Skip to main content

A day for thinking

If I had the power to do so, I would a dedicate a day to logical thinking.  And make it mandatory for everyone to sit and think logically and coherently. Instructors will be provided for those who need. Simple steps of logical thinking like the Aristotelean syllogisms will be taught. People will be asked to do certain logical exercises. Their logical thinking skills be assessed and rewarded as they deserve.

If people begin to think logically, there will be no terrorists killing innocent people for nonexistent celestial creatures. The heroes of the world won't be the natural descendants of Gulliver's Yahoos whose greatest delight lay in amassing some stones which they absurdly believed to be very precious. Expediency will not take the place of morality. Godmen and other frauds will vanish without a trace. The world will be what Jesus wished it to be: the kingdom of heaven.

Rational thinking will teach people:
the real cause-effect relationships,
the difference between poetry and falsehood,
to interpret myths meaningfully,
to see heaven in a grain of sand,
to see god in the face of the starving child next door,
why cooperation is more desirable than competition,
why gods are created and why they don't belong to religions...

The world is a product of man's thinking. Change the thinking and the world changes.

Imagine a world that's governed by logical thinking.
Oh, poetry won't be banished. Imagination and fantasy can coexist with reason and creativity. But emotions will be reined by reason.

So, why not have a day for thinking?
Why not think everyday?

Why create hells when heavens are beckoning?

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 125.

Just dreaming 😁😂😇😅



Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Unfortunately, we have lost the power of thinking since we develop a trait of going with crowds

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thinking ...many would turn it into day of sleeping :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Alas my power of promoting a blog has been deprived but then I thought and thought until found out that it is not the almighty but some rules of a blogging platform which has barred me from promoting a desrving blog. So silly of me :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And a lot more things have nothing to do with god. Let people think and think! ☺

      Delete
  4. Well said Tomichan sir, todays society does lack the logical thinking & instead prefers do to what others also do.

    There's a poem of Pablo Neruda titled 'Keeping Quiet' which tells the world to stop for a moment & think whether their actions are worth doing or not; whether they benefit the world, or harm it?

    I suggest you read it if you have time. The PDF is on Google. The subject of the poem is closely related to this article.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've been teaching that poem for almost a decade ☺

      Yes, Neruda and so many others tried to get the world to do some introspection. But who cares? The world remains silly, fighting for its petty entertainments.

      Delete
  5. Logic cannot be the solution. Logic can be equally applied for the argument and against the argument. Also, it can only be spun on some axioms.

    The whole rational thinking of science is based on the axiom that the smallest unit of multidimensional universe is point, which is itself dimensionless.

    A point has no length, no breadth, and no height but a series of points is called length, and series of lines is called plane, and so on. I don't find it logical at all.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Also, you can establish a cause-effect relationship with logic, but you have no means to test whether the established cause-effect relationship is real or not.

      Delete
    2. That's why I mentioned poetry and imagination. Science accepts both. They are part of the universe which in the words of Einstein "is expanding into nothing that's something." The mathematical concepts of point, zero, infinity and so on require imagination as much as logic to comprehend. Only those who are willing to raise their thinking to that level will understand the absurdity as well as mysterious beauty of the cosmos and the rules that govern it.

      Delete
    3. sorry to intrude, but if you hit a person with a bullet right on the head, he will die. if you feed a person with lies right from his childhood, he will become a believer of those lies. I can see cause and effect everywhere.

      Delete
    4. You're welcome to intrude, Pranju.

      There is casuse-effect relationship everywhere including the notion of karma. But misperceptions are highly possible. As Shelley said, life is a many-colored dome that "stains the white radiance of eternity." Life's distortions often become religion's truths.

      Delete
  6. Sir, people are very clever than we thought of, even uneducated.But they want their own interests,that's the real problem.See everywhere,the less they educated,the more they amassed wealth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's why I spoke about cooperation over competition. Logically, competition leads to survival of the winner which is what's happening. The winner may be the crook, the terrorist, or whoever. The fact remains that they are incapable of thinking beyond elementary levels.

      Delete
    2. Murthy sir, I added the smileys at the end with the mention of dream because I know mine is a sheer dream.

      Delete
  7. What about a day of unthinking? Ha ha ha.....

    ReplyDelete
  8. There are some MNCs which have dedicated a day of the week as 'Think friday' just to encourage new thinking and initiatives by their employees.So this does sound like something which can be given serious thought.

    ReplyDelete
  9. What harm has ever come by thinking?

    Thoughtful post Tomichan.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Anupam. Creative thinking contributes to civilisation. But we are inundated with destructive thoughts. Alas!

      Delete
  10. heard mentality and not giving time to reading have stopped our thinking capabilities

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reading, serious reading, has gone out of fashion. Now it's fb and whatsapp!

      Herd mentality is coeval with the species, I think. Most people like to follow and not lead or choose their own paths. It's safe to be a follower.

      Delete
  11. That's interesting....I like that you have laid emphasis on poetry too....The conversations with Ravish and Pranju are interesting too....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ancient philosophy spoke about the "music of the spheres." 'Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum (orbital resonance) based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear. Subsequently, Plato described astronomy and music as "twinned" studies of sensual recognition: astronomy for the eyes, music for the ears, and both requiring knowledge of numerical proportions.' [Wikipedia]

      There are many mathematical and scientific concepts that are quite poetical, I think. In the sense that they transcend pure logic and enter the realms of vision.

      Delete
  12. I think I really need more than just a day to sit back and introspect...beautifully written post:-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Amit.

      The DAY is a gesture only. Just to remind ourselves of our duty to THINK.

      Delete
  13. Now that everything is available at the press of a button people have forgotten the exercise of thinking. Maybe someday a fad from the west will reintroduce it and people will start joining some center offering mental exercises and techniques to improve thinking and channelizing positive thoughts!!! We fear imagination and art and bookish knowledge is interpreted as thoughts; once we let ourselves free thoughts will find their vent.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some