Hack your own mind
Part 1. Critical thinking
Part 2 (Barriers to CT) and Part 3 (Going inwards) coming soon…
Have you ever watched a horror movie that made you laugh? Perhaps the villain turns out to be a midget, or the victims split up when running away from the bad guy making it easier for him. Or even worse, when they actually manage to get him but never make sure they are safe, providing the audience with a final surprise that could be easily avoided in real life.
In Real life,
when we are under a threat, our limbic system pumps great doses of adrenaline and cortisol through the amygdalas. The heart races, bloodstream pulses and the cortex stays in full attention. No room for chatty thoughts, just pure awareness of the moment so we can analyse facts and make the right decisions in order to survive.
The human body is incredible and we should be proud every time we look at the mirror!
Our species is pretty good when it comes to threats. To the average person, there are no predators left (besides another human) or main biological concerns to worry about. Our opposable thumbs helped us developing our brains which we have been using to collaborate and innovate, designing technology and all the fantastic things we have in modern life, to the point that, in order to track back to our most basic instincts we now go to amusement parks to feel the adrenaline kicking in. It’s a fantastic world we live in! This is the most exciting period of time in human history.
However, evolution is all about fitness and survival, not about understanding.
We can lose track of our minds. The brain in idle (or not at focus), is not very helpful. Thoughts come and go like an endless stream of information which most of the times are useless and we simply can’t control. They put us in the past or in the future, hardly ever in the present moment. The first step to take control of your own mind is to think critically.
Whether if it was because we have opened the pandora box, or because we have eaten the forbidden fruit, throughout mythology we’ve try to explain the mental realm and our hunger for knowledge. The human history is basically a war within the human mind where our ignorance hurts and destroys but is part of a race to understand ourselves, our environment and our true nature.
Critical Thinking
You are about to cross the street, what do you do? Look to the right. There are no cars. Look to the left, there are no cars either. Ok, it’s now safe to cross. We look at evidence, analyse facts and make decisions based on them. If you don’t look when cars are coming you might not make it across the road. If you were run over by a car and luckily survived, you will know it’s time to review your thinking.
CT is the art of analysing and evaluating thinking with a view to improving it.
It is a lifestyle. True self-awareness. A lifelong process of self-reflection, curiosity and inquiry, thus its benefits can be very satisfying and can ultimately provide intellectual freedom or, as Bob Marley would say, emancipation from mental slavery.
The Journal of Educational Development says that “Critical thinking is best understood as the ability of thinkers to take charge of their own thinking. This requires that they develop sound criteria and standards for analysing and assessing their own thinking and routinely use those criteria and standards to improve its quality”.
All good thinkers have the intrinsic ability to question. Like a 4year old, who in average asks 73 questions a day due to their brain exploding with billions of daily new synaptic connections, a Critical Thinker is never lazy to question. He/she lives in a creative ocean of curiosity and enchantment, where beauty guides their eyes and motivates their understanding.
Critical thinkers have the ability to observe their own point of view and are able to see how their personal worldview can influence their own thinking.
Traveling is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.
This richness can be defined as a physical experience that provides you with new information. When we travel we feel like a tourist because we know we don’t belong to the place we are visiting. It’s like a virtual reality, looks real but its not necessarily our reality. Their habits, food, language, architecture, etc are different from of we are used to so we think it’s interesting and fun. That’s a new point of view, literally the place from which we see things. If we decide to stay a little longer, maybe get a job, find a partner and settle we will get used to it and the feeling of being a tourist will disappear and we will be looking for a new point of view in the next travel agent or instagram post. Exploring different cultures allow us to question or own culture.
Being able to take yourself outside your own point of view with genuine intention of understanding another point of view is an incredible task that needs focus and attention; its called empathy.
Ahhh nah.
For things within our reach like crossing the road or buying fruits, we are really good critical thinkers, pretty good in analysis and decision making, we feel responsible for our actions and we are aware of the cost of bad decisions.
The real problem is when its not within our reach, like political issues or topics that need to be discussed in society, we tend to not feel so responsible anymore. Therefore we don’t put as much energy and thought. Most of the times, we take shortcuts in our thinking because it’s simply easier than deep thinking and unfortunately, that’s what the brain gets used to.
There are 3 types of shortcuts:
Barriers to CT: Cultural biases and behaviours we learn throughout life.
