I am interested in self-evident facts. The moment you ask me to believe something or accept something on faith you have lost me.

I am interested in the science of thinking. That is, I am interested in demonstrable facts about how human beings think. This should be the mission of psychology.

When I was a young person, I found Western psychology fascinating. But now that I am an adult, I find Western Psychology not useful in explaining the issues that I want explained. Frustrated, I turned to Oriental systems of understanding human nature for help. I find Oriental ideas more adult than Western psychology, and will, therefore, begin this discourse on thinking by evaluating some Oriental ideas.

Of all the oriental thinkers that I have studied, I found Buddha the most interesting. Let me, therefore, begin this inquiry by examining some postulations on the nature of human beings attributed to Buddha. We shall dispense with the mythology that surrounds Buddha. (An example of such mythologies is the fairy tale that Gautama was a prince and did not know suffering until he was age twenty eight, when he happened outside the gates of his palace and, for the first time, saw sick human beings etc. No human being gets to be twenty eight years old without having been sick and seen or heard about death. During the time Buddha lived, 2500 years ago, there was no anti bacterial vaccine like penicillin, so people were dropping dead right and left from assorted diseases and seldom lived beyond forty. Buddha did experience suffering, sickness and death. We shall not concern ourselves with the infantile mythology that those who did not even bother to understand what Buddha taught spawn around him.)

What is germane in Buddha’s life is his philosophy, not the mythology his existence is clothed in. Is that philosophy true and useful? First of all, what is it?

Gautama Sakayamuni was a young man who was disturbed by the nature of being on earth and searched for answers that would enable him to tolerate the real world. As a Hindu, he naturally looked into the various Hindu paths to understanding human nature. He tried ascetics, austerities and Tantra and nothing seemed to provide him with the answers that he was looking for. He became frustrated and resolved to either find the answers or die. He did not want any thing to do with this world on its own terms. Thus, he sat down by a Bo tree and told himself that he would not get up until he found the answers he was searching for. He tried to meditate.

In his meditative frame of mind, his ego, which his followers gave a cute name, Mara, tried to convince him why this world is worth his while. He was told about all the nubile damsels that could be his if only he wanted to live in this world. The kingdoms of the world are for the taking by any one who resolves to do so. But Gautama had seen through tinsel town and would not be swayed. He rejected the offerings of the ego and its world.

Gautama’s temptation reminds us of Jesus temptation. Before Jesus began his ministry, he went into the desert and fasted for forty days. During that time, his ego, which his followers christened as Satan, tempted him to change his thinking and accept living on the egos terms. Satan, his ego, took him to the highest point in Jerusalem and showed him the kingdoms of this world and told him that the world is for his taking if he decides to bow to the ego, live in terms of the ego and pursue the things of flesh. He told his ego that man does not live by bread alone but by the word of God, by truth. He wanted to live only on the basis of truth, which is union with his father, God, and all his brothers in creation. He won.

Gautama, too, won, for he was not tempted to give up his search for union. Gautama was not to exchange the paltry things of this world for the wealth of God. He was not about to exchange the valueless, this world, for the valuable, spirit. He just sat there and refused to budge. Ultimately, he escaped from the world of separation and entered the world of union. He experienced peace and happiness, the peace of God that St Paul said passes human, ego understanding. Having ascertained that there is a better world, Gautama came back to teach his people about the truth he experienced and how to live in our separated world without much suffering and pain.

Buddha postulated that to be a human being is to suffer. As he saw it, human existence is characterized by pain and suffering.

(Is this proposition true or not true? It is true, so I will accept it.)

Buddha then goes on to explain why human beings do suffer. As he sees it, we suffer because we do have Desire. As long as people have desire they would suffer.

(Is this proposition true? Do we suffer because of desire? The answer is yes. If one desires something, has a wish for something, one runs the risk of not obtaining it. When one does not get what one desires, one tends to feel disappointed and frustrated. To be disappointed is to suffer. Therefore, this proposition is true.)

Buddha proceeded to say that the only way to eliminate suffering is to give up desiring things. No desire, no disappointment and suffering.

(Is this proposition correct? Yes, it is correct. If you do not desire any thing, you would not be disappointed by not getting anything.)

Buddha recognized that to live on earth is to have desire. If one gave up all desire one would not be on planet earth. For example, to live in body one must desire to do so. If one did not desire to live in body one would not take the trouble to do what it takes to procure ones food. Survival in physical form requires a wish to live in this world. If a person gave up all desire to live on earth he would not do what survival requires of him and would die. To live in body requires food. To have food means to work for it. It takes effort to acquire food, clothing and shelter, absolute necessities for survival on earth. That is to say that no desire at all means physical death.

Buddha was not a nihilist who hates existence on death. He was not preaching suicide. If he had insisted on total cessation of desire he would have, in effect, been teaching suicide and would be a nihilist, an escapist from his world. He would be negating life on earth. His philosophy would be the philosophy of death and, therefore, of no relevance to those who want to live on planet earth. So what is the next best thing to do? Buddha taught DETACHMENT.

In effect, he said, go ahead and desire the things that make your survival in this world possible, but do so with detachment. Recognize that the chances are that you may not get what you desire, or that if you get them, that they may not last long. The things of this world are fleeting; do not become over attached to them. Recognize things fickle nature; they are here today and gone tomorrow.

If you do not get what you desire you should put your disappointment in perspective and not allow yourself to be over bothered by it. Life on earth is such that one cannot always get what one wants. Take life on earth on its own terms. Whether you like it or not, people will die. Those who are born in flesh and live in flesh must die, for flesh is composed of matter and whatever is composed of matter must eventually become decomposed. Matter is composed of elements, atoms and particles. These are held together by chemical bonds that weaken and break hence what they hold together, our bodies, decompose. Your parents will die. Your desire for them to live forever would not prevent them from dying. Your desire for there to be no hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes, bacteria, virus, plagues etc would not prevent those natural phenomena from occurring.

Life is such that what we desire we do not always get, and those we do mange to get do not last long. Just learn to take things in stride. You win some and lose some and such is life, cest la vie.

Clearly, Buddha’s teaching of detachment is a very useful approach to tolerating the pain that is inherent in our existence on earth. Life on earth is pain, and then you die. That is the truth and there is no sugar coating that reality; accept it and be detached to the fleeting glories of this world. The world is transitory and ephemeral; things are here today and gone tomorrow, so do not be attached to any thing, so that you do not feel disappointed when you lose things.

Detachment has another connotation; here it means not taking credit or blame for ones actions. An individual sees himself as a conduit through which life operates and does good or bad things. He does not take responsibility for the good he does, for if he does so, he must equally take responsibility for the bad he does. If you take credit for your good works, you must take blame for your inevitable bad works. If you can do good work, you can do bad work. If there is pleasure there must be pain. If you seek pleasure you must get its opposite, pain. Therefore, do not take responsibility for one or the other. Be detached from the fruit of your action. Do your best but do not be attached to the result of your action. All that matters is that you did your best, as you understood best to be. You are not in the business of assigning credit or blame.

This proposition of Buddha is, most rational persons would agree, valid. One who wants to have emotional equanimity must be detached to the events of this world. He must not permit himself to be overly attached to anything. If one is overly attached, one feels frustrated if one does not obtain what one desired, but if one desires things with detachment, not getting them does not produce much psychological suffering and pain. This teaching of Buddha makes him one of the world’s greatest psychologists.

