Learn to unthink

Yes. We have to consciously learn to “unthink”. This may seem odd. After all what is “unthinking”. According to me “unthinking” is the need to stop a thought in its tracks and consciously think on another line contrary to our innate tendencies. Let give you an example. When someone insults you, our natural tendency is to get angry. Why? Because our egos have been hurt and we feel the strong urge to retaliate and give a piece of our mind to that somebody. We react this way because of our conditioning, because of years of programming handed down to us through the ages that insults have to be responded in equal measure with anger.

It here we need to pause and reflect. Can we instead of reacting with anger, extinguish immediately the surging fury in us and instead smile and act gracious towards our offender. This is what I mean that we have to unthink the insult. As Christ says, “love your enemy. Be kind to those you hate you”. In other words we have to go against the grain of our programmed and predictable behavior and respond with graciousness and magnanimity.

We have to consciously unthink in these cases. As humans we all crave for recognition and fear criticism. We want those words of praise for the acts that we do. We want recognition. We want respect. “I” have done this. “I” Have achieved this gets in the way. In these situations also we need to “unthink”.

We have to get rid of the “I am the doer” and “I am the change agent”. This is what the Gita tells us. We are not really the agents we believe we are. It is all in God’s plan. We just fit in the grand scheme of things and really we cannot take credit for the success or failure of what we do. In other words we have to learn to “unthink”

The ability to not just act according to our pre-dispositions, according to our programmed behavior is extremely difficult to do. In most cases we just behave in certain ways without even thinking just because our reasoning mind tells us do so.

But beyond the reasoning mind of us mere mortals are the great teaching of Jesus or Christ which requires to step back, unthink and then act.