A general understanding of critical thinking that it is an important condition for both the resolution of disputes and intellectual progress. But for us these terms are still vague. This way of putting it allows us to believe we are all critical thinkers when we are not. We are not on the same page, and why? It is because the term lacks a common definition. We sense its importance but nobody agrees on a workable definition. Some might define it as higher order thinking which are capable of producing new knowledge. But this is still vague. It is not an easy term to define much less teach.
For me the term comes on the heels of a very subtle implementation of a world vision after World War II which is still within the four corners of Marxism only this time much more subtle. It is not in religion what we would call the holy lie although the vision of which I am speaking is a lie or if you prefer, a deception, the real purpose being hidden from the masses who must be kept dumbed down.
I think the notion of critical thinking arose to meet this dark force that had infiltrated our culture but we still have no idea how to use it. So we just talk about it and publish books and papers on the subject. And yet we know something other than critical thinking is going on in our universities and even in Buddhism which daily is being changed into something it was never meant to be. A nihilistic religion.
Buddhism, I think, is better at getting a hold on what critical thinking should be about. For us it is closer to observing the limitations of thought (i.e., the process of thinking); that much of what we know by way of thought rests upon mere assumptions this being the act of supposing that something is true when it may later be found to be false (Canki Sutta).
My Buddhist training has been good at teaching me to be very critical of anything that comes out of academia about Buddhism. Buddhism by 1969 taught me to inwardly pursue, in an extended retreat, the very essence or substance of thought, itself, that I might realize what the Buddha did. To get there, I had to doubt, fully and completely, approaching kenshõ by thought.
Over time, I eventually learned that the human mind is naturally polarized (left and right hemispheres). One side, the left hemisphere, is worldly. It is involved in Darwinian fitness while the other side, the right hemisphere, is transcendent and evolutionary. They can work together in harmony and should. But if the worldly, left side takes control, all is lost. Critical thinking is meant to help us get rid of a lot of false ideas, including false culture both of which are ideologically grounded which is not open to correction. Ideology, itself, consists of ideas based on physical values and sensations (the left hemisphere).
Half of us is a bestial, half is divine. Buddhas come into this world to reveal to us the transcendent—not that we should remain here clinging to the bestial aggregates.
> One side, the left hemisphere, is worldly. It is involved in Darwinian fitness while the other side, the right hemisphere, is transcendent and evolutionary.
Let the reader discern whether this describes the brain or the earth.
Posted by: db | August 31, 2019 at 10:38 AM