(Alas, to achieve anything substantial in this world, one must be attached to what one wants to accomplish and must feel disappointed if one does not attain it. Feeling psychological pain is inevitable for great achievers, for it takes great passion and enthusiasm to achiever anything worthwhile. Excessive detachment leads to lack of enthusiasm and poor productivity. University professors are, on the whole, not known for their great contribution to human evolution because they are emotionally detached and objective; they are seldom emotionally passionate about anything. It takes passion that borders on the irrational to make a difference in the world, as we know it.)

The above four propositions constitute the core of Buddha’s teaching; they are called the four noble truths. Buddha subsequently elaborated on what is generally called the eight paths to correct living. These are really not original with Buddha. He merely elaborated on the universally recognized need to be truthful in ones speech, to be kind to other people, to love other people, to have compassion for other people, to forgive other people, to be generous with other people, to not say negative things about other people, to not backbite other people, to be trust worthy etc. These statements are found in just about every religion of the world and are not specific to Buddhism and, therefore, we shall not see them as Buddha’s major contribution to truthful living.

Buddha founded a monastic order for his key followers to live in. The monks were required to renounce pride and shame (those two go together, a proud person is always a person prone to feeling shame) and live simple existence.

The prideful ego is very difficult to do away with. Nevertheless, pride must be given up, for as long as a human being is proud he can not know peace of mind. The proud must suffer psychological pain. The proud person is actually in jail and hell, a prison and hell of his own making, but does not know it.

The ego is like a raging bull that requires constant effort to subdue it. One way to subdue the ego’s pride is to constantly and consciously humiliate it. To accomplish this end, Buddha insisted that monks beg for their food. They are to take a bowl and stand by the street side and beg for food. And they are to ask for only the food they need, now, not for tomorrow. When hungry, go beg for food, but do not beg for food to support you tomorrow. Such behavior is bound to make the person feel unimportant and small. Imagine a proud person begging for his food! Human pride feels attacked by the very notion of begging. The proud individual would feel great shame from asking lowly people for his daily bread.

That is exactly the point. Buddha knew that human beings are very proud and wanted them to overcome their pride through begging and simple living.

Human beings, particularly vain and narcissistic ones, like to bedeck themselves in fancy clothing and, like coxcombs and peacocks, trot around as very important persons, desiring other people to admire them. Buddha dealt with that attribute of human vanity by insisting that his monks wear a uniform, the saffron robes they wear. If necessary, they should walk around without shoes or wear simple sandals, but nothing fancy and expensive.

Buddha’s goal is to attack, belittle, degrade, humiliate, insult and bring down the individual’s prideful ego. As long as the individual is arrogant and haughty, he cannot know his real self, a self that is the same and coequal with other selves. Moreover, as long as the individual is proud he would be prone to anger and would not know inner peace and joy. A proud person is forever feeling that other people’s behaviors that do not treat him as a very dignified and important person denigrate his pride and reacts with anger. Anger is designed to make other people take him seriously, to see him as a very important person, to rehabilitate his belittled ego. The proud person’s emotions are up and down, yoyo, never stable; one moment, when he feels respected by other people, he is happy and the next moment, when he feels belittled by other people, he is sad, anxious or angry.

To be peaceful one must subdue ones ego and do away with pride in the self.

The other aspect of Buddhism that is useful is his insistence on meditation. Buddha was a Hindu. Hindus have been practicing mediation for as long as any one can remember. Buddha, therefore, did not invent meditation. All that Buddha accomplished is give different names to familiar Hindu names.

Let us briefly review what Hindus do in meditation and then add on to it what Buddha contributed to it. To understand Hindu meditation it is necessary to understand Hindu story of creation.

Hinduism believes that, in truth there is only one self. That self is called Brahman. Brahman is one yet is infinite in numbers. Each part of Brahman is called Atman. In eternity are Brahman and his Atmans. Brahman and Atman are joined as one self, literally, so that Atman is Brahman. Somehow, Brahman/Atman desired to experience himself as divided and not unified. Brahman, as it were, wanted to experience his opposite self.

Unified Brahman wanted to experience the world of multiplicity. He could not do so in his real nature. So he invented Maya, a magical portion, and cast that spell on himself and went to sleep. In his sleep, he dreamed that his infinite parts, Atmans, are separated from him and are no longer parts of his unified one self.

Our world is the dream of Brahman. The world is Maya; an illusion for it takes the unreal as real. Reality is union, unreality is separated things. In the world, we see ourselves as separated from each other and as not each other; we are, therefore, in Maya, in illusion, in a dream; we are ignorant of our truth, which is union.

The first part of the dream of the world is to see oneself as separated from other people. The second part of the dream is to see ones self as unified with other people. We come to separate but eventually must see ourselves as unified to be able to end the game.

The purpose of our existence on earth is twofold: first, to forget our unified nature; second, to remember our unified nature; we must remember that we are unified as one self, and are no other person but Atman who is Brahman.

The game is set up to first make us feel separated from each other and later to make us feel unified with each other. The Yogas taught by Patanjali (Jnana, Bhakti, Karma, Raja, Tantra…each appealing to different persons: Jnana to thinkers, Bhakti to worshipers, Karma to doers, raja to meditators, Tantra to sensual persons) are helpful means for remembering our real self. Meditation is the most immediately helpful means of remembering ones true self hence it is called the royal yoga, the king of the Yogas.

In meditation, Hindus try to transcend their separated selves, egos (Ahankara) so as to remember their real self, the unified self (Jivatman). They try to stop thinking and tune out the chattering separated self, the ego. If they can break out of the ego (Moksha) and enter Samadhi (world of stillness, world of no opposites, no separation, world of union) they would come to know that they and Brahman are the same.

This break through from separation to union is variously called self realization, enlightenment, illumination and awakening. The self realized person, called Avatar, knows that he, all creation and Brahman are the same. He is said to be awakened from the dream of Brahman; he has discarded the spell of Maya and overcame the ignorance that hitherto led him to think that he was separated from other persons. The enlightened person now knows the truth that he is unified with all people. (These ideas on Hinduism are culled from the various Hindu Holy books, scripture: Veda, Upanishad, Ramayana, Mahabharata, and Behavad Gita; and from the writing of Vivekananda, M. Gospel of Ramakrishna and so on.)

Buddha built on his inherited Hinduism and added to it. He said that to be human is to have a thinking aspect.

All of us do think. You do think and I do think. Something in us, let us call it what Hinduism calls it, ego, the separated self, the I in us, thinks. That thinking aspect of us is always thinking. It is thinking when we are awake as well as when we are sleeping. To be a human being is to think. Human beings are thinking animals (hence the study of thinking is really what psychology ought to be all about).

Thinking includes trying to understand the world one lives in. Unfortunately, the information available to the individual, all of us, at any point in time, is limited. Therefore, think as much as one likes, there are simply many things that one does not understand. For example, at this very moment, I do not understand the nature of the stars. Of course, I have studied some physics and appreciate what physicists say about the nature of the atom (electron, proton, neutron etc…Hinduism believes that matter is composed of three Gunas: satva, raja and tama and that the dominating one determines the individual’s character, if satva, cool headed; if raja, active and if tamas, dull; the three social class are said the reflect inheritance of these elements with the Brahmins being more satva, the Kastriyas being more raja and the lower classes and untouchables being tamas; apparently those who have worked out their sansaras from past lives evolve to the higher classes) and how nuclear fission is taking place in the stars hence producing the stars’ energy and light. But what cosmology knows about the stars is only a beginning.

Simply stated, there are many things about the stars and the world that the individual does not understand. Whatever the individual says about phenomena is based in incomplete information and is largely speculative. Conjecture is not truth.

