Rational Thinking

I'm listening to lots of lectures now, and for the past three months, i also borrow lots of books (buy then return) -- mainly books on philosophy, but not the academic stuff. i think i've graduated from academic philosophy, which is nothing to do with the real stuff.

The process i'm going through, i would hardly call personal, but it is, at the same time, very individual. That is perhaps a mystical distinction, but one that i don't make any apologies for. The universe is itself a mystery, a riddle.


Nevertheless, understanding is inherent in the universe, or at least, inherent in the universe is its capacity to create beings capable of understanding it. it is irrational to believe that a universe would create beings with the capacity to understand and yet not allow that capacity to fulfill itself. so, i believe in knowledge, and truth and I believe there are an infinite number of illusions, but only one truth (UNI-verse).

The illusions all result from man's emotions stealing from his mind. only the mind can approach to understanding, not the emotions. the emotions only cloud judgment and inevitably lead mind towards false conclusions based on the inevitable bias that emotion creates. this is the problem of the era of the modern "scientist" who relies on science for his survival -- it is impossible that such a situation would cause the scientist to be impartial about his own knowledge and discoveries. as a result modern science has reached an incorrigible state of corruption, in all of its fields of endeavor

(including "psychology" -- e.g., the word psyche means "spirit" in greek and yet there is no psychologist alive that believes he is studying spirit -- he is studying, simply, electronic circuits embedded in an organic matrix, and not because he inherently believes that, but only because such activity perfectly befits current materialistic values. spirit is a ridiculed notion among biased knowledge seekers, and, to the atheistic scientist, the universe created god rather than the other way around).

the predicament of the human race at this stage of evolution is that emotions are vastly more developed than thought. the emotional (irrational) human spends his undeveloped life STEALING from his mental faculty -- using mind to justify emotions and for hardly any other purpose -- the search for truth is ridiculed because mankind is unwilling to confront the fact that in his search for truth his emotions always get in the way and color his thoughts.

the only way out of human undevelopment is growth, which is evolution, which is long and painful. in the interim there is always the tiny minority who put the search for truth ahead of personal desire, even the desire for personal existence -- these are the martyrs and advancers of all human societies (e.g. the copernicus' and the galileos, and the socrates' and the christs and the mohammeds the pythagorus' etc., etc.). The quality of a truth seeker is that he does not worship blind faith nor does he fall into the trap of worshiping Doubt (the God of modern thought) -- both are extremes and therefore indications of dominance of the mind by the emotions. rather he walks the middle path, never doubting that truth exists but never relying on anything more than his own experience and intuition in the search for it. the truth seeker has the important faith that when he has sufficiently divested himself of his own ignorance, truth will make itself apparent to him. Mind can never be anything more than an organ of diminishing error, it can actually never possess truth, it is truth that reveals itself to mind as a reward for mind correcting its own mistakes.

In any case, eventually, through many thousands of years of evolution mankind will realize that the proper use of mind is not in the justification of the emotions -- but rather direction of mind towards the source of itself (know thyself). Knowledge is possible, because mind itself has a source and the source is knowable or mind would not have been created in the first place. But the source is difficult to know because it involves wresting mind from the domination of emotions.

The search for the source of mind involves reasoning as opposed to intellectualizing. Intellectuality is a celebration of the arbitrary -- it is not evil or even wasteful. It is to the mind what sports is to the body, the latter being a celebration of arbitrary physical activity. Intellectual activity can be just as mentally fulfilling as sports are physically, but the real work of the body is in it's own growth and survival, and the real work of the mind is knowing its own source.


I am only beginning to touch upon the rational or reasoning faculty, and part of my process is expanding my own capacity to think rationally. Human reason is not cold and calculating -- it is exactly the opposite -- it is warm and enlightening. To reason properly is to behold the fountain of truth -- Pythagorus said that Deity is a being whose body is composed of the substance of Light and whose soul is composed of the substance of truth -- he was truly a rational thinker.