Active thinking is pure intention that bends daydreams into a dynamic, unified line of thought that has purpose, motive, and direction. To “think,” we must confront the mass of associative material circulating in our mind, sift it, and methodically discriminate it into a comprehensible, usable synthesis for everyday life.
In the practice of watching one’s thoughts, one rapidly accumulates information about many aspects of oneself. One learns to watch Body, Essence, and Personality; their crystallized habits, moods, associative thought patterns, and unexplored beliefs; their contradictory desires, competition for resources, and wasteful and futile functioning. Although revealing, this mass of self-knowledge by itself cannot materially influence internal change. Who needs the ability to recognize one’s own reactivity if one cannot curb it? What is the point of watching the moods of fear and anger, of worries and anxiety, if we remain under their hegemony?
Watching the mechanical nature of habits over time allows us to recognize the price we pay for them. The function of active thinking helps us see how daydreaming and distraction isolates us from Reality, and how ungoverned reactivity constantly inhibits the emotional dimension that, in a state of repeated contraction, colors everything it feels with an attitude of competition or defeatism.
Thanks to its power over abstraction, the function of active thinking can help you understand this broad body of experience, quantify it and encapsulate it in a word, a short phrase or an extreme synthesis. These processes, once assimilated and mastered, are like magic formulas that, when remembered, bring you back into direct contact with Reality.
The next time you catch yourself daydreaming, feeling tense and lonely, in a hurry or brooding, chant your magic formula and put the habit face to face with the cumulative price it asks you to pay; it will be very easy to see whether it is better for you to fight to Be or to remain in your gargantuan idealizations.
The Work is intentional motivation, it is learning to love Reality as it is. On the contrary, opposing reality is like trying to teach a donkey to speak ― there is no hope.