Because there are many things one does not understand, one must, therefore, keep quiet and not pretend to know what one does not know.

On the other hand, the human ego wants to know, and when it does not know, it confabulates and fills itself with conjectures. The ego often pretends that its speculations are facts.

What is salient is that the ego, the human current self, wants to know everything and that it does not know all things.

Who am I? The ego asks that question and wants to know. Truth? I do not know who I am. (Do you know who you are?) My ego often pretends to know who I am, when, in fact, it does not know. The ego gives me the stuff that I studied in Western psychology, the stuff of adolescents, and that, for a while, made me feel like I have understood human nature. When I attained age thirty-something, I realized that Western Psychology is for adolescents, not for adults. Western psychology did not help me to understand myself.

Buddha advises me to not pretend to know what I do not know. He asks me to simply acknowledge the truth of not knowing many things. Buddhism teaches the individual to accept that he does not know who he is, who other people are, what the world is all about and what anything means.

Buddhism teaches the individual to empty his mind of all the gibberish that he normally takes as truth and simply remain open to truth. Tell yourself that you do not know who you are, who other people are and what any thing is or means. Deny your egos spurious information on what is true and what is not true. You do not know what the truth is. If you studied the physical science, deny that it is the truth; science merely studies material phenomena and that is not the truth we are talking about.

Meditation is the active denial of the truth that our egos provide us. In meditation, one tells ones self that one does not know any thing for certain. One decides not to listen to the half-truth and lies that ones ego tells one are the truth. One negates the chattering of ones ego. In effect, one struggles to stop thinking altogether. Just stop thinking and remain quiet.

It is very difficult to stop thinking. As noted, something in us thinks at all times. Therefore, the effort to stop thinking is a Herculean task. Actually, no human being can ever stop thinking; all that he can do is go from one mode of thinking to another.

There is ego separated thinking, the mode we currently engage in; there is unified thinking, the mode that exists in eternity. One must stop the one to be able to engage in the other; one cannot engage in both modes of thinking at the same time. You are either in our world of separation or you are in the unified world of heaven, but not both. Actually, you are always in heaven, unified state, but think that you are on earth, in separated state.

Most of us find it near impossible to stop our egos from thinking. In fact, when you attempt stopping thinking, the ego redoubles its efforts and presents silly ideas to your mind to think about. It is as if your ego is afraid to stop thinking. It is as if it believes that if you stopped thinking that you would die.

The ego thinks that were you to stop thinking that you would no longer exist. As Rene Descartes told us: cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am. To be a human being is to think. To stop thinking is to cease being a human being.

I have tried meditation for years and find it almost impossible to attain inner silence. I have attained stillness only momentarily before my obsessive-compulsive thinking swings into motion thinking about everything on earth.

In fact, if one comes to meditation unguided by an experienced teacher, one is most likely to panic when one succeeds in stopping thinking and ones ego seems to die and only void exists where one had thought that one had a self. I recommend that if you want to take meditation seriously, that you find a teacher who knows what he is talking about. I recommend a Hindu swami or a Zen Roshi as possible teachers. I had a Hindu swami (equivalent to Christian pastor, minister) for my guide.

The human self is a concept. My idea of whom I think I am, that you are and what the world is are exactly those, ideas. Concepts are not facts. Concepts are ego-based ideas and do not have tangible reality. Therefore, my self-concept, my ego, is, as Buddha correctly stated: smokes and does not exist.

Let me repeat: the human personality, the ego, the self-concept is non-existent. It merely seems to exist. When it is believed in, it seems to exist. When the ego is believed and defended it seems real to one, but when it is denied it, in fact, does not exist.

If one is suddenly confronted with the fact that ones valued self concept and self image is a smoke and does not exist, in fact, one struggles to make it seem to exist. Psychosis is nothing but a futile attempt to make the non-existent self seem to exist.

The psychotic person, as R. D. Laing (see his Politics of Experience) correctly observed, is more advanced than the so-called normal human being. The psychotic has reached a state where he recognizes that his so-called self concept does not exist. But instead of accepting that fact, he struggles, rather mightily, to convince himself that he exists. He invents a more outrageous ego self-concept and defends it. Now he believes that he is a very important man or woman, that he is the king or queen of the world. He or she clings to a grandiose self-concept that even normal persons can see that it is not real but is a delusion. The psychotic’s self concept is deluded and that deluded, false self, tries talking and seeing hence his experience of hallucinations.

(R.D. Laing made the mistake of thinking that the psychotic is a mystic. No, the psychotic has come near enough to understanding the truth of our selflessness but is unwilling to give up his false, separated self, the ego, and accept his selfless self, the unified self. The mystic, on the other hand, is a person who has reached where the psychotic and neurotic are, and voluntarily gives up his ego self and accepted his selfless self, which is unified self. The mystic died to the separated self to be reborn in unified self. He has relinquished his separated false self and accepted his real self, unified self. R.D. Laing, unlike the run of the mill Western psychiatrist, came very close to understanding human nature but failed. Western psychology is adolescent stuff but occasionally a Western psychologist comes close to real knowledge. Laing was one such psychologist. But he did not quite succeed and does not teach real psychology, as we are teaching here.)

The psychotic and the neurotic are at the gates of knowledge of their true self but stopped. The normal person has not even begun making efforts to know his real self. As it were, the normal person is like cattle, grazing grass, oblivious of his true self. Evolutionally, the normal person is less developed; he is behind the neurotic and psychotic. The effort to become enlightened is for neurotics, not for normal persons. Normal persons need normal religions, the stuff of Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, and Bhakti etc. Those who are at the verge of self realization will not be satisfied with normal religions and will seek real religion, connection to their source.

Whereas we all can appreciate that the neurotic and psychotic self is false, what is not always apparent is that the normal self is also false. The normal self is as much a delusion as psychotic self. In fact, the seeing and talking engaged in by normal selves is as hallucinatory as those engaged in by psychotics. This world is our mutual hallucination and delusion. The world is a shared delusion and shared hallucination. The world does not, in fact, exist. It exists only as in a dream. It seems to exist because all of us think that it exists. It is a shared dream.

The psychotic engages in unshared delusion and hallucination, as all persons do when they sleep and dream. The psychotic invented a private fantasy world and lives in it, not sharing it with other persons. On the other hand, our day world is a shared dream, a hallucination and delusion that we all buy into and share. Our sharing it makes it seem real to us. But it is not real; it is as unreal as the psychotic’s fantasies.

Buddha discovered the unreality of our so-called normal world. In meditation, Buddha denied his ego and it’s chattering and tried to keep quiet. At some point, he succeeded and attained inner silence. Momentarily, he escaped from this world and entered a realm of no space, time and matter. He entered the world of union; a world where there is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen. In that world, there is only one self; one self with infinite parts.

Christians call that self-God. But that self has no name. It is nameless. To name something means that one has understood it. No one on earth can understand the real self. It is beyond concepts. Moreover, to name something is to define it; what is defined is limited. The real self is limitless and, therefore, cannot be defined.

The real self is one self and at the same time infinite selves. One self extends itself into infinite selves. The real self is its self and at the same times all its infinite selves.

If you like, one God extends himself into infinite children. God is himself and also his infinite children. There is no space and gap between God and his children or between one child of God and another. Where God ends and his Son begin is nowhere and where one son of God ends and another begins is nowhere. There is one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.

