I think (really ha ha) That thinking is more or less used in choice/decision making. When I think or ponder as opposed to contemplate (thanks Traveler) it is usually used to make a choice. Especially when I say "I"ll think about it" that normally implies that some sort of end point thought has to be arrived to.

I really am moving towards thinking less than I have. Most thinking as opposed to thoughts ( I hope you see the difference to me) is futile and based in some sort of past experience recollect. I am moving towards choice-less awareness. Meaning that I use my unbiased awareness to lead me in the direction I want to go for I already have all of the answers in me.

Yes Stingray that place (I think) is choice-less awareness, kind of like quick meditation where stuff just arrives and you really did not think about it.

I kind of get it when people say "I really don't want to think about it". Maybe they are not saying that they do not want to be bothered by it but that they do not want to use that sometimes useless energy of thinking.

Like anything, everything serves it's purpose and maybe thinking should just be used for math and fact based problem solving, like science and stuff.

I am not sure so...

Let me think about it (*wink)

Michael

by the way, that EXACT picture you used was my avatar on fb for the last week up until yesterday.

As a salesman i hear the phrase " Ill think about it" quite a lot! It can often be a polite way of saying no.

I do get the odd TOO BIG thought coming to me and i have to get somewhere quiet and literally talk it thru with myself. I have to verbally say stuff to myself and reason out aloud.

I normally get this when im struck with the fact im ONE with God. Its such an easy phrase to say but when it HITS HOME who i really am i just go into a nice kind of overload.

I cant just think when it hit me,i have to verbally go thru my thoughts. It happens also when im confronted with something new to me that ive not had time to digest or get my head round.

Talking about it helps it settle into me,no idea why. It also makes me emotionally feel better once ive talked myself thru it.

Graham

I guess there are many ways that people think. We are all different and have different abilities and needs. Some people need to do something while they think, like arts and crafts. Some people need quiet time for contemplation. Some people need to talk about it. Maybe we all need some of each. However, if we are not conscious of our thoughts, we can find ourselves thinking instead of being present. This is what I am working on because I think a lot about deep things. I do like to think and problem solve and math. I love this clip.

When I want to think about something, sometimes I need to talk it out with someone, even if they don't give input, but act as a sounding board for me. Sometimes I need to sleep on it and not think about it too much until I have had a chance to kick it around in the back of my mind for awhile until I feel inspired to think about it. Sometimes I just sit down and weigh the options.

When we say I'll think about it that means we will spend time mulling it over. It is like running a simulation in our brains of "What if?" "What if I do agree to this deal? Next this would probably happen then that." "Or no maybe this wouldn't happen but that would which would mean this would happen!" "Oh no that is not very good at all but on the other hand if I agree and then do this maybe that then this will work out great for me!"

This is "Thinking about it." It is taking into consideration, 'what is', 'what could be' and the direction you would be heading before and also after as well. It is working out tons of probable possibilities for your future and then trying to eliminate them down to is this a good decision or bad decision to choose?

Cliche. This has been going on for longer than one can imagine. The first documentation of this was recorded in the Old Testament. There was Jonah's disobedience to God's calling which placed him in the belly of a wale. There was Abraham and the account of his pleasing dialogue with God. Moses, who climbed to the top of Mount Siani to receive the 10 commandments of God and many more. There is no communication without thinking, and so to build upon this momentum we must sometimes stop to regroup our consciouness.

the picture is the thinker:

The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin, whose first cast, of 1902, is now in the Musée Rodin in Paris; there are some twenty other original castings as well as various other versions, studies, and posthumous castings. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle.[1] It is often used to represent philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker

yep facing hell or having internal struggle one needs to think to find answer.

it is a very good start to be able to get to deep meditation.

practice makes perfect.

very good question stingray.

How do you think about it?

1) You listen about it

2) Analyze what you listened to and make sense of it using what you already know

This is what you have always done when you were asked to "think"

Try this exercise.

......... Think of a European village on a Sunday where you are standing in the cobble stoned square trying to decide what type of freshly baked bread you are going to buy to eat with the wonderful cheese and whine that you purchased earlier............

An entire experience came to life in your imagination didn't it?

Chances are you filled in most of the missing details that I did not give you.

You probably decided that it was a beautiful sunny day with a blue sky, or maybe it had a few white puffy clouds.

You may have imagined that there were many vendors all over the square selling their wares.

You may have imagined a particular type bread, maybe a long French loaf; and you would have definitely smelled the wonderful freshly baked aroma in your imagination.

When you got to the part of the cheese & whine you would have already decided on the type and even tasted eating your bread with the cheese and a sip of whine to go along with it.

You may have even gone ahead and created the anticipation of when, where and with whom you will be eating your delicious fresh bread along with the cheese and wine. Perhaps you even had the details of the social interaction that you were looking forward to having later that day.

If you were THINKING this entire "vision”, you would have had to make a decision on every detail that existed in your imagination.

You would have to decide, is this a sunny day? are there clouds?, what type of cobbled stones?, how many vendors?, what type of bread, is it fresh?, what type of cheese? What type of whine? who am I buying this for, is there a dog running around in the square? etc., etc., etc.

If you were thinking it, every decision would have to be made by you, using the capacity of logic, analysis, and a decision making process.

