorporate meditative thinking in existence, along with naturalistic and analytic thinking.
Awareness of things
The final mode of thought is subtly different than all other modes of thought. It is the mode of thought that occurs within us because the nature of our minds is to be conditioned to ways of thinking. The mode of awareness is the way of thinking to discover our conditioned ways, not only through experience but through instinct.
Awareness is the acknowledgement that we have a deterministic, instinctual component that is the limitation of our corporeal bodies. Awareness is the unity with our defined physical parameters.
True awareness arises when we observe all details and all actions, and is a result of meditative thinking. When we are aware, we are aware of our instinctual and conditioned nature, and that we are partially acting as a cohesion of molecules assembled into a complex machine. The free-thinking and living part of us is the fundamental strand of the universe that defines what it means to exist, but it cannot operate without a deterministic component.
Awareness means to sense the component of life that is our instinctual response, for it is only by understanding our instinctual responses that we can transcend those responses. The state of constant awareness is the next stage of conscious evolution. Since true awareness as a state of conscious awareness is only partially developed in human existence, we must work very hard through the three other pillars of thought in order to develop it.
Conclusion
Human beings are reaching a state of crisis that transcends all other crises because we are slowly coming to the realization that our primarily analytic state is in disharmony with the nature of the universe. The disharmony is necessary because the evolution of increasingly complex forms of consciousness necessarily give rises to the primitive way of analytical thinking. This is a fundamental aspect of the universe that transcends scientific analysis.
And yet, the universe is thriving for the disharmony to transmute into harmony, and humanity is part of that transmutation. A necessary part of that transmutation is the realization of each of the four modes of thinking that I have written about, and we can only realize our next step as existing beings through this effort.
Thank you for this. I will share widely within my circles