Buddha called this experience of union Nirvana. Hinduism calls it Samadhi. Zen Buddhism calls it Satori. Christian mysticism calls it mystical union. Helen Schucman calls it Holy Instant. Call it what you like, it has no name. It is ineffable. No human being can describe it in words. Words do not apply to it. Words, speech and language are meant to adapt to the world of separation, the world of you and I. The world of union transcends words. There is literally only one self in that world, so there is no other person to talk to. Yet, there are infinite selves in that world, but all of them know themselves as the same self. They are joined. They know what each other are thinking. They know everything about each other for they are each other. They are immortal and eternal. They have no beginning and no end. They have always existed as one self that is simultaneously infinite selves.

Buddha, in effect, became illuminated to his real self, enlightened to the truth of our unified self and awakened from the dream that he is separated from his real self; he overcame Maya, self forgetfulness, and now knows who he is, unified self. Put differently, Buddha stopped his identification with the separated self, the ego-self, and momentarily returned to our real self, the shared one self and its one mind. In that brief moment, he knew his true self.

While in the state of union, Buddha made a decision to return to the world of separation, so as to come teach those who think that they are separated from other persons that they are, in fact, unified. (The decision to return to earth to become a teacher of God, teacher of union and teacher of love is called Buddha vista in Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhism has two main threads, Theravada and Mahayana.)

Our empirical experience on earth teaches us that we live in body. Body, matter, cannot unify. The world of union, therefore, must not be in body. Although the world of union cannot be described in earthly categories, but for the sake of analogy, we can say that it is a world of spirit, if, by spirit, we mean the opposite of matter. One must worn you not to allow your ego to tell you what spirit is, or is not. Let us just say that the world that Buddha experienced is not a world of space, time and matter; that it is the opposite of our world. Our world is the world of separation; our world’s opposite is the world of union. Buddha experienced union.

Nothing in our world applies to the world of union. Our world is a world of form, that world is a world of formlessness. Heaven, if you insist on calling it that, is the opposite of our world, just as our world is the opposite of heaven. Heaven is unified and our world is separated.

Buddha, in fact, did experience union. How do I know that he did? I practiced meditation and found it impossible to stop thinking. Then I succeeded and stopped thinking. I cannot tell you what happened for I cannot describe it. Even if I could describe it, you would not be able to understand it. There is nothing in our world that would prepare you to understand our real self and our real home, unified state.

Let us proceed with the fact that Buddha taught meditation. His goal was to enable people to transcend their separated ego selves and, hopefully, attain the awareness of their real self: a unified spirit self. Very few of those who meditate, in fact, attain the awareness of real self. This is so because to attain it requires giving up our present ego identification. As already observed, to give up the ego tends to make us feel that we are dead. We tend to think that if we give up our self-concepts, our personalities that we die and stop existing. We do not want to die, so we cling to our separated self-concepts.

Please notice that nothing said so far about Buddhism has any thing to with moralism. One does not have to be religious or moral to relate to what Buddha taught. One merely has to study it, think about it and then try to meditate. It does not matter whether one is a murderer or a saint, if one denies ones ego self one attains awareness of ones unified self. This is a fact, not a conjecture. Buddhism is not a religion. It is a science. It can be studied in a dispassionate and objective manner and verified. Any one can understand Buddhism, practice it and experience his real self.

Because Buddhism is amenable to rational approach and scientific verification, it qualifies as a science. That is why I am beginning this discourse on thinking with a summary of what Buddhism is.

However, I am not a Buddhist. As already observed, I do not accept the East or West; I am only interested in self-evident truth. I am a scientist. I want to understand things as they are, not as people tell me that they are, or how I want them to be. Having understood things as they are, I design a technology to adapt to them.

I want to understand how human beings think and having done so, design a technology, a psychotherapy, to help them think more rationally and scientifically so as to optimize healthy thinking. Healthy thinking, appropriate thinking and corrected thinking patterns lead to peace and happiness.

Science of thinking is aimed at enabling people to experience peace and happiness while in this world. If your thinking makes you feel at peace with yourself, with other people and with the world, it is healthy thinking. If not, please consider alternative thinking patterns, ones that give you peace and joy.

To feel peaceful and happy, you must live in harmony with all human beings. To live in harmony with all people you must love and forgive all people.

Each of us wants to be loved by other people…to be joined by other people…therefore, do unto others as you want them to do to you, love them, that is, join them.

Love is the most important variable in the world. Love your real self, love other people’s real selves and love God. But make sure that you know what the real self that you are loving is. Loving the separated ego self housed in body is not love of the real self. To love the ego is, in fact, to attack and hate the real self. The real self is spirit and those who love it love spirit, not body.

(This does not mean that you should hate your body. You must accept your body and uses it to love other people, to love those spirits who, like you, have the delusion that they are in bodies. Body is a means of loving the children of God experiencing themselves in matter. Body itself is nothing; it does not, in fact, exist. At best, body is neutral and can be used to love or hate. Body was made to hate with, to deny unified spirit and affirm separated self. Now use what was made for hate to love, what was meant to separate with to unify with. When body is used to love your real self and other people’s real selves, it becomes holy. Love (joining) makes our bodies a temple for the dwelling of the children of God and their God.)

SOME BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

The ego likes to talk about itself. Talking about itself makes it seem to exist. The ego wants other people to pay attention to it. It thrives on getting attention from other egos. If the ego did not obtain other people’s attention it would seem non-existent. It would panic and seek neurotic attention. The ego does everything to get other people to pay attention to it.

In certain instances, paranoid ego, the ego might attack other people, or in mild forms of attack, criticize them, so that they would attack and or criticize it and, in so doing, it obtains negative attention. Negative attention, apparently, is better than no attention at all. Human beings fear being ignored by other human beings, for to be ignored, not paid attention to, makes them feel non-existent.

In other instances, borderline ego, the ego might hurt itself and in so doing get other people to pity it and pay attention to it. The borderline personality, a type of ego self-concept, hurts its owner’s body, so as to convince itself that it is alive and to get other people to acknowledge its aliveness.

The normal person competes and obtains what his society laid down as condition for obtaining social attention. He does compete at school, spots, work etc and gets attention from those activities. He, therefore, feels like he exists, for other people are validating his existence. The normal person is an ego that successfully adapts to the exigencies of this world; he is at home in this world. This world is the home of the normal ego; he does not feel like an alien here.

(If you feel like an alien in this world, like you are an orphan despite love from other people, from your parents and spouse, you are a neurotic and are beginning the awakening process. Science of thinking is meant for you, not for normal egos. Normal egos are fast sleep and cannot be disturbed yet. When they are ready to wake up, they would project tigers into their dreams and those tigers would chase them and they run and in running awaken from the slumber that is called this world. We set events up, events that in grappling with them we awaken from this world. If you like this world, brother, sleep tight. It is not yet your time to awaken. But if you find this world nauseating, as I did from the get go of my sojourn on earth, you are a candidate for science of thinking.)

My ego would like to talk about itself and in so doing obtain other people’s affirmation of its existence.

Like all human beings, I have an ego and my ego craves attention. (If you do not have an ego you cannot be on earth; if you are reading this material, are on planet earth, you have an ego, a separated self.) Writing biographical notes, therefore, is enjoyed by my ego for it gives it attention. Be that as it may, let me proceed and make some observations about me, for without that information about me, you would not understand why I am where I am.

I was born with some biological disorders: spondylolysis, Mitral Valve Prolapse and an over sensitive body. I totally feel weak. I am almost always in pain. The cumulative effect of these is that I developed a self-concept that says that I am an inferior person. I feel inferior.

