When it comes to your life and the eventual destination of your soul, you need to develop the ability to think for yourself. So many people in life and in religion outsource their thinking to someone other than themselves. I am always amazed that people would entrust the eternal destination of their soul to someone else. How much trust must one have in a teacher to allow them to do all their thinking for them with regard to spiritual matters? Why not learn to think for yourself?
But that is sadly how much of the religious world behaves. Even when it comes to their souls, people will outsource their thinking to someone else. They will avoid the difficult labor of thought that comes with making decisions.
So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling;
Philippians 2:12
You must learn to think for yourself. There are many ways to do this, try these exercises to begin with.
I – When watching videos online, do not read the comments. Formulate your own thoughts and evaluation of the video without falling into the opinion of the mob.
II – Do not ask what others think before deciding what you think.
This doesn’t mean you cannot change your mind once you hear the other side of the story – but you must be in the habit of relying on your own thinking and consulting your own mind first. Then consult the minds of others after you have formed an initial hypothesis. Have the autonomy to think for yourself, but also the humility to change your opinion if you find a more correct way of thinking. You can adjust your opinion as you gain more facts, but at least develop an initial idea to work off.
III – Do not expect things to be good or bad based on what others say about them.
Understand that you will have your own interpretations and way of valuing each scenario. Do not make a pre-judgment when someone describes a movie, song, or book as “awesome” or “terrible”. Learn to formulate your own judgments only after you have examined the movie/song/book with your rational mind.
You have within you the latent and often untapped ability to think, be creative, and generate unique thoughts. Why waste the incredible capacity of your mind by allowing others to do all your thinking for you?
Besides, those people didn’t even think for themselves either. They inherited the majority of their ideas, swallowed them without question, and proceeded to live their lives based on ideas they do not know are true or false. They have never taken the time to scrutinize them and determine what the real elements of truth are, and what elements of their beliefs need to be done away with.
Thinking is the process of asking and answering questions in your mind.
We avoid thinking by asking others questions instead of ourselves. Get into the habit of asking yourself questions. What you will be surprised to learn is that if you can get into the habit of asking yourself questions, your mind will actually generate answers for you. Sometimes it will do this with no additional work needed on your part. Your mind is so powerful that the unconscious components of it can do work and provide answers to the questions that your conscious mind is asking.
Of course, I’m not asking you to avoid ever asking questions or getting help from others. Of course, we need help from others and we need their expertise from time to time. We would make infinitely more mistakes and lose much more time if we exclusively relied on our own thinking to allow us to reach our goals.
What we are trying to avoid is continually and habitually asking others for help and asking them questions at the expense of thinking for ourselves.
Your reflex reaction to a problem should not be to immediately ask for help without first trying to think through and figure out the situation you are in. Instead of asking ourselves questions and searching for the answers internally, we externalize every single question and never force our minds to generate any answers. This will cause us difficulty later in life because we will never have developed the ability to think rationally.
Begin by employing the handful of strategies suggested in this essay. You will find yourself using mental muscles that you have not used in years. You will learn to think for yourself. We must re-learn to think for ourselves and develop our own thoughts to the fullest.
