A contemplative mind
Imagine being told you think to much! Now imagine being told by someone you look to for guidence!
What would your reaction be? I can only talk from my own personal experience and my reaction was to work hard to eradicate my overthinking! Why wouldnt I, after all it was being highlighted constantly as a negative, something I should work to silence!
And this started a war within my mind. Unbeknown to me at the time I was working hard to eradicate who I am and this obviously created conflict. An over thinker would carry a different label in a different culture or even within a different class! Amongst the rich I would have been a philosopher with the corresponding certificate in qualification to support it, and in a tribe I would have been called a shamen or wise one. Yet in the lower working classes I was labelled an over thinker, told I think to much, or told im deep, like, hes a really deep guy!
As I have age and matured over time my friends circle has changed, none more so than the people I share my thoughts with. I never invisiged this happening, I thought when I was young I would have these friends forever, we got along and there was nothing more to it than that! But at a time when I was working very hard to eradicate my thoughts I wonder if my circles would have changed a lot sooner if I had thought deeply about things. After all, thinking deeply about things makes it impossible to ignore the relationships around you, your effects on them and their effects on you.
I am now a self proclaimed philosopher, because I only see thinking a problem when the things we think about are unhealthy and the conversations leading on from thoughts are only discussed within the echo of our own words! What I mean by this is , to think profoundly about something I have to formulate my thoughts and then find constructive arguments against my view, at least look into alternative views and arguments. So long as I am willing to discuss, debate and adjust my view, then no thinking nor discussion can be deemed unhealthy.
So.......... thinking! How can an act of self discovery be a bad thing and why would it be labelled so?!
My thoughts from experience about thinking would point me to fear! I say this because diverting from core beliefs or world views is scary for the vast majority of people. After all who would want to openly admit that most of what they think to be true is just the opinions of others and that no thought they have is theirs!! Most that stumble across this type of thought process/internal dialogue or however else you want to describe it, have done so not intentionally! At least not conciously intentionally! I say not concious intention because a lot of what brings us to the fringes of life are unconcious intention. I never at any point said to myself , you need to think deeply, take time to be alone and come to an acceptence of who I am, warts and all. There was no conscious thought that this needs to happen, but I engineered it and followed through with this act all the same. Which means deep down somethere in my subconcious there was a need for growth and somewhere my brain was aware of what was needed for this growth to take place.
If I was aware all those years ago that in following the path I was on, it would lead me to here? With more questions than ever about myself and the environment around me, would I have changed direction?! An impossible to answer without 2020 hindsight! Yet still one worth pondering when compared with how I travelled to where I am and would I go backwards if there was a path to do so!
I dont think I can un-see the things I have seen, nor unravel what I have read and how that has changed my internal dialogue.
What Is most evident to me is that these are all my decisions, wether conscious or unconscious they are still my decisions. Which is far more difficult to take responsibility for and accept as part of our own decision making! My personal experience led to me believing that the unconscious decisions I made were controlled by something outside of myself, the energy of my father, the influence of the unhealthy adults in my life at a young age! They all pointed outside! I can see now how when unaware of the many facets to our brains/minds we can easily attribute 1 or 2 of the conversations in our heads to someone or something else, after all we spent most of our lives being told that talking to ourselves is the first sign of madness, schizophrenics are heavily medicated and our culture works hard to protect us from “them”. It seems that the very culture we have created works us away from this understanding , and by doing so loosing the most important conversations we will ever have in our entire lives, the ones we have with ourselves!
My conversations are still in need of scrutiny, that doesnt change through self exploration. In fact I would say the conversations have deepened and I am more open to adjustment. I have programmed narratives I am working hard to unravel, some easier than others.
When open and honest about ourselves we can use a lot of our life and the situations we have found ourselves in and how we chose to get out of them as a reflective point and this will help us unravel a lot of the programming we have struggled to overcome.
An example of this was the homophobia I was raised within! This was not just by family members but largely by society as a whole as well as religion . For a long period of time I considered the whole act to be disgusting and un-natural! The very word gay was used as a derogative slur, even in banter I used it all the time.
Yet my experience with gay men had proven to be anything but , in fact the people who had come into my life that were of a different sexual preference were more open, kind and honest than I had ever been led to be believed as possible!
Were these lies I was fed, were they intentional lies? I had to seperate the belief from the reality, which is a lot harder than ud think. After all it is our thoughts that shape our reality! So I was challenging my reality! And in this act or self sacrafice what else would unravel?!!!
Its at this point you can either double down on your ignorance or accept that you know absolutely nothing and let the flow of life as it is show you the reality you have self distorted for so long!
My response to this was the latter, with a new found knowledge of how little I know to be “fact” , what I can always be an expert on is my perspective and so working to master and accept that I know nothing has become everything.
E.Plaistow