As Alfred Adler pointed out, no human being likes to feel inferior. Why? It is because it takes power to survive in our world. All inferior feeling persons must reject that feeling and compensate with superiority feeling. Thus, I restituted with superiority feeling. Of course, I know that I am not superior to any body. I am not even superior to my dog (I love dogs). I am not superior to trees, animals and anything in existence. The rational part of me knows that my body is just a variety of trees, animals and other biological objects. (The same atoms in me are in animals, trees, and mountains.) Nevertheless, I tended to seek superiority. That desire for superiority motivated me and was responsible for my neurotic behaviors.

There are biological and social reasons for my inferiority feeling. I have already alluded to my biological deficits. My social deficits are also real. I am black. In our contemporary world, to be black is to be construed as nothing. Racism and discrimination are alive. All black children grow up feeling that they are second-class persons. I am not different from other black children and felt socially marginalized. This contributed to my sense of inferiority.

All said, I feel inferior and compensate with desire for superiority. Alfred Adler explained this phenomenon very well. Karen Horney also helps explain it. I pursue ideal self and ideal every thing. As Horney observed, to pursue ideal self entails rejecting ones real self. Horney calls such a person a neurotic person. That is the case with me.

The neurotic hates his real self, and, in fact, rejects it and wants to become an ideal alternative to it. If he is black, he may fancy that to be white is to be ideal and seek to be white like. Later on, he discovers that whites are not that different from blacks and despairs.

For our present purposes, neurotics are persons who deny their real selves and seek to become ideal selves. They know that they are not their ideal selves. But they keep trying to become their ideal selves.

Neurotics are different from psychotics in that psychotics, in fact, believe that they are their ideal selves. In believing that they are already their ideal selves, psychotics reduce their anxiety (but feel anxious when their ideal selves are threatened and their hated real selves are about to be exposed).

The neurotic feels anxious most of the time. This is because he wants to become an ideal self and knows that he is not that ideal self. Anxiety inheres in the effort to become an ideal self and fear of not becoming it.

The neurotic defends an ideal self and is afraid of not becoming it hence always has what Horney calls free-floating anxiety. He lives in perpetual fear. As long as the individual desires to be an ideal ego, self-concept, he must fear not becoming it hence must live in fear.

The normal person is a bit like the neurotic hence has a bit of fear and anxiety. Normalcy is a concept, a model of the adjusted human being. No human being is totally adapted to the exigencies of this world. What we are talking about is relative normalcy, neurosis and psychosis. Every person is a bit of all three; it is all a question of degrees, with some being more normal than neurotic and some being more neurotic than normal. Only about two percent of the population is psychotic (schizophrenic, manic-depressive, deluded). The average human being is mostly normal and sometimes neurotic (self hating and desiring to be ideal).

I hated my body and wanted to become a different body. I rejected my physical self and wanted to become an ideal, mentally constructed physical self. I lived in anxiety state most of the time.

As I am is the way my father, grandfather and some other relatives are. As long as we inherited problematic bodies and live in a racist world, we have to feel inferior and restitute with pursuit of ideal selves. Neurosis runs in my family. On the other hand, no one in my family is psychotic. I have done a retrospective analysis of members of my family going back to hundreds of years and none was psychotic.

Biology is personality. The individual’s personality reflects his inherited body. My family members inherit problematic bodies and develop the neurotic personalities they have. As long as they have their bodies they must have the personalities they have. I expect my children, those who inherited my genes, body, to develop my type of personality or variations of it.

The function of science is to study phenomenon as it is, not as one wants it to become. In this light, as long as my family members inherited the bodies that they have, they must have the problematic personalities they have. Biology is fate. It behooves me to study my family members’ bodies and see how it correlates with certain personality types.

You must study your inherited body to understand your personality. Do not kid yourself with the nonsense that only sociological factors shaped you. Your body shaped you more than your social experience did. I estimate that the individual’s inherited genes, bodies, are responsible for at least 75% of his personality and intelligence, with social experience accounting for no more than 25%.

Normal persons tend to have inherited healthy bodies. This seems good except that they seem closer to animals. We do not need to be emotional and sentimental over this matter. Average persons tend to have gross bodies that make it very difficult for them to do high-level thinking.

(Actually there is no such thing as body; body is a picture in a dream; the thinker projects his ego self into a body and identifies with it. The body reflects the thinker. Body and thinker are one and the same self. If the thinker is bright his body will reflect it, if he is dull his body will reflect it. Simply stated, ego thinking is body and body is ego thinking; ego is body and body is ego. The thinker that is synonymous with body is the ego thinker. There is another thinking self, one that is not ego or body. The real self is unified spirit; it denies itself and identifies with ego and body. The real self is spirit; the ego self is symbolized in body. The real self exists forever and ever; the ego self is a dream self and does not survive physical death.)

As a teenager, I found myself in a war situation. I was exposed to killing and dying. I saw dead and rotting human beings lying all over the place. The cumulative effect of seeing dead and smelling bodies is that it solidified my earlier belief that the human body is nothing. Thus, when I see a person, I am not enchanted by his or her body. If I see a person I easily visualize his body rotting. If I see a beautiful woman I imagine her gorgeous body in various states of decomposition. This makes her body repulsive to me. You get the point.

I am very idealistic. My idealism is rooted in my wish for a different body. My idealism is, of course, fantasy, a futile wishing that human beings be what they are, in fact, not, ideal.

I wanted the people I see around me to be more than their future rotting bodies. I was looking for something beautiful, for, to me, the human body seemed ugly.

My neurotic idealism is a product of my awareness of the nothingness of the human body and my desires to replace it with a fantasy ideal body/self.

The neurotic is keenly aware of the valueless ness of the human body. He wants to replace it with an imaginary valuable body. The neurotic is keenly aware that the human body is worthless and wants to replace it with what seems to him a worthwhile body.

Alas, the worthwhile body he imagines is nonexistent. (The Igbos say: no matter how much you wash the anus with soup that it would still smell of feces. Interpretation: no matter how much value you give to the human body, it is still going to rut and smell to high heaven. In other words, the human body is nothing; it will ultimately die and decay, no matter how much you try to make it last long. Our ego existence is an exercise in nothingness.)

Please pay attention to my interpretation of neurosis for it is not the way Western psychology does. As noted, Western psychology is adolescent. Africans are an ancient people and have a more mature view of phenomena than our brothers from Europe. To the Igbos, for example, the world is nothing and only spirit matters. Therefore you must quest after spiritual things and not delude yourself with the belief that you would find meaning in the things of flesh. Flesh is going to rut; it is ephemeral and transitory; so seek what is permanent and that is spirit. (In Igbo: umunam ihen ke Chukwu ru anyi aka)

Western psychology is adolescent. But man is not always an adolescent. As St. Paul said: when we grow up, we give up the things that we had found interesting during our childhood. As adults, we must seek to understand our world in an adult manner. In my own search, I saw Oriental philosophies more adult than occidental ones. But alas, Oriental explanations are steeped in religion and mysticism. I am interested in science, not religion.

DESIRE, FEAR AND FREEDOM FROM FEAR

Buddha talked about desire/wishing as the cause of suffering. He was obviously correct. But let me look at desire in a different light. Let me show the correlation of desire and fear. If you desire something you must have fear. You fear not getting what you desire; you fear not obtaining what you wish for.

If you have no desires, no wishes then you would not have fear. Freedom from fear lies in having no desires and no wishes.

