"Oh nooooo! That's too intellectual!"
(from an offline discussion)
Just a moment! People very often mix up thinking and rationality, reason and logic. That's why intellectuals are seen nowadays as cold-blooded creepy creatures playing with ideas in a rational and/or abstract way. The very word "intellectual" has become a kind of insult, and poor kids who happen to like thinking more than say, basket, are clearly heading for trouble... But thinking is much more than mere rationality, and is not at all necessarily abstract.
The idea that reason equals rationality is a very Enlightenment one, and I think it is a tremendous impoverishment, a haemorrhage of meaning out of the word. Thinking is an attempt to engage with reality in a meaningful way. It is a method we (especially those for whom thinking is their main function - sorry I am into Jung again these days :) use to approach life. Thinking does "happen" in our brains, and it does use rationality, logic and abstraction as its instruments -- not always, nor universally: despite our Western education based mainly on rational reasoning, much of our thinking is still intuitive, imaginative, even sensory, and Eastern cultures developed thinking based on entirely different assumptions than ours... But wherever efficient and authentic thinking takes place, it involves the entire person, body and soul, mind and heart, the whole human being standing in the midst of his or her experience to find out its meaning.
Thank you so much, M, for this distinction. I like the idea that thinking is so much more than the rational and can involve intuition and body too. I am particularly into exploring the idea of 'body thinking' and 'feeling thinking' at the moment in my meditation, and indeed of taking meditation into the heart and out of the head - Buddhists translate 'mindfulness' into 'heartfulness', which I find persuasive.
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