The Beginning and End of the Thought Process

The human experience in terms of thought, decision, and action.

 

The Beginning and End of the Thought Process

 

I am a firm believer that one has to think big to make things happen.

It is the center of human existence to inject meaning into one’s life. That meaning is lost in the midst of idleness and of sloth. The lack of action is man’s greatest weakness. To avoid this particular weakness, we have to find the root of its solution. The solution is action. Its root is thought.

Every action starts from a thought. Our perception of actions might be wrong because philosophically, when Newton’s third law is applied, our thoughts are the initial action and our actions are technically our reactions to our thoughts.

The thing is, every single advancement in human history began from a thought. The Sumerians thought about creating civilization. The mathematicians thought about explaining the world systematically. There are much more thoughts from the past that when added up, creates the world today. They have spent thousands of years creating a construct so intricate that there are very few holes left to fill.

There lies our next problem. If most of the holes in our world had already been filled up, what more can we contribute? That is why our thoughts have to cross boundaries. To be honest, reality is a cage. Society is a cage. Everything we perceive on a conscious level is a cage because these things limit our minds from escaping the dimension where they reside. If the Wrights stayed in the cage of gravity, we wouldn’t have airplanes. The mere fact that airplanes exist implies that the human mind is capable of going to unvisited dimensions.

Once we accept these barriers as limitations, we are then free to move on to the thought process. The fastest train in the world is the train of thought. This is why you could start with searching “Dante’s Inferno” on Wikipedia and end up with “stem cell research” a few hours later. The human mind is truly unpredictable therefore; we can definitely make up ideas that are beyond what we are familiar with, whether intentionally or accidentally through the unpredictable train of thought.

To be brutally honest, we think of these reality-bending ideas every day, sometimes consciously, others as a passive thought. The conscious thoughts are rare but when we become lucid, it is such a remarkable phenomenon that it is an insult to ourselves not to act on it.

Returning to one of my earlier points, lack of action is man’s greatest weakness. Since we have accepted that action is a reaction to thought, we can now transform my original point into, “Lack of reaction is man’s greatest weakness.” Lack of reaction is indifference. To be painfully honest, refusal to care is refusal to live. An innovative thought is nothing if we don’t react to it.

Now that we have declared our new problem, we must now find a new solution.

Idleness, sloth, these are man’s undoing. Refusal to care is refusal to live. If we truly care about ourselves, we must preserve our greatest gift, our minds. This preservation is simply an act of reaction. Only men who truly respected themselves, men who respected their minds, have changed the world.

Action is now in the equation. The only obstacle now is society. To be honest, this is the greatest obstacle of all. Society is a hive mind, one that has been corrupted by pop culture and irrational thoughts. These people are drowning in their own society that closed-mindedness is not uncommon. One man acting alone is enough to change himself but to change the world, one man has to change the way people around them think.

If idleness and sloth are man’s greatest weaknesses, lack of confidence is its second. Overcoming one’s personal gripes is not enough. One must share these ideas to the people around them. One must act upon these people because these people are the only practical receivers of these actions.

The reason this is the greatest obstacle is because the way other people think is as unpredictable as yours. At least you have the least bit of anticipation of your thoughts but don’t you surprise even yourself sometimes? What more with other people? The best thing to do is persevere. Keep looking until you find trains going on the same course. If your idea is good enough, these trains should be willing to go all the way to end of the line.

This is the last level. Once you get these people to agree with you, you should have no problems whatsoever. Once you get enough people to stick with your idea and change the world to the end, you have successfully made a small stroke in the gigantic portrait of history.

Behind all these words, you have no doubt discerned that nothing would have happened without that initial thought. Failure to engage one’s mind enough to create thoughts like those is failure to make a mark on history. With each of us possessing such a relatively insignificant existence, shouldn’t it be each of our main goals to leave something, however small, behind?

To sum everything up, here is a quote from Chuck Palahniuk. “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever. The goal is to create something that will.”