In her book, A Course in Miracles, Helen Schucman pointed out that human beings have two main emotions (Energy in motion): love and fear. As she sees it, God created love and we invented fear. We cannot change what God created, for whatever God created is permanent, but we can change what we made. We made fear and can unmake it (in her words, “undo” it). Schucman’s book is perhaps the best western rendition of Buddhism and Hinduism in Christological terms. Arthur Schopenhauer tried accomplishing the same end in philosophical language. (See Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea.)

Schucman is correct in stating that we invented fear and that God created love. Fear is an instrument of separation; whereas love is an instrument of union. Love unifies, fear separates. The moment you want to separate from someone you begin to fear him or her. If you are married and want to separate from your spouse you immediately think that he could harm you. The thought of separation from him seems wicked, evil and sinful, and that makes you fearful. It is the thought of separation that produced fear.

Fear is used to maintain the proposed separation. Now afraid that he would harm you, you run and hide from him. In doing so, fear enables you to separate and stay away from him. Fear cannot exist where there is no desire for separation, no thought of separation.

Are you a very fearful person? If the answer is yes, you desire this and that. This may not be how you have looked at fear. Indeed, it was not how I looked at it before. I looked at it from a biological perspective and concentrated on understanding the biochemistry of fear: how the body reacts when under fear and the neuro-chemicals involved in that reaction, such as adrenalin, which stimulated the workings of the body, made the heart pound, lungs work rapidly, bringing in more oxygen into the body, the heart pump faster and blood carries oxygen to all parts of the body, the body releasing sugar which is also carried by the blood to the muscles, preparing them for increased activity in fear’s fight-flight response. In fear there is rapid activity of the nervous system as messages are sent to, processed in the brain and feedback sent back to the muscles, telling them how to respond to perceived threat that elicited the fear response. Complex chemical and electrical reactions take place inside and between nerves to facilitate the movement of information from one nerve to another at the synapse. Several neurotransmitters are involved, such as serotonin, neuropiniphrine, dopamine etc; electrical ions interact with each other, such as magnesium, calcium, sulfur, Phosphor, sodium etc. The biophysics and biochemistry of fear obviously are useful understanding but do not lead to cessation of fear. Moreover, such understanding has led neuroscience and psychiatry to take recourse to treating fear and anxiety with anxiolytic medications such as Valium, Librium, Xanax etc and these have adverse side effects, symptoms of which are similar to the effects of alcohol addiction.

It was only recently that I recognized that to experience fear that one must have desires and wishes and that if one did not have desires and wishes that one would not experience fear.

One always have desires hence must have some fear. To be alive in body, on earth, one must have a desire to be so. As Buddha observed, twenty-five hundred years ago, there is always desire in people’s lives. In as much as people must have desires to be human beings, they must fear not getting what they desired for, thus, there will always be fear in their lives.

What we can do is to understand the correlation between desire and fear and resolve to eliminate unnecessary desires, reduce desires to the very minimum, so as to reduce ones level of fear. As Buddha recommended, one then develops detachment to the remaining desire, so as to not allow ones self to experience unnecessary fear and anxiety.

I saw myself, other people, social institutions and the world as imperfect and desired to change them. This makes me an idealist.

Let me explain how this phenomenon worked. I am walking down the road and I see a tree, an animal, a person, a house, a car, social institutions, anything and everything. I immediately grasped these things imperfections. I then thought about their possible more perfect forms. I have always done this. In so far as memory goes, I remember engaged in this idealistic thinking at age six, when I began formal schooling; I used to imagine how I, the other pupils, teachers, school building etc could be made perfect.

I engage in this sort of idealistic thinking from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to sleep at night. In my sleep, I continue with idealistic thinking. My dreams continue the process of wishing for an ideal self and ideal world.

This pattern of thinking is called neurotic by Karen Horney. (See her Neurosis and Human Growth.) The neurotic is a person who hates and rejects his body, his real self, other people’s real bodies and selves and wishes for their ideal forms. He does so obsessively and compulsively. (In terms of diagnosis, I do not have any Psychiatric disorders. However, on Axis 1, I would rule out Generalized Anxiety disorder and Dysthymia; on Axis 11, Avoidant and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorders; on Axis 111, Spondylolysis, Mitral Valve Prolapse and hypersensitive body; on Axis 1V, Normal psychosocial stressors; on Axis V, good social skills.)

Desiring for ideal states, wishing that I be different from what I am and that people be different from what they are, and that the world be different from it is; positing forever changing perfect images of how the self and things ought to become meant that I was invested in the outcome I desired. I lived in fear of not attaining what I desired, the ideal self concept, ideal self image, ideal other people, ideal social institutions, ideal world, ideal this or that. I, in effect, lived in perpetual anxiety.

Now, suppose that I did not desire ideals, did not desire for things to become perfect then what would happen? I would no longer experience excessive fear.

If you do not have idealistic goals you would reduce your fears by a large measure. You would still have some fears for, as noted, you must have the desire to live in body to be on earth, and, in as much as, you wish to be on earth, which means to be separated from unified state, aka heaven, you must experience existential fear, what we might call normal fear.

Helen Schucman provided the best method for eliminating fears that I know of. Although her book is written in religious mumbo jumbo, it actually contains profound insight into human psychology. I would rate her as a science of thinking expert. She recognized that everything in this world is produced by thinking and that we can change our thinking to obtain different results. In fact, the objective of her book is to correct our disordered thinking, to help us go from separation based thinking to unified thinking. In her view, such corrected thinking, undertaken with the aid of the Holy Spirit, is what miracle is all about. Such corrected thinking, from hate to love and forgiveness, would transform our world into a happy dream, real world, and bring it to the gate of heaven; and finally, make the will of God, love, replace the wishes of God’s Son and bring about the much hoped for Kingdom of God into our world. Our world would be transformed into what Christian eschatologists call New Jerusalem, New Israel, and what I call a New World, the world at its best. Love would at last prevail on earth, as warriors beat their swords into plowshares and lions lie side by side with sheep, not devouring them. This is a world that must come into being before we leave the world of separation and return to the awareness of living in the unified spirit world.

SCHUCMAN’S MYTHOLOGY

Let us, in a nutshell, review Schuman’s story of creation. I say story of creation because it is not factual but metaphorical. In actual fact, physics tells us that the universe began fifteen billion years ago, in a Big Bang. It is hypothesized that all matter and energy was originally in a ball the size of an atom. Somehow, that hot ball exploded and spilled out its guts. The Big Bang invented space, time and matter. Subsequently, particles were invented and those united to form atoms. Atoms, in time, changed forms to become the various elements on the Chemical table. The elements combined to form biological life forms. Simply stated, people evolved to where they are today through a long chain of events. Stories of creation by religionists are, therefore, an attempt to explicate the unknown in human terms.

Briefly, Schuman pointed out that the temporal world came into being as a result of our desire and wishes to be separated from God. In her view, in eternity, heaven, everything is one. There is God and his extensions, his creations, his children. God and his extensions are one. Brahman and his extensions, Atman, are the same.

God and his joined children are spirit, unified spirit. They are the same and are equal. However, God created his children, God’s children did not create God, though they are imbued with the creative spirit of God and do create their own children. We create with the creative power of God in us, but not with our own powers. In effect, we are co-creators with God and not solo creators.

God is more powerful than his children since the children can do nothing without the power of God, their father.

As Schucman sees it, the children of God resented the fact that their father, although of the same essence as them, is greater than them; they resented that he created them and they did not create him. They desired to create their father and create themselves. This desire is impossible of gratification in reality, since the whole will always produce the parts and the parts do not produce the whole.

