Royal LePage - Your Community Realty, Independently Owned and Operated, (905) 731-2000
Jim Reid, Broker, (905) 731-2000
The following is the preface of a book I've been working on. It would be most kind of you to let me know if you think anyone would want to read a book such as this.
STOP THINKING STUPID
PREFACE
We enter this world just as innocent and unknowing as the other 100 million babies born each year. For a few seconds, we all begin with relatively the same intelligence and equal opportunity to make the best of our lives. With few exceptions, we are all born equals.
But almost instantly, each one of us is scooped up by people who will have a passion for directing, controlling, manipulating and moulding our minds and our behavior. Days, weeks, months and years will pass before we begin to learn how to take control over our own lives. In fact, most will never get truly free.
Freedom has many facets. Generally, we aspire to political freedom, individual freedom and spiritual freedom.
The first alludes to the amount of government authority and influence imposed over us. The second comprises the amount of freedom we have from the influences of other people, whilst spiritual freedom, relates to one's inner mental independence and self-control.
It is this latter freedom that often becomes a lifelong quest. It is spiritual freedom that enables us to cope and adapt to loss of freedoms in the other two areas. Tragically, less than 10% of humanity likely experiences all three freedoms.
After more than sixty years of battling political constraints and personal restraints imposed by others, I've finally learned how to enjoy greater spiritual freedom. This book is about this quest.
Spiritual freedom matures and grows as we experience life. Without it, life becomes a personal tyranny as we blame everyone else for our misery. But with it, we acquire self-confidence and an inner strength that enables us to overcome every adversity thrown our way.
Much of what we learn in life has to do with our external environment and circumstances. We learn enormous amounts about other people and other things, but very little is learned about ourself.
But STOP Thinking Stupid is all about us. It is about how we became who we are now. It is about how we can understand ourselves more completely. It reveals the secret ways we have been moulded and modified by other people. It is about finding our inner being and becoming who we should be.
I'm not going to impose upon you a boring paternalistic lecture filled with technical language and condemnations. This is a chance to laugh at ourselves, take a fresh look at some common sense ideas and concepts and to peer into the amazing universe inside our heads.
This book isn't written for intellectuals or psychologists or mental health professionals. It has been written for ordinary people of all age levels.
(If you pass this book on to your Mom or Dad, you may risk revealing to them the crap they dumped upon you. Just remember that they couldn't help who they became. We have all unwittingly made huge behavioural mistakes in our lives.)
This book loosely flows through three areas of analyses:
1. How our mind creates ideas by receiving data and information, (Chapters 1 - 5).
2. How ideas feed thinking processes and influence our behavior, (Chapters 6 - 8).
3. How our thoughts influence our character, (Chapters 9 - 15).
The Appendices provide some simple tools for exercising and training our minds.
Along the way, there are some personal examples of experiences and philosophical meanderings, (Diatribes), that relate to the content of each chapter.
Although the original purpose of this volume was to create a foundation for another more technical book about strategic thinking processes in organizations and businesses, this one has evolved into something more relevant to a broader audience.
As mentioned above, this book is about our struggle for freedom. It is about discovering that freedom doesn't come by battling the world around us. Freedom is hidden inside our mind. It dwells within our spirit.
Our quest for spiritual freedom can involve searching through the rubble of past relationships, or revisiting the disappointments from unrealized aspirations, or reliving the shameful condemnations from others or even our self. But it may also include remembering the lost elations of hard won victories and remembering the accolades that gave us moments of prideful jubilation. But quite likely, none of these mental explorations into our past will give us anything worth building upon.
Our personal past experiences provide insight into what mistakes we've made. But, they don't often reveal why we made all those mistakes. As you peer into your mind a little deeper, you will begin to see how your spiritual state or your spiritual level of immaturity affected your behaviour and your beliefs.
Spiritual freedom may be the "enlightenment" sought by the sages of past generations. It doesn't exist in our external world. It exists within us and enables us to discern the world around us in a non-threatening and self-confident demeanour.
(I remember a well intentioned business professor teaching us "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs". Unfortunately, his personal spiritual awareness was quite low, so he never could come up with a satisfactory description of "enlightenment " for us.)
Spiritual freedom enables us to walk without fear. It enables martyrs to accept impending death without fear and pain. It enables us to function purposely in this world, but still remain detached from this world. It provides the assurance we need to have that enables us to believe in the eternal life of our spiritual reality.
Spiritual awareness also helps us to understand changes in how we relate to the world around us as we grow older.
Our youth is focussed on discovering the human and physical boundaries of our world. As a young adult, we begin to learn about the dependencies, inter-dependencies and exploitations in relationships. In middle age we finally discover that the material world will never provide us with any lasting satisfactions.
As we approach "senior citizen" status we realize, that in addition to our immediate family, our relationship with our self and our relationship with God are the only things worth building upon.
In other words, we have to stop thinking the way we have grown to think. This external world offers no peace for our soul. (Perhaps this is why a large portion of humanity is dependant upon drugs and alcohol?)
Freedom is experienced within our spiritual consciousness in the mental space between us and our maker. Thus, we need to seek out how our conscious mind functions in order to understand our spirituality.
It is normal for us to just take our conscious thinking for granted. Rarely do we even try to figure out what is going on in there. (Women seem to figure out how we think about 20 years before men do. And some men just never get control over their thoughts.)
