Free thinking means that you are allowed to think about anything.
Sounds easy? It isn’t.
Thinking about anything also means that you are allowed to be racist.
Or that you question why we spend money on cancer research. What did cancer do wrong? Maybe later we’ll discover that cancer has an important function in nature, and that we have an unhealthy relationship with death.
You are also allowed to have all sexual fantasies, even the ones that are not necessarily pleasant for others. Or for your surroundings, if you are attracted to the same sex.
You are also allowed to disagree with science. I think evolutionary theory is an interesting theory, but nowadays everything gets explained through evolution. Someone learns to control fire? Then we call it cultural evolution.
For a long time I thought the inside of my body was visible. I have feelings, don’t I? If you connect those together, along with your thoughts, then the inside becomes visible by itself.
Or that you doubt hospitals. Healthcare is great, sure, but by taking care of everything we take responsibility away from people themselves. You can now go skiing, tear everything apart, and get operated on. Would you go skiing if there were no hospital?
There are billions of people who cannot think freely. You are stuck in a certain religion, scientific school, cultural class. Before you know it, you say what everyone says and believe what everyone believes.
We live in a time in which everyone is terrified of saying something that might sound stupid.
What you think about says a lot about the type of person you are.
About your personality, and how you look at things.
Let’s take my thoughts as an example.
To be clear: these really are my thoughts. These are things I think about often.
You could say:
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I lack a lot of fundamental knowledge about the things I think about.
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I am a science skeptic, with a tendency toward religion.
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I am a creative, intuitive thinker.
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I am an autonomous thinker who cares about the environment.
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My thoughts are close to being psychic and incoherent.
My point is this: it’s not an ego trip to examine your own thoughts. You don’t notice it, but you think about a lot of things every day. These thoughts are phenomenal in indirectly explaining who you are to yourself.
A lot of those thoughts may seem useless in a competitive, working environment, but that doesn’t mean you are a useless individual. Let’s say you think about other people all day long. For me, you are an amazing person. But if somebody else looks at you, they might call you a dreamer who doesn’t get any work done.
But we all know what we think about people who think about their office job 24/7. It’s like a lot of people have lost their minds completely. Don’t get me wrong—I have an office job too. But a lot of us don’t really care whether we put the right PDF in the right folder.
Time is an angle
Someone in Australia and I do things at the same time.
While our clock time is different—here it’s afternoon, there it’s dark.
If you see time as seasons that go around, then it’s the same. In Africa it’s summer right now. Here it’s winter.
My point is that time is perspective. Everything happens at the same time, but we all look from a different angle.
What makes it complicated is that we carry the past with us through our memories. So the past still exists—both in a different energy form and as something that influences our decisions day by day.
We also glance at the future. We already spend a little bit of energy on tomorrow.
Saying we only live in the here and now is like saying that you shouldn’t make a big deal about slavery, since most of it happened a long time ago. To be clear: please never say that. We think about the past for a reason—to learn from it, for instance.
The problem with modern science is not that science is wrong. Modern science unintentionally excludes people with different opinions.
Let’s say you have a group of people. You want to get from A to B as fast as possible. The best group will naturally include people who disagree with each other, some with really false claims or wild imaginations. Because everybody learns from each other, you end up with the best solutions.
Modern science is the opposite of this. It basically only includes people who share a certain view of the world. Right now, physics is important, so you can only keep up if you understand physics. You naturally exclude people who don’t know anything about numbers or physics. It’s not that this happens on purpose, but you can’t imagine learning from people you completely disagree with. Yet those are the ones who make you think the most.
A complete theory of everything would therefore include the people you don’t agree with. A theory of everything can never be solely science-based, for instance.