Unable to gratify their impossible wishes, the children of God decided to separate from him, to go invent a world where they seem to have invented reality, that is, invented God, themselves and each other. As it were, they cast Maya on themselves and went to sleep and in their sleep, dream this world. In that dream, this world, the children of God use their creative thinking to invent self concepts for themselves.

The human self concept says that one is separated from other people, and is self created. It is the individual, you, me, who invented your/my self concept. George Kelly tells us that personality, aka self concept, is a self construct. The human child, building on his biosocial experiences and the experiences of all human beings around him is responsible for inventing his self concept.

SELF-CONCEPT VERSUS REAL SELF

As far as I can see, it is me who constructed my self concept. Of course, I built on my inherited biological constitution and my social experience. I made my separated self. So did you. Each of us made his empirical self.

Schucman argues that the empirical self we made for ourselves were made as replacement selves; that we use them to substitute for our real selves. To her, our real self is unified spirit, which she gave a Christian name, Christ, and the Son of God. The son of God is holy, that is, unified with his father and all his brothers. But that unified son of God, that holy self, was replaced with an unholy self, a separated self, the ego self concept. To live on earth is to have an unholy self, a separated ego self. (Whole self, is contracted to holy self; separated self is unholy self.)

The ego is the earthly self, a dream self, a dream figure housed in body. To Schuman, the ego and its body do not exist. As she sees it, space, time and matter are non-existent, and are, at best, dream existent; they exist in dreams, but do not exist in spirit.

Schucman rearticulated the truth found in Hinduism and Buddhism. Her book contains the perennial wisdom of mankind. She christologised Hinduism. She stated the truth and nothing but the truth and God helped her. (I reached the same conclusions as Schucman did before I head about her book and its thesis. I eventually read her book and essentially agree with its thesis.)

The only problem with Schuman’s book is that it is written in Christian language and some of us choose not to do anything with formal religion. Religion tends to compound fear by teaching folks to fear God. Misguided religion teaches its adherents to worship an imaginary, all powerful God. That made up God (it is human beings who invent whatever idea they have of God; God is our individual and social constructs) is used to restrict freedom of thinking.

Religionists try to restrict their thinking to the parameters approved by their religion. Already those who call themselves students of A Course in Miracles try to limit their views to what Schuman said. Indeed, they have already evolved a pope, a chap who scarcely has understood what his mentor wrote but who now has taken it upon himself to approve what folk’s say. This man set himself up to decide whether folk’s interpretation of the Course is in line with what the book teaches or not. This is sad, very sad, indeed.

Religion tends to lead to conformity hence stifle the generation of new ideas and lead to social stasis. Therefore, the individual is best served to be outside the confines of organized religion and think his way to his real self. Thereafter, he should gather with like minded persons to share ideas about their true self. We do that at Science of Thinking Institutes around the world. (We call it institute because it is a school where we learn and teach about the real self and how to think correctly, not a place to propagate useless dogmas.)

The salient point in Schucman’s theological thinking is that she recognized what Buddha before her did, that this world came into being and is sustained by desire and wishes.

We wish to be on earth. We wish to live in separated forms. Matter, space and time enable us to seem to live as separated selves. I am over here, probably thousands of miles apart from you. That distance separating us is space. It takes time for either of us to get to one another. We do not seem joined. We seem to have separated selves. We see ourselves in bodies and bodies give us a sense of boundaries. I am in my body and you are in your body, so we seem separated from each other.

Schucman correctly sees our world as an illusion; she teaches that in reality we are connected to one another, that there is no space and gap between us; that there is no space, time and matter and that to the extent that we see space, time and matter that we are in the world of Illusion. Indeed, seeing, perception, itself is part of the illusion of this world. In unified state, there is no other person to see, there is no seeing in heaven. Heaven is characterized by knowing.

The lady theologian, the best that America has produced, is correct. We are joined. This is a fact, not conjecture. I know so from direct experience, not speculation. However, I am not here to tell you about my experience of union. I am here to help you experience union, so that you would know about it without merely speculating about it. To help you appreciate this truth, consider that at night we dream and see the entire world we see during the day. In our nightly dreams, we see space, time and matter. As long as we are in that world of dreams, it seems external to us. Then we wake up in the morning and that world is nowhere to be seen. We recognize that the dream world was made up by our thinking.

We think in images. Our thinking imaged the world we saw in our dreams and that world is not real.

In our dreams at night, we see mountains and those obstruct our movement pretty much as the mountains we see in our day world obstruct our movements. But when we wake up in the morning we recognize that the mountains that were obstacles to us in our dreams were not there, in fact. The question, then, is whether our day mountains are, in fact, real obstacles? Of course, if they are believed as real, as we believe our dream mountains as real, they act as actual obstacles. But suppose one knows that our day living is also a dream, would the mountains in ones life still obstruct ones activities? Jesus did not see the mountains we see on earth as such. Thus, he could walk through closed doors, for he did not see obstacles. He walked on water because he believed that there was no water where we see water. The man said that with faith we can move mountains, meaning that if we believe in spirit and deny the reality of this world that we can get through where we had hitherto seem mountains and obstacles.

Our day world, Schucman tells us, is also a dream world, this time, a collective dream world. We all share the dream we call our day life. Because it is a shared dream, it seems permanent.

When a dream is shared, it seems to last long. Thus, each of us lives in the world for a hundred years or so, and those one hundred years seems continuous. The world seems to last billions of years because it is shared by human beings, animals, trees and stars, everything.

When each of us dies, he exits the world’s dream. The world no longer exists for him. (Consider the old philosophical saw: if a tree falls and there is no human being around to observe it fall, did a tree fall? Was sound made? George Berkeley, in his Dialogues, suggests that the world may be in our thinking. This is solipsism. Quantum Mechanics- physicists like Schrodinger, Heisenberg, and Pauli suggest that the observer affects what he observes, that the external world may not be independent of our thinking.)

REINCARNATION

In as much as the wish that led to this world’s seeming existence, the wish for separated self is still there, Schuman says that the individual will be reborn on earth. This is akin to Oriental concept of reincarnation, except that one is merely having different dreams, none of which is real; one is not born in body or die; one merely has dreams in which one seems born in body, in a place called earth and dies and comes back to it.

As Schucman sees it, people come to the world, over and over again, until they recognize that the world is not real, is a dream, and is a response to their wish for separated self. When they give up the desire to have separated self, they return to the awareness of unified self and no longer return to the world of apparent separation. (Buddha called this phenomenon the breaking of the wheel of rebirth. The illuminated person is no longer reborn on earth.)

Schucman and her mentor, Jesus, teach a path to remembering the unified self. Their part is the path of love and forgiveness. They teach that in eternity that we are unified. Union is love. Love is that which glues everything together. God is love. God is unified with all things. The Son of God, in his true essence, is love, for he is joined to all his brothers, to all creation and to creation’s creator, God.

Our world is a place of separation. To separate from union is to attack and seem to split it into fragments. As Schuman sees it, we seem to have attacked, split union into infinite fragments and each of us identifies with a fragment and see other fragments as apart from us. To separate from others is to attack, hence to hate them.

To hate other people is to hate ones self since, in truth, all people are unified with one. To live on earth is to hate ones real self. Out of mutual self hatred we attack and do evil things to one another.

Jesus and Schucman attempts to reverse the nature of the world; they teach love and forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook the empirical world and what is done in it; to see it as dream and ignore the dream. Jesus was killed and overlooked those who killed him and remembered that he is unified with them.

