What is thinking?

[Patrick_9931]

Whatching Leo's videos I have the impression that he puts a strong emphasis on thinking/contemplating i.e sitting in a room and just thinking for hours about various topics.  

But what is thinking? Does it actually make sense to sit in a room and spend all of these hours in this activity? Will it actually bring some concrete and practical benefits to life? Will it improve your career, dating, relationships, money situation ecc.?

Thanks in advance for your perspectives 

[Osaid]

54 minutes ago, Patrick_9931 said:

Will it actually bring some concrete and practical benefits to life?

Yes. Before you drink water, you think. It's interfaced with basically all your actions. The quality and efficiency of a lot of your actions are linked to how you think. Someone who thinks that suicide bombing is gonna send him into heaven is gonna go do that. Thinking is serious stuff.

[King Merk]

I consider contemplation as a subset of thinking.

you essentially can not “not think”

So you’re always thinking…

The questions is how much control do you have over your mind/thinking process.

Can you control it the way a Cowboy controls a horse? Or are you bucked off the horse?

Most people live at the whim of their mind and are being constantly bucked off their horse (meaning their mind controls them)

Things like meditation and contemplation give you the ability to get back in the saddle and tell the horse where to go

Can you focus your mind on one specific subject or question for an hour straight? That’s an example of contemplation

Once you learn to think well via activités like meditation and contemplation then yes it is absolutely life changing

One of the biggest reasons most people have shitty lives is because they are shitty thinkers 

[Leo Gura]

All of mankind's problems come from not being able to sit alone in a room and think.

Questioning whether it makes sense is to already be doing it. You cannot escape thinking. Wherever you go, there it is.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Zedman]

Can we view thinking as exclusively input/output of information? So when I am contemplating I am merely feeding output into input and then accessing input to generate stuff which is output. I am the only one getting dizzy trying to become conscious of this process? I remember this used to really fuck me up on a psychedelic.

[Thought Art]

“When it comes to thinking, thinking about thinking is the toughest sort of thinking… which makes you think… ? “

[King Merk]

3 hours ago, Thought Art said:

“When it comes to thinking, thinking about thinking is the toughest sort of thinking… which makes you think… ? “

How thought provoking  

[Polymorph]

Most people are unable to think through situations. You shouldn't devalue the significance of contemplation. 

 

[Meditationdude]

@Patrick_9931 thinking is purposeful while thoughts are automatic. Think of a red apple - you see it in your minds eye? That’s thinking. 
Driving down the road and someone cuts you off- anything that comes into the mind after that is automatic. “This mother fucker!” 
 

Contemplation is just focused and concentrated purposeful thinking. 
 

What Leo said about man not being able to sit alone in a room is pointing towards our inability to focused or concentrate our minds on one thing for very long; the mind gets bored and starts to look for ways to feel good again; the attractive automatic thoughts start pouring in which distract your awareness. Essentially we are never in the moment bc of this. 
 

Personally this is the very reason I stay away from the internet, technology, etc… I moved into a van this June and have been living in the worlds most beautiful national parks and forests ever since. People don’t realize how much their day to day habits and activities destroy their ability to think clearly. I chose solitude and peace over whatever the fuck this is. 

[Breakingthewall]

Thinking is the activity with which we humans create our own artificial world. humans are not beings adapted to an environment, but we adapt the environment to us. the more we adapt it, the more we think. once the medium is completely modified, as is the case, our medium is entirely thought. we live in an artificial world that we constantly create with our mental activity, billions of interconnected processors creating the collective ego. a strangest natural phenomenon. we cannot stop thinking because our function as entities of the hive is precisely that, to think.