Fallacies: Logical mistakes in an argument.
Cognitive Biases: Embedded brain dysfunctions in logic and reasoning.
It's understandable when people don't want to spend too much time thinking about deeper questions. We all work very hard and want to spend our free time with quality and fun. We all want to be happy and thinking about things we can't control can be a waste of time and energy. However, the lack of these conversations and the inability to think critically are ripping the fabric of human civilisation.
Our lack of responsibility towards our collective creates a system that is not capable of solving its own problems: Politics or demagoguery.
The solution? Functional thought.
Philosophy is nothing but a way of thinking. It works by asking very basic questions about the nature of human thought, the nature of the universe, and the connections between them. It attempts to deconstruct beliefs by asking simple questions. You can start understanding philosophy with Plato’s Allegory of the cave. The cave doesn’t not exist. The cave is an analogy to our relationship between our own beliefs and our actions. The one who attempts to exist the cave is the one who sees the beauty of the outside world. The world outside of one’s self or one’s mind.
The School of Life has a great series of short videos on Western and Eastern philosophers! 5 minutes videos explaining ideas of some of the great philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche in the west and Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu in the east.
The scientific mode is a great way of thinking. Rather than simply believing what one finds, we ask for peer review. Lots of other people do their best to prove one is wrong, in an attempt to validate one’s findings. If it’s wrong, one would humbly continue working on it. If one is right and no one can prove him/her wrong, we all learn together. We find an emergent truth which we can use to continuing learning and understanding our universe.
The Zeitgeist movement is a way of thinking that aims the root causes of problems, always looking beneath the consequences and superficiality of events, deconstructing foundations and frameworks in which we base our view points to design culture. The Zeitgeist mode has a series of films that illustrate important issues from widely opening minds around the globe. The first one was released in 2007, followed by Addendum in 2008 and moving forward in 2011. The director Peter Joseph has produced uncountable shows since then and the latest is InterReflections that is due for release, watch the trailer here.
Critical thinking does not stay locked in in the outer realm, under reasoning and logic only, it can also be applied to the mystical, and to what lies beneath our conscious mind. Critical thinking is generally related to skepticism and Atheism but this is a simple misconception. Humans have the freedom to believe in any story, whether its Alice in Wonderland or the Bible, as Yuval Harari says in his TED talk, stories get us together and help us to collaborate.
However, not questioning stories can shorten our freedom to believe, threat our objective reality and our mental health.
The Hermetics, also observes the root mechanisms of all. There are fundamental laws in the universe that are within every single thing. Some of these laws operate as 7 principles which only the attentive mind can see. Due to its amoralism (no morals, neither good or bad) this philosophical approach to understand the true nature of reality lost its regard against the power of religious institutions of the past two thousand years. The introduction can be found in the Kybalion. Like Nietzsche said, “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”.
Agnosticism is the view that the existence of God, of the divine or the supernatural is yet unknown. An agnostic is constantly curious about the non-physical phenomena and is never 100% sure in what to believe, always seeking more to further his/her understanding.
The seeker
Thinking is (obviously) incredibly important. That’s the only thing we are meant to be good at as a species. But there’s something way more important than thinking that sometimes we don’t really think about; will power.
The moment we decide we want something is a groundbreaking moment. If you don’t want to read this article, don’t read it. Don’t waste energy doing something you don’t want to do.
Instead, focus in what you want because the moment you do that the entire cosmos is with you. Energy flows naturally with no barriers. It feels fun, we enjoy it, we smile and we feel awesome! Awe… when will power changes thoughts that change our neurochemistry making the brain boost dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, norepinephrine and oxytocin. We feel in heavens. Where time seems to stop, providing us with those magic moments when we realise we are a vessel for information to come and go at the same time we are the medium that manifests this information in our worldly reality. If you feel that as you do something, you won’t want to stop.
The corny saying “do what you love, love what you do” is a simple representation of some of the mechanisms that lies in the subconscious level of the human mind. Above thought there is will power. Above will power there is love.
If you are curious or simply interested in improving your own thinking (and perhaps feel a little of heavens) here’s a little present for you:
Follow here to access a quick free course on Critical Thinking to test your knowledge.
Continue to Part 2 — Barriers to Critical Thinking.
