Personal Development - I Believe I Am Therefore I Can

October 2, 2010

Thinking - is it a voluntary or an involuntary human function?

I recall a conversation I had with a friend one time that I thought was hilarious.
This gentleman was explaining the agonies men go through in getting girl to agree to go out with them. So he explained how the young man will spend hard earned cash over a whole semester to send a girl gifts, flowers, and generally be nice to her. The girl, over the entire long semester, never once gives any indication that she does not approve of his gifts.
Come the close of the semester, the young man, felling sufficiently confident that he has the girl on his side, will go up to her and ask to take her out.
Then the girl, will turn, look at him straight in the eye and exclaim, 'who on earth gave you the permission to think like that?' much to the poor fellows utmost confusion.
Do we give ourselves 'permission' to think certain thoughts?
To most of us, thinking is something we do; it is a natural thing to do much like eating food and passing a bowel movement. In fact, we will much sooner question the action of passing a bowel movement than we will question the act of thinking.

Thinking only becomes vitally important when you choose to achieve more in life; then the quality of the thoughts you think becomes your serious concern.
We can only understand if we do in actual fact give ourselves permission to think if we first understand the two words closely associated with thoughts; the mind and the brain.
We comfortably use the two interchangeably in many of our conversations and only take on the actual real meaning when we start to question our personal progress and growth.
The brain is a physical organ of the body that has its place in the head. It is the flesh between your ears, in the same way your heart has it physical place within your rib-cage.
The mind though defines a non-physical element – it is an awareness, an ability to recognise and interpret things and give them an emotional or moral association.
We think with our mind, but we transmit the energy carried in our thoughts with our brain. Now that is an important difference for the belief that we have no control over our thoughts in truth attributes a physical act to a non-physical process.
Stay with me here and I will show you the clear difference.
Understanding thoughts and thinking from the mobile phone
Let us think of your mobile phone as your brain. Your mobile phone, though it belongs to you has no power to choose what calls it will accept or not. The calls that come to it are purely collected from the air-waves and only you can choose if you will speak to the person on the other end or not.
The air-waves are as the energy that is all around us that contains stimuli which causes the formation of a thought. Your subscriber information is what directs the air-waves to come to your hand-set or to your neighbour's handset. The choice to go to the service provider and collect subscriber information was a conscious choice on your part.
Notice that slight distinction; you choose to be a subscriber, and thereafter you choose which data or call you will give your attention to. You have complete jurisdiction over what text, email, or multi-media messages you will read and what phone calls you will accept.
So it is with your mind. You, by the use of your mind, choose which ideas, or thoughts you will permit to pass through your physical tool – your brain. You attract these thoughts by your existing thought tendencies. Your thought tendencies were at first a conscious choice which then became habitual. When they became habitual, they now seem to you like unconscious action. Just like the girl at the start of this article, any thought you think is one that you gave yourself 'permission' to think.

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