Do You Really ‘Think’ or Do You Merely ‘Think You Think’?

Are you thinking or thinking you’re thinkingWell I keep reflecting on the thought of Thomas Troward.  I just find it so alluring.

Here are some of his words that draw my attention recently:  “To give right direction to the thoughts of ignorant thinkers is the purpose of much religious teaching, which these uninstructed ones must accept by faith in bare authority because they are unable to realise its true import”.

Troward’s assumption as he wrote those words was that there is a lot of disordered thinking going on in the world.

People are confused in their thinking, wouldn’t you say?

So the purpose of the great religious thinkers was to help people rectify their thinking.  People felt lost and confused.  They felt alone and afraid.  They could not make sense of life on this earth.

The religious thinkers understood that there is ‘order’ and that this was so because they knew something of God and perceived that this Higher Intelligence was very ordered in Its thinking.  This was evident in how the whole Universe hangs together without planets crashing into each other at every turn and so on. 

There is also the beautiful ordered symmetry of a flower.  Surely this is not the result of random and chaotic thinking.

These religious thinkers called people out of the nonesense of their fearful, irratioanl and superstitious thinking.

But people often were not nurtured into their own ability to think.  They were simply told to follow the laws of the church or by faith to accept the teachings of the teachers and not try to figure things out for themselves.

This may not have been because the teachers did not want to teach this but becaue people were so caught in their fears and dis-ordered thinking that they were not believing they could think it out for themselves.

But good teachers always led their people to realise their connection with the Source of Life… The Spirt Itself.  Once connected to Spirit the student was ready to enter upon the journey of individual thinking and personal discovery.

But that journey is not that easy.  There are a lot of fears to be walked through on the way out of fearful and chaotic thinking.  Human thought is very ‘unregulated’ would you not agree?

People think they think, but in fact they are merely following the trends and suggestions hammered into them by peers and the media.  They do their thinking based on the nonesense all around them.  They do their thinking ‘based’ on outside facts.  They have to discover how to ‘think from the ‘inside’.  We might say the ‘social proof’ is the basis of their thinking and not the Source of all thought. 

So once a person discovers the connection with Spirit within they are called to move out of the phenomenon of unregulated thought.

Being connected with Spirit within they are numbered now with the so called ‘instructed’ teachers and they start the courageous journey out of unregulated or chaotic thinking.

Their purpose becomes, writes Troward: “…hence the great object to which the instructed mind directs its power is to free itself  from the entaglement of disordered thought, and to help others do the same. To escape this entaglement is to attain perfect Liberty which is perfect Power.”

The perfect Liberty Troward speaks of is the same as that spoken of in the words of St. Paul : “for freedom you have been set free.”  Hence the purpose for each one of us if to be “free” that means to have the courage to learn to think for ourselves from within realizing we are One with Spirit and that we each have a safe Guide to follow and be instructed by, if only we learn to trust that.

Of course this means we have all manner of Power within, if we dare trust that and begin to live our lives accordingly.     You and me

are meant to learn to think from within and to break away from that field (of thinking we are thinking) that we could call ‘social conscience’ or thinking from outside of ourselves, based on what the current trends are and what others, or some perceived authority is saying.  No… I am Free.  I have the Author of Life Guiding me.  I am Powerful because I can think from within my Self.

Obviously this would take many more words to clarify and the purpose of this blog is not to write a book.  So I’ll leave it at that for now.

Blessings and Peace

Norm