Thought has a place in life. It’s inaccurate or rather incomplete to say thought is the cause of our troubles. We need to think. So then we need to ask what right thinking is. And for most of us it’s about understanding wrong thinking and in its resolution coming to a place of right thinking.
J take about time, thought, the self all occurring together. But thought can also occur without these additions.
This is unclear. But the question I had was why does psychological thinking “dull” the mind and create “inaction”? That was the K statement and I wondered if anyone felt that they understood what he meant.
So check me on this: Rather than directly observing one’s environment in the present moment, the brain has become habituated to a ‘psychological’ form of thinking. This form of thought brings the outer ‘practical’ time into the mind in the form of images of past experiences and future possibilities. Pleasant rememberances of the ‘past’ as well as painful or fearful possibilities in a ‘future’. It favors the ‘pleasant’ and does not see that the ‘painful’ is inevitable as long as psychological thought continues.
We’ve become accepting of psychological suffering and fear as long as it doesn’t exceed a certain level. Psychological thought has created our personal reality: What happened in the past, what’s happening in the present and things that ‘might’ happen in the future. We can go back and forward in time with this form of thinking but there are consequences. It occurred to me that Nature has no memory! No memory, no reflection… just ‘movement’ forward. No going ‘back’…psychological thought puts us out of sync with the world?
Another way to say this is that experience is wholly dependent on recognition.
Experience is based on a conclusive process. We rely exclusively on thought’s faculty of recognition to compose reality. There is rarely, if ever, a moment where the product of thought is felt to be inadequate - actually, not conclusively - as is evidenced by its un-interrupted processing of data in our minds. We thus live in a closed world, a knowable world where everything is either explained or explainable. Even if something is concluded to be unexplainable it is labeled and filed away as such. Explained as unexplainable.
Looked upon from above (figuratively speaking), a mind in a constant state of re-cognition can be said to be self-contained, non-curious, non-creative, dull, not in discovery mode. As for inaction, a classic example of that is when we conjure up ideals, postponing any real action - into a future that never manifests - by assuring ourselves that we know where we need to get to.