Blog: "Move beyond the thinking mind"

Once in a while I was sitting longer periods in a train. I always liked to gaze outside the window and have the landscapes pass along my eyes. During these moments I often got insights. That was the actual reason I liked to take these longer rides.

These insights just got to me. It was not that I was looking for them. Instead, it was more like the otherway around. I was not thinking at all while gazing outside the window and in those moments I just got the insights, like a gift. It seemed there was another way to get knowledge instead of thinking or reading books.

During the end of my study in philosophy I more and more started to get trouble reading intellectual books. Somehow the theories in the books I did not memorize anymore. The moment I opened a book, my brain shut down and my energy-levels dropped. It was in this period that I found out that thinking actually has limits. I assume everybody knows this already on a more unconscious level. We all know those moments when we are really do our best to find a solution for a problem by thinking, but instead of solutions we find only worries. Only this time it really struck me. It became very clear that thinking, or conceptual knowledge how we could also call it, has its limitations.

Do not get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with thinking in some cases and in some cases we do find solutions by thinking, but for more complex situation thinking is just not enough (and our external world gets more and more complex).

So what else is there beyond thinking? Beyond conceptual knowledge?

"Moving beyond thinking is the next step in our evolution as human beings."

Now I realize that during my train-rides I got access to what we can call a higher level of intelligence, another way of gaining knowledge. This knowledge however we do not gain because of thinking, we can not actually gain it. This knowledge or this source of intelligence we can only access by becoming silent inside. By silencing our thinking mind. By silencing our thinking mind, we make space in our head so this vaster intelligence can come into our lives, into our being and give us the knowledge or wisdom that we are looking for.

So to get access to this intelligence we do not have to do anything. We do not have to work harder, or read more books. In fact we have to do less, we have to surrender ourselves and accept that we do not know the answers and solutions.

Moving beyond thinking is the next step in our evolution as human beings. By becoming silent from inside we find a new source of intelligence which can then guide our lives in a new way, which the "old thinking" is not able to understand.