Inner Worlds Outer Worlds – Part 4 – “Beyond Thinking”

In the Buddhist tradition, Samsara, or the endless cycle of suffering is perpetuated by the craving of pleasure and aversion to pain. Freud referred to this as the “pleasure principle.” Everything we do is an attempt to create pleasure, to gain something that we want, or to push away something that is undesirable that we don’t want. Even a simple organism like the paramecium does this. It is called response to stimulus. Unlike a paramecium, humans have more choice. We are free to think, and that is the heart of the problem. It is the thinking about what we want that has gotten out of control. The dilemma of modern society is that we seek understand the world, not in terms of archaic inner consciousness, but by quantifying and qualifying what we perceive to be the external world by using scientific means and thought. A new consciousness of the heart beyond thinking is possible.

Thinking has only led to more thinking and more questions. We seek to know the innermost forces which create the world and guide its course. But we conceive of this essence as outside of ourselves, not as a living thing, intrinsic to our own nature. It was the famous psychiatrist Carl Jung who said, “one who looks outside dreams, one who looks inside awakes.” It is not wrong to desire to be awake, to be happy. What is wrong is to look for happiness outside when it can only be found inside.

On August 4th, 2010 at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, California, Eric Schmidt-CEO of Google, mentioned an astounding statistic. Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003, according to Schmidt. That’s something like 5 exabytes of data. Never in human history has there been so much thinking and never has there been so much turmoil on the planet. 

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