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Thinking more/thinking less
A sign in a shop window reads “Pray less. Think more.” Seeing it on Tucson’s 4th Avenue, a commercial street in a socially and politically liberal neighborhood, has me imagining that the dual directive is an anti-fundamentalist or -evangelist corrective, perhaps to a sign or bumper sticker that reads “Pray more. Think less.” If my supposition is true, then praying less and thinking more offers itself as a solution to people’s self-serving, egotistic, and mindless–or simple-minded–requests of a deity.
“Pray less. Think more” implicitly defines thinking as rational–sensible, reasoned, and analytical–and implicitly assumes that reason produces good outcomes. However, thinking defined differently, as in “You think too much,” is obsessive and unproductive. Or, “You think too much” can operate as an anti-intellectual’s trashing of an intellectual, if we define an intellectual as a mentally active person.
Being a scholar and having had a career in academia, my impression is that intellectuals tend to believe that thinking, the rational kind, presents facts accurately and leads to considered opinions and calm deliberation. Consequently, thinking is the best and most realistic way to solve problems. Reasoning is surely better than beating up people or yelling at them. Yet, reasoning, because it’s a human activity, has the human quality of being reactive, even when used by someone who can critique her own positions and arguments, because everyone is subject to their own persuasions, whether we call them biases, ideologies, or just likes and dislikes. Persuasions can be hidden to oneself or so embarrassingly glaring and incriminating to ourselves that we are ashamed to own up to them. Reactivity indicates imbalance. Thus, the supposed balanced nature of reasoned argument falters.
To state the obvious, thinking avoids or dispenses with the body, but the obvious needs stating in this case. In our society, which encourages thinking things through before acting, whether personally or governmentally, the body is untrustworthy. Despite the growing respect for holistic tools, such as integrative medicine, our society considers the body to be unreasonable–cramping, aching, or getting ill without any cause or explanation that we can discern. By dismissing the body, thinking dismisses direct experience, without which a person can never come to equanimous terms with reality. The indirectness of thinking adds and subtracts from reality. Selectivity both establishes and limits a fine argument.
People tend to be remarkably undiscerning when it comes to the body with which they go about their lives; often in blithe oblivion, despite the assertion, “I know my body,” from people who strike us as inexperienced in little more than gross sensations such as acute or recurrent pain or genital orgasm.
In appreciation of the rational, we may praise it for bringing us to awareness. Ah, the surprises and satisfactions of awareness built on explaining, theorizing, and justification. Thinking can bring me to an awareness of social problems, of literary brilliance and the beauty of dead leaves and bougainvillea petals that blow to the front door of my house, of justifications for leaving a relationship or entering one. But thinking cannot get rid of feelings, which, alive in the body, even when submerged within it, substantially direct a person’s life, no matter that he is profoundly forgetful of them, let alone unable to name them. (Naming can be beside the point, an exercise in the kind of interpretations that may promote self-recriminations or undue pats on the back.)
I find thinking to be fun. Right now, as I write this post. Yet, the body’s very subtly ever-changing nature, which a person can feel when being still and silent, gives the thinker–and I don’t mean that in any hifalutin way–a chance for the mind to stop commenting, to stop confiscating the reality, which the body feels, of impermanence. Dogmas, doctrines, theories, beliefs–people hold firm to them, like they’re real, real as in unchanging and not to be changed. Talk about hard thinking. Holding thoughts, whether theories, beliefs, etc., in an iron grip. People are also capable of holding thoughts softly, the way that a grown-up holds a child, whose tears, moods, and actions the adult sees changing quickly. Thinking is a useful tool, used for both serious and playful purposes, that the body enhances.
- June 11, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 0
