Did You Think Today?

"The world is hostile to serious thought. Our lives are cluttered with barriers that sear our minds with the habit of lazy, shallow thinking. Consider the insipid television and movies that pass for entertainment, transparently hostile toward anything approximating deep thought. Consider the overstimulated, technology-driven, information saturated nature of modern life. It is too noisy for us to hear ourselves think, yet so omnipresent and addictive that silence disquiets us. Even within respected circles of society, intellectuals are plagued by fundamental flaws in their thinking. Consider the education and scientific communities, which staunchly stand by the unprovable theory of evolution. Formal education can actually be a hindrance to quality thought - emphasizing the wrong subjects, approaching certain subjects improperly, bullying students into specific political and/or intellectual mind-sets, fostering a destructive social atmosphere. Little wonder that many of the great men and women of history were self-educated. How we think is critical. Our thoughts govern our moods, our attitudes, our actions. Thinking is the core of our being. Superficial, unfocused thinking produces a superficial, unfocused life. We are what we think. Trouble is, generally we are not taught how to think. It is a skill we are expected to know, without specific instruction. What is the quality of your thinking? Are you skilled at analyzing problems? Are you able to concentrate on things you want to concentrate on, or are you easily distracted? Vigorous thinking is fundamentally a matter of replacing inferior thoughts with quality thoughts. You cannot think shallow thoughts and deep thoughts at the same time - it's one or the other. So first you must push out, put off and purge the one in order to clear space for the other. You must first expunge the shallow thought that so easily fills your mind, and then fill that mental vacuum with quality thought." - Anonymous