19. The Necessity of Thought

I spend a lot of time thinking about the power of ideas, both good and bad.

Unfortunately, bad ideas can be every bit as powerful as good ones. depending on the context, they don’t have precisely the same power. being in touch with the way the world is as a utility, that being confused or self deceived doesn’t.

Now there are philosophical problems that I’m skirting here is hard to be precise about what we mean by true knowledge, or what it means to be in touch with reality. On some level, all we have are our perceptions and descriptions of reality, which we never get to compare with a pristine chunk of reality as it is in itself. But without going down that philosophical rabbit hole, it is obvious that knowledge, however, we conventionally define it, does have real power. If we ever cure cancer, or Alzheimer’s, it will be based on understanding something about the biology of these diseases. And this understanding is different from our present state of relative ignorance. But ignorance and confusion have power too, and they account for most of what is wrong in our world. Our world isn’t filled with bad people intentionally doing bad things. There are some people like this, but it is far more common to find good people, or potentially good people, psychologically normal people, at any rate, doing bad things while under the sway of bad ideas. And once you see this, you recognize that there’s no force on Earth, more powerful than human thought. Apart from an immediate asteroid impact. Ideas are the most powerful forces of nature we ever encounter. Each of us comes into the world, having inherited the cultural artifacts and assumptions of our ancestors. They built this place, they canonized certain norms of behavior. They wrote the laws and built the institutions. They fought the wars, they filled the reservoir of grievance between disparate peoples. What we have beneath all of this, all of culture are words. There’s language, under the pavement. The civilization is a word predicated on the meanings of other words, freedom, art, science, reason, justice, democracy. All we can do is seek to persuade one another with better concepts and ideas, and our ability to identify problems, and to solve them, and to identify and solve new and hopefully more subtle problems, is entirely the product of thought.

So there’s nothing about the practice of meditation that denies the power of ideas. The question from the point of view of practice, is whether one needs to be identified with thought, confused by it, ruled by it, made to suffer by it in each moment. And the answer to that question is no. Recognizing thought as thought, truly, as a transitory appearance and consciousness isn’t just another thought. But neither is it a substitute for thinking when thinking is required. So there’s no need to denigrate thought - it’s almost everything. Almost.