• George Bernard Shaw: "Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation by thinking once or twice a week."

About ten years ago, for my Word Gems collection, I posted numerous quotations from history’s notables on the subject of thinking. Assertions, such as this one by Shaw, made no sense to me, and I wondered about what he was getting at. I’m starting to understand.

• William James: "A great many people think they are thinking when they are rearranging their prejudices."

One of the best teachers I’ve discovered on this subject is Eckhart Tolle. It was he who helped me to see that much of what we call thinking is merely the chattering Ego, the Great False Self, aggrandizing, perpetuating, power-posturing, itself. The Ego loves to endlessly replay the horror movies of the past (“I will never forget or forgive what he or she did to me!”); or, of the future (“I can’t wait for such-and-such to happen, and then I will be happy”).

• Eckhart Tolle: “I would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people's thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.”

That which commonly passes for thinking is merely the Ego seeking its own narrow objectives; rich or poor; educated or illiterate; religious or atheistic; culturally sophisticated or red-neck, it makes no difference… The great masses are led around by what Tolle refers to as the autocratic and domineering Ego.

The editorial comments of Camille Paglia often make me smile. Notice, in her assessment of partisan politics, the many untoward designs of the self-absorbed Ego…

Political ideologues "automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote ‘critical thinking,’ which sounds good but is, in fact, just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms  ... The [politically-correct] brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled.”

Believing your own propaganda

Camille is right - however, these things apply not only to those involved in politics. Many of us, too many, do not consider… we just react… we defend tired propositions… many of which were mindlessly accepted from parents and never subjected to the critical light of day… and the Ego defends these thread-bare propositions… because it has identified, closely linked itself, with them; which means, when we say we are defending an idea, we are really defending … ourselves … and, therefore, winning an argument sometimes becomes a matter of very survival… to the Ego… which has attached itself to these mental thought-forms.

What should thinking be?

• Gerald Holton, Einstein, History, and Other Passions: "In the final chapter entitled What, Precisely, is Thinking? ... Einstein's answer is particularly insightful ... ‘One must allow the theoretician his imagination, for there is no other possible way for reaching the goal. In any case, it is not an aimless imagination but a search for the logically simplest possibilities and their consequences' … Einstein continued to ask questions about the world that children are taught not to ask.”

But most people do not have “questions.”

They do not “search.”

And if the Ego searches at all, it will be only to seek further entrenchment within, and support for, its thought-identified positions.

Thinking, for most people, is a tawdry process of shooting an arrow into a wall and then drawing a bulls-eye around the point!

We search for confirmation of our parochial views, block out what we don’t like, and then call this “research.” We go shopping for Ph.D.’s who are sympathetic to our position, reject those who disagree, and pontificate that “experts tell us.” This kind of so-called thinking, as William James warned, is merely the rearranging of prejudices of the Ego.

The average person – even if confronted with compelling evidence to the contrary - has no intention of ever analyzing, reviewing, and moving beyond, “what Daddy said”; or “what Grandma said”; or “what College Professor said”; or “what Dear Political Leader said”; or “what Exalted Religious Teacher said.”

• Albert Einstein: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

How far removed! How different! as we witnessed earlier, was the intellectual curiosity, and integrity of Niels Bohr, who withheld obeisance, and would not offer a popular and conventional answer, even though his diploma stood in jeopardy!

Do you think it was by accident… not only that Bohr won a Nobel Prize, but… that he became a developer of one of history’s strangest, most other-worldly, most so not-common-sense, theories ever to be posited by any scientist of history?!

Allow me to offer a hint - he didn’t get there simply by memorizing his lessons!

Do you think that you could win a Nobel Prize?

Why not?

Maybe you could.

Why do you think not?

Do you not have a brain as these others? How do you know that twenty years of creatively-applied skillful thinking might not yield your own stellar results?

• Albert Einstein: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

The high-level achievers of history usually do not speak of “genius.” They speak of hard work, over long periods of time.

Thinking, as Einstein defines it, is meant to be a creative process, a diligent methodical “search” and no mere "aimless imagination"!

But before you can search, you’ll need, as he advises, some “questions.”

And before the questions, you’ll do better if you understand what Dr. Adler spoke of as “the ABCs,” the building blocks, of thought.

Thinking, of course, is important for all human beings - but if you aspire to become a writer, or a speaker, one who will have something worthwhile to say, you, especially, will need to discover what thinking really means!