However, that is not what happened when you did the exercise.

Now the logical person will still insist that all those images are a result of learning, storing, and eventually retrieving already existing imagery and information.

If that argument were true then we should all be still living in caves hunting and gathering instead of living such a complex existence.

I believe that at an individual level each of us is struggling to expand our capacity with a limited envelop of our existing potential and a slightly larger capacity beyond it through trial and error.

HOWEVER, that whole paradigm changes by the fact that we also use something called consciousness to exist in this dimension.

With this thing called consciousness we are able to automatically up-load our limited capacity of growth from each of our individual point of reference but at the same time access the total data base of every other human beings uploaded capacity of limited growth.

Therefore, we are able to access the entire capacity of human potential from the time we began as cave dwellers, all the way, to where we are at today with the complexity of thought that we are able to maintain within ourselves now.

However, how do you make sense of all this information when there isn't enough time in one's life to experience all that is humanly possible?

Therefore, a system of request and retrieval either has evolved along the way or was always designed that way for all humanoid life forms.

The request and retrieval system works something like this.

You have to identify what you want and make a vibrationally matching request to it.

However, you don't call it that.

You call it brainstorming.

This is where you identify the problem and you "think" and "think" for a solution.

When you are thinking you are stuck within only what you have learned and understood by your own conscious effort.

As long as you are "thinking" for the answer, you will be frustrated because the solutions within you are limited to what you have learned.

Aaaahhh... but then a wonderful and miraculous thing happens.

This part is for the logical and analytical thinker.

When you relinquish the constraints of your own limited accumulated knowledge, based on the vibration of the problem that you are trying to solve, suddenly a solution that is very close to your "knowledge" but just beyond your own capacity to "think it" suddenly APPEARS like a FLASH!

And you excitedly shout "I HAVE GOT IT!”

Rarely do you hear people shout, "I have thought it", because they recognize that it just appeared into their mind and it was not "thought" into existence.

What happened there is that for a moment, in-spite of your "thinking" standing in the way, you were able to access the totality of accumulated knowledge of humanity and retrieve a vibrational match to what you were intently focusing on.

You retrieved something that either occurred to another mind or you retrieved a combination of your focus + something that occurred in another mind + you pushed the envelope of what is possible based on the vibrational intent.

Either way you were at the "leading edge of consciousness"

Most of the time it is not that consciousness is expanding because we are pushing the limits with our intellectual effort.

Consciousness wants us to expand with it in the expression of "all that is"

Therefore, what is available beyond the limit of where we are at already exists within consciousness.

However, just like and athlete spending many years to become an Olympic champion, we cannot "manifest" too far beyond where we are at because everything physical has a backward compatible foundation in consciousness.

It has to be built upon what is already here physically and in consciousness, and all of the new expansion has to work with what is already here.

So what we have to do is intently focus on what we want and then allow consciousness to show us what is possible within that "asking" or "focus" of what we want.

This is exactly what we do when we think right now.

We ask and we retrieve something that is vibrationally close but depending on the asking, slightly wider in potential to where we are.

This is why the best answers come when you ask with intent thought and then you go to sleep on it.

What we don't realize is that most thoughts are a mini version of that exact mechanism.

In silencing our minds, we can realize the existence of this mechanism.

Not just silencing it in meditation where you are shutting out all distractions.

I am talking about silencing your mind while having a conversation with someone else, or while trying to "think" a solution to a problem.

Silence here is not the absence of thought.

It is the inward observation of the mind while using the mind.

It is adopting a second person perspective within yourself while engaging in life to understand what is happening within you to cause you to get upset, angry, excited, confused, afraid, agitated, sad, desire a cigarette, angry at other drivers, frustrated by not having the answer, embarrassed, happy, laughter, need for food, etc., etc., etc.

If you do this yourself, you will find that much of the theories on the mind are incomplete or very narrow in their potential.

We think and think and think all day.

However, if you replace the word "think" with "analyze"

With self-observation you will realize that it is far more accurate to say we analyze and analyze and analyze all day.

Then what is the object of our analysis?

It is random and yet specific to our totality of personality.

Let us say that a million random triggers (ideas) can represent your totality

This totality can be divided under various categories, of which the main one is "emotion"

So if you are angry, the million now narrows to about, let's say 1/4 million.

However, you are specifically angry about something, and based on that something, the 1/4 million is now down to let's say a thousand.

Now depending on the focus of your specifics you will start to randomly access your pool of a thousand anger triggers all through the day.

However, you will not call it that.

Instead, you will tell your friend "I have been angry all day"

You focus is the "asking" and the asking is constantly downloading your "triggers" based on emotion and each trigger starts an analysis that you describe as "having a thought"

Even if you say right now, “OK I am going to decide to think something of my own free will”, you still have to pick something to start with.

In the moment in which you "pick" that something to start with, watch your consciousness.

It is a random spin of the proverbial spin wheel of consciousness.

How do you think the choices on that spin wheel got there?

It is a vibrational match spin wheel based on your desire of activity (expansion)

Therefore, thinking is not what we think it is.

It is actually a random trigger based on a vibrationally matching desire, which emerges from the unlimited potential, and the analysis of which is always limited within ones total accumulation of conscious understanding.