Thinking about Thinking:

In college, if a professor was lazy,
she or he could always ask question like:

"Compare and contrast the Crusades and
Casablanca."

Or more likely:
"Compare and contrast Faulkner's Sound and Fury
and Conrad's Heart of Darkness."

Hopefully the last question would come in a course on Conrad and Faulkner.

And, lazy, as the question is or was,
it still set us up for how to use our thinking at
what it does best.

Contrast. Find Differences.
Notice differences.
Compare two or three things.

Now, this can lead to a life of hell
if we add emotions to this and compare,
say,
ourselves,
to say,
Mozart or Bob Dylan in terms of creative output.

(Those in their league probably aren't reading this,
so we'll stick with the "normal," non genius run of humanity.)

And comparing ourselves to Bob or to Wolfie,
we add on the overtone: oh gad, what's the matter with me.

Then we've used thinking to drive ourselves into suffering.

And as the book goes along, we'll see that most of our so-called "suffering"
comes from so-called thinking.

And what if we were to must play around with thinking
as thinking.

We could imagine ourselves 3 inches taller or shorter.

We could imagine being born 50 or 100 years earlier, or later.

We could look at various problems in our life and set out to list 3 ways
that we've already tried to solve them, and then imagine up 5 more ways we
might go about that.

We could watch ourselves when we are happy
and discover our posture and breathing then,
and experiment around to find 3 other ways of being happy
in slightly different postures and breathing.

Likewise with unhappiness,
we could discover posture and breathing
and search for three different postures and breathing patterns
in which to be unhappy.

Careful though:
getting curious and changing things
around
could undermine our unhappiness.

Oh, well, worse things have happened.

Today is the day of playing with playing with
thinking.

Mess around with ideas
options
possibilities
contrasts
comparisons
and
other stuff

in your mind.


It's your mind. Practice playing it.