Way of the Mind

(This one is related to this blog’s name. I wrote a little about this in the What’s this? page.)

Maybe it’s just me, but from reading magazine articles, blogs, books, and talking to people, there’s one thing I hear (in some way or other) quite a lot: something to the effect of:

• “The mind isn’t really important”
• “Emotions and feelings are what really matter, not mere logic or brain power”
• “People think way too much. Things would be much better if we just ‘went with the flow’”
• “An intelligent person (geek, nerd, egghead, etc.) is cold and unfeeling, unable to deal with people”
• “Reason had its chance and failed; today is the age of feelings”
• “The mind is fallible; for real enlightenment, you must go into the higher realm of feelings, of emotion”
• “Your problem is that you think too hard about things”
• “The really important things can’t be understood, only felt“
• “The heart is superior to the brain”
• “‘Truth’ isn’t a hard fact, it depends on what we believe or desire”
• “All of the world’s problems are caused by too much cold logic and too little emotion”

and so on. In short, people complain that everyone “thinks too much”, and that we should let go of that and care more about our emotions. Reason is seen as “outdated”.

The stupefying thing is that people are complaining about a situation that doesn’t exist! If anything, people are, from what I’ve seen, heard, and read in the past couple of decades, increasingly obsessed with feelings and emotions! And yet they complain as if the opposite was happening…

People seem to believe that, previously, there was some “age of reason” (they may call it something else) which caused suffering, wars, and everything bad in the world, and only now are we “learning” that there’s something “higher” than reason, “higher” than the mind, something that will eventually lead us into a new age of enlightenment.

Bull.

There were a couple of “ages or reason”, true. One was called the Renaissance. It released humanity from the Middle Ages. They were also called the “Dark Ages” for a reason - because humanity had “let go” of the mind (the Ancient Greeks and Romans were much more advanced), and went through centuries of poverty, plague, blind faith, superstition, serfdom and wars. The Renaissance gave humanity something back - science. Learning. True “enlightenment” - not the common misuse of that word, which usually means some mystic experience. That was an age of reason, indeed.

But, today, we seem to be in an age of refusing the mind. Of putting everything, anything before the mind - emotions, faith, feelings, instinct, others’ expectations, society, etc..

And people still complain about “too much thinking”.

I’m not saying that emotions don’t matter. They’re an important part of us, surely. But stop believing that “too much mind” is the problem - because, even if that was a problem, it would be a non-existent one - if anything, there’s “too little mind” these days.

And your mind is your greatest asset. Don’t give it up just because others don’t believe in it, just because they say it’s “outdated”. Use your mind to its fullest extent. Think. You may find it to be the greatest experience in the world.

Add to:

Related posts:

1. Anti-intellectualism
2. Rationalism and feelings
3. Accepting the opposing viewpoint for the sake of argument
4. Conversations with “mystics”
5. Atheism is necessary, but not sufficient — and not the final goal