At some point, we begin to focus upon our ability to control our thoughts. This simple step also reveals that our mind can somehow examine itself. There is another one of us in there!
Of course, we can experience our spirituality without understanding it. Many feelings arise from within our spiritual self. More will be said about this later.
But to begin with, we need to start analyzing why we have done so much wrong thinking during past years, months, weeks and minutes.
Most of us grow up with the idea that if we are going to be successful, we need to get as much knowledge as possible. Yet, after becoming a vast resource of useless information, we still mess up our lives. Why is this?
Our problem is that once we obtain some knowledge, we become self-confident and put our minds on "cruise-control". We don't mature beyond filling our minds with junk food knowledge.
For many of us, three to five years of University created an obesity of knowledge in our brains. It truly didn't make us more intelligent as the IQ tests would suggest.
It just reassured our future corporate masters that were capable of comprehending their business processes. They perceived us as equivalent to a 200Giga-Byte hard drive in a world of 120 Mega-Byte people!
In the developed world, our minds have been filled with a greater than average range of thoughts, but there is no proof that we can think effectively. Higher education merely tends to create a false confidence in people. It often just makes us better equipped to make a more complex mess out of our own lives.
(At this point, I don't want to offend or alienate those of atheistic or agnostic persuasions. I ask you to humour me somewhat and at least try to understand another perspective and perhaps understand how it was derived.)
The main cause of our failures is stupid thinking. It is stupid thinking to rely upon knowledge as a foundation for our successful growth and development.
In fact, three intellectual properties are prerequisites for success in life. Everything is accomplished through Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge:
*By wisdom the Lord laid the earth's foundations,
*By understanding he set the heavens in place:
*By his knowledge the deeps were divided, and the clouds let drop the dew. - Proverbs 3:19-20
Three thousand years ago it was written down that God shares these three intellectual properties with humanity. When God set about to create a world for human existence, he used his wisdom to determine that there must be a foundation or anchor for his creation. Then from his infinite understanding about how things relate to each other he created the heavens. And then through his omniscient knowledge of how everything works he created the oceans and the clouds.
Every one of us has been given free access to these powerful intellectual properties of wisdom, understanding and knowledge. Yet few of us ever exploit them to our full benefit.
We casually access them through our minds. But we rarely discern that all three are very unique. Individually, each one is a unique canvass from which we picture the world around us.
Down through the ages, there appears to be an almost universal agreement by philosophers that Wisdom comes from God through a spiritual channel. Wisdom is seen as a thought that conforms to God's intended plans and wishes.
Wisdom requires that we act in a manner that will benefit others and/or ourselves over the longer term. There is unlikely any wisdom behind decisions that produce short-term gains.
Wisdom is often perceived as a "common sense" that is accessible to all who are prepared to exercise self-control or perhaps self-sacrifice. No amount of study, research or education guarantees wisdom. It is by trial and error that each one of us is given the opportunity to acquire some wisdom.
In Chapter 14, we will look at how all of us can acquire more wisdom. (Proverbs 1-9 describes Wisdom. There is an abbreviated summary of biblical wisdom in Appendix B)
Understanding occurs when our mind focuses upon reality and truth. It requires us to analyze the existing information, perhaps acquire more information, and then discern if our understanding is truthful.
In order to truly understand something, we should uncover the purpose, meaning or intention of the information. However, all too often we assume the correctness of our understanding of a purpose, meaning or intention and thus acquire a false and incorrect understanding in our mind.
These false understandings in our minds form incorrect values, beliefs and attitudes, which lead us into all sorts of problems. Unfortunately, we often believe that we understand something, but in fact we completely misunderstand it&ldots; just ask your spouse!
We'll be examining these important values, beliefs and attitudes later.
Our experiences in life provide a range of inputs to our mind, which we recognize as knowledge. Knowledge is a record in our minds of the data and information that we have acquired and experienced. It is like a database of facts.
Things that we don't experience or observe are not part of our personal knowledge database. Thus, thoughts or communications that our minds haven't received yet, are not part of our knowledge database.
Also, the ways we physically and spiritually receive and process our life experiences can cause us to acquire false knowledge. Then, we may use this incomplete or erroneous knowledge in making all sorts of incorrect conclusions and foolish decisions.
Thus, for all of us our minds are pregnant with: Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge, plus Foolishness, Misunderstandings and Ignorance.
Furthermore, when we almost magically discover congruence between Wisdom, Understanding and Knowledge our lives advance; however, when we ignore their interplay our lives recede. Similarly, most of life's disasters occur when Knowledge and Understanding are present, but Wisdom is absent.
Soon, you will be exposed to observations about how our mind works and how we can acquire more effective control over it. With improved mental control skills, we can exert more constructive and positive direction over our minds, our bodies and our behavior.
Effective mental self-control will produce a more balanced mental state and more frequent success in overcoming life's trials and tribulations.
After many years of "willy-nilly" laying my brilliant and clever ideas and proposals on boardroom tables, I finally forced my mind to immobilize my tongue. Thereafter, only at the end of meetings would I share my thoughts. From thence forward, my status rose and my power and influence grew.
It was this wrestling with my mind that enabled me to over-come not just some of my physical foolishness, but also it enabled me to see how my mind was manipulating me.
I hope you enjoy your visit with me into the depths and recesses of your mind!