“What men experience as ‘thinking’ is like a man standing before a billboard, watching an ever running electronic tickertape that continuously reports the news. This is a fair description of what ordinary men refer to as, ‘THEM – thinking.’
This is as passive an activity as the human creature can be part of, and does not make full use of the brain’s potential, (at least in a few men), and thus does not constitute, ‘thinking’ as it could be, (in those few people).
Accepting this automatic physiological activity in your brain to be the full report of what it is capable of doing, will keep you from ever getting everything settled in your mind. If your mental sight and analysis of life is limited to what passes through your head on that endless electronic tickertape, nothing is ever concluded, and nothing is ever understood in its satisfying entirety. You indeed, (as the mystics say): ‘Live as though in a fitful dream.’
The first, and always most profitable step is to think: think originally; think for yourself. This is impossible for ordinary men to do, (and damn-near so for us), and you, (that is, your brain), cannot be told by someone else’s brain, how-to-do-it. There are no, ‘How-to-do-it instructions’ available – nay, possible – for if the present state of your brain’s operations was capable of hearing, and actually comprehending such information it would already know it and be using it, (which it obviously is not).
You cannot teach a boulder to swim. If it could swim – it would be swimming. You cannot teach someone how to open their eyes/I’s to the untorted essence of everything. All you can do is encourage them to take up real-thinking, which will inevitably lead one out of the land of nod and fog. Even though, how to actually think-for-yourself cannot be described, how NOT to do it can. All you have to do is think, one way or the other, about what other people think-about, (as they call it).”
J.