How to think with an open mind?

Very few of us really know how to think (including me). While this is a bold statement to make at the start, I’ll just stick to it and I hop...

Very few of us really know how to think (including me). While this is a bold statement to make at the start, I’ll just stick to it and I hope you will too stick to this article till the end, to find out this interesting theory of mine.

You see, when I say very few of us really know how to think, I mean it. Most of us just repeat what we have read in a book, or what somebody has told us, or our thinking is the outcome of our very own limited experience. We compare, judge, choose, and through this process, we hope to find some reasonable attitude towards life. But that kind of thinking is very limited, it is confined to a very small area. Don’t you think so?

We have an experience like seeing a person perform rituals to please his lord, or a corpse being carried to the graveyard, or a father kissing the forehead of his son before dropping him at the school gate – all these impressions are there, but we are so insensitive that they don’t sink into us and ripen, and it is only through sensitivity and empathy to everything around us that there is the beginning of a different kind of thinking which is not limited by our conditioning. If you hold strongly to some set of beliefs or other, you look at everything through that particular prejudice or tradition; you don’t have any contact with reality.

What happens when you observe something for the first time? You automatically translate what you see according to your prejudices, don’t you? You experience it according to your conditioning as a communist, a socialist, a capitalist, or some other ‘ist’ or whatever. You categorize everything into good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. Don’t you?

Whereas, when you don’t look through the screen of any idea or belief but actually have direct contact then you will notice what an extraordinary relationship there is between you and what you observe. If you have no prejudice, no bias if you are open then everything around you becomes extraordinarily interesting and tremendously alive.

The key to thinking this way is to think beyond good or bad, right or wrong, black or white. In simple words not to be critical but to just observe with sensitivity.

-         - Michael Joachim Ganpat, Student Correspondent, Kolkata