Thinking is Highly Overrated

"It's not healthy to be thinking all the time. Thinking is intended for acquiring knowledge or applying it. It is not essential to living."

-- Ernest Wood

If Descartes is right, and you think therefore you are, who are you when you're not thinking? I do believe what we've got here is a Western philosophical koan. And as anyone with just a smattering of knowledge about Zen knows, koans never have just one right answer.

As "Woody" points out above, thinking is at times just a bad habit. Granted, it's useful for problem solving, planning and the like. But what about when you're just hanging out, just being? Too much thinking just gets in the way. It's hard to simply groove on living when your mind is filled with roof brain chatter.

The cool thing is that life can be lived at a deeper level than thinking. Descartes got it backwards -- being precedes thinking, it doesn't follow it. Being is primary. You can live from a deep, intuitive level of being if you're willing to let go of thinking-as-usual and allow life to emerge and engage you on its own terms. It will anyway, so why drive yourself crazy thinking about it?

And then you will find out, in an up close and personal way, who you are when you're not thinking. Be prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

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