A Few New Thoughts
You get new ideas and thoughts when you take a new perspective
on things. One way to do this is to challenge the existing assumptions.
Consider, for example, the assumption that love is a feeling
of desire or attachment. What if we challenge this?
Some Thoughts on Love
Attachment and desire can be strong feelings. They are often
called love in certain contexts. Of course, attachment can be
for bad reasons too, and desire can come from less than noble
places. So what can we use as an alternative definition of love?
Recognition of value? How about seeing the inherent value
in a person, like the beauty you see in a painting or hear in
a melody. We don't need to be attached to, or even desirous of
beauty to enjoy it. We just have to recognize it. The enjoyment
that we take in another's existence could be a definition of
love. At least the feeling.
However, love is more than an emotion, isn't it? The feeling
a mother has for her children could hardly be called love if
she doesn't feed them. In this context, love has to include action,
doesn't it?
Here's the real problem with defining concepts like love:
We have seven or eight or perhaps a hundred things we want to
communicate, each different, yet we have just one word for them.
Rather than redefining love, maybe we need to create a dozen
new words. There's an area for some new thoughts.
Random New Ideas
One way to have new thoughts is to just look for any new ideas
to replace old ones. Then expand on the new idea, to see what
value you can find in it. Some examples of new thoughts follow.
I haven't expanded on them - I'll leave that to you.
- Why encourage uninformed people to vote? Perhaps it's better
to encourage people NOT to vote, unless they're willing to educate
themselves on the issues.
- Why is multi-tasking considered a sign of efficiency? It
seems to me that needing to be so busy just to get what we want
shows that our actions aren't effective enough.
- Can we pay less for a surgeon who kills more people on the
operating table? Obviously there are better and worse doctors.
Why not have that information available, and pay accordingly?
- I'd rather have wonder instead of faith. Isn't faith just
believing without reason, or even in the face of contradictory
evidence? A feeling of wonder means to marvel at the world and
accept it's mysteries as mysteries - no explanation until there
is one.
What if our level of creativity, and ability to have new thoughts
isn't just something that is set at birth. What if it is a systematic
process, one that may not be recognized by those who use it,
but can be identified and copied? My experience tells me this
is the way it is. We all can train ourselves to have creative
new ideas. One way to get started is to go sign up for my course on radical thinking.
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