Sublime

Moi maintenant je pense qu’il y croyait lui-même. J’ai souvent remarqué que les gens arrivent à croire ce qu’ils disent, ils ont besoin de ça pour vivre. Je ne dis pas ça pour être philosophe, je le pense vraiment.

I was struck by a full-color advertisement for a Bible verse memory program. At the center of the ad was a man’s face, and emblazoned across his forehead was a startling claim: “YOU ARE WHAT YOU THINK.” That is a very explicit way to state what many of us implicitly assume. In ways that are more “modern” than biblical, we have been taught to assume

Do you make thoughts happen? Are thoughts yours? How do ‘you’ make thoughts? What are thoughts made of? What history do thoughts have that are valid without more thoughts being added? It is all patterns appearing.

Doing mode needs to think. It analyses, recalls, plans and compares. That’s its role and many of us find we’re very good at it.

One might naturally think that on being told a proposition, we would first comprehend what the proposition meant, then consider the proposition, and finally accept or reject it. This obvious-seeming model of cognitive process flow dates back to Descartes. But Descartes’s rival, Spinoza, disagreed; Spinoza suggested that we first passively accept a

“In so far as the mind conceives a thing under the dictate of reason, it is affected equally, whether the idea be of a thing present, past, or future.”

His name was Jean-Paul Sartre. He looked at Descartes’s statement “I think, therefore I am” very deeply and suddenly realized, in his own words, “The consciousness that says ‘I am’ is not the consciousness that thinks.”