Schucman asks you to overlook those who seem to do evil things to you, for they do it in your dream. If you are a black person and whites discriminate against you, if you are a woman and men rape you etc, Schucman asks you to forgive those people. Why? It is because they have not, in fact, done what you see them do to you. They seem to have done those things in our mutual dream of self attack. They are still as God created them: innocent, holy, sinless and guiltless. So are you despite what you seem to have done on earth, in the dream.

As Schucman sees it, it is when you overlook other people’s apparent evil that you can overlook your own apparent evil; when you forgive other people, you forgive yourself. But as long as you bear grievances against other people’s attacks on you, you must think that what you yourself did in the world is real, that you have committed crimes, and is a sinner.

Believing you a sinner and guilty, you want to be punished, for guilt calls for punishment. You and those who believe in guilt, all people, want to be punished. To separate from God, as we all did, to be on earth, makes us feel like we did something wrong hence feel like we are sinners. To be human is to feel guilty and to expect punishment from the person one sinned against, the person one separated from, God and other people. We all expect God and other people to punish us.

(Christians call the act of separation from God Original Sin, and believe that we are born in sin and live in sin and are punished for our sin. They symbolize this separation in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eating the forbidden fruit is metaphor for disobeying God, separating from God, and because of that separation and sin we are punished with suffering and death. The wages of sin, Judaism, the antecedent of Christianity, teaches is death.)

We, as separated egos, invent a God that has nothing better to do with his time than to place us in his hell and satisfy his sadistic nature by watching us burn forever and ever.

But when we forgive others their evils, we forgive our own evils. In doing so, we overcome the world of dreams and awaken in the world of unified spirit, our real home.

Schucman restated the eternal truth in her Christological language. One cannot really add anything better to what she said. The only problem with her methodological approach to awakening to our real self is that it is religious and one is not a religious person. I am a scientist and express the perennial wisdom of mankind in scientific language.

If you like religion, then read Schucman or Hinduism or Buddhism. We are all saying the same things. But if religion makes you angry, as it made me, and then consider my secular representation of what is found in the world’s religions.

Religion is any attempt to reconnect people to their source, to help them remember their true nature. I want to accomplish religious goals through rational thinking.

As I see it, everything is a result of our thinking. I like the word thinking. I do not like the world mind. Mind tends to be deified and reified as if it is a person and worshiped. We say my mind as if mind exists apart from us. Mind is abstraction for the act of thinking.

There is thinking in the universe. The universe is a thinking universe. All things think, in different forms, of course.

We are part of a thinking universe. Everything thinks along with us. As Schucman recognized, we think in images. We see a world that represents our thinking. First, we think and our thinking is simultaneously shown in images. This is a fact, not conjecture. The external world we see is the simultaneous representation of our collective thinking.

When we die, that is, stop thinking in terms of this world, separated thinking, the external world is no longer there for us to see. Of course, we do not die. We merely exit this world and go to other modes of thinking.

Different modes of thinking show us their own different worlds. What folks report seeing in near death experiences is a world produced by that mode of thinking. As long as you choose to believe it as real, it seems real, and, in fact, is as real as our present world. But like our present world, the near death world, what Orientals call the astral world, is a fantasy and a dream and does not last forever.

What, in fact, exists forever is the world of union, the world of God, what Christians call heaven, Hindus call Brahmaloka and Igbos call Elegwe. That world is a world of connected light, a world where everything is joined to everything else, a world where there is no space and gap between people, a world where there are no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, a unified world. That is the real world. It exists and is our real home. We are foreigners in our present world of separation. (Don’t you feel like an alien here? I do.)

Unified state is the only world that is real. All you have to do to find out whether this is true or false is deny our present world, and deny the separated self you have invented for you, and with which you replace the unified self that is your real self.

The condition for experiencing heaven is that you give up the world of perception. If you consider that price too much to pay, well, you are not yet ready to return to your real home and real self. Keep on dreaming. Dreaming is allowed. God does not stop you from dreaming. Indeed, he is in the dream with you and is guiding you.

By all means stay in the journey without a distance, a journey to nowhere. (Everywhere is already in God and you, as part of God, is already in God and can, therefore, go nowhere that you are not already in; there is no place apart from you, so there is no distance to go to.) Like the prodigal son, you are on a journey to see if you can be independent from your father; at first, you seem to succeed, but eventually you learn that you cannot and return to your father and home, unified state. When you return home, heaven will throw a party for you and rejoice, for God’s seeming dead son is resurrected from death, the lost sheep is found. Dream on, my friend, for dreams are permitted. You have the freedom to dream, no one, not even God can prevent you from dreaming. What you are not allowed to do is permanently change your nature; you can dream of separation but you cannot make yourself permanently separated from God. You are always as God created you, unified with him and all creation. All you can do is dream that you are separated from God and your real self, that dream does not alter the reality of our unified spirit self. (Ndi muoso na edu anyi nu uwa.)

It is very difficult to negate this empirical world, to give up ones self concept and self image. As noted, one feels terrorized and, in fact, constructs psychotic and or neurotic self concepts and self images and identifies with those rather than face selflessness. The death of the self, as we know it, is very terrifying.

Western psychology, as superficial as ever, defines psychosis as this or that. But psychosis is really an invention of a more deluded false self and false world when the individual recognizes that his earthly self and world are false.

Insanity is efforts to make our world seem real when it is recognized as not real. To do so, the insane person must vaguely recognize that our world is not real. Thus, insane persons are closer to heaven, to God, more than we tend to realize. Of course, they are not in God, heaven; they are afraid to meet the condition of heaven, God, their real selves: give up their earthly selves.

Neurosis, which I can speak from direct experience, is a product of being closer to God, to the real self and to heaven. The neurotic is aware that our world is unreal. He is aware that his body and ego self is unreal. Because of this vague awareness, he hates and rejects his body and ego. He then uses his thinking to construct an ideal body and ideal ego self for himself and for other people. He aspires after becoming his ideal body and ego and world. His life is motivated by an obsessive compulsive effort to seem his ideal perfect selves.

By age six, I was aware that I hated my body and self. I used my thinking to image a better body and self. At age twelve, a man from my area came back from America and had PhD. My father treated him like he was God. I resolved that he must be very important and wanted to be as important as him, to be respected as my father respect him. Subsequently, I did not relax until I had PhD. Then I realized that that degree did not change me. I still felt as worthless as ever. Still desiring social worth, I sought a high position in society. I worked hard for it. A few years after leaving college, I was the executive director of a mental health agency. Still, I felt as worthless as ever. I then dropped out of the rat race to seek alternatives to social worth. In my late thirties, I immersed myself in the study of Hinduism, Buddhism, new age religions and traditional Christian religions.

Neurosis is a product of the individual’s awareness of his existential worthlessness and valuelessness. This is a correct self assessment. The problem is what one does with that fact.

The neurotic attempts to construct a better self and a better world. He does not succeed.

The psychotic seems to succeed and live in his imaginary ideal world. The neurotic knows that he is still living in his imperfect world and is unhappy with that world and is unhappy with himself. He is Henry Thoreau’s man who lives a life of quiet desperation.

Western psychology talks shop about neurosis but do not cure it. I have practiced most of the psychotherapies that purport to heal neurosis: Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian; Fromm, Horney; Ellis rational emotive therapy, Beck’s cognitive behavior therapy, Skinner’s behavior therapy, neuroscience’s medications, and so on and so on. None of these works. They merely address the symptom not the disease itself.

What heals neurosis, as well as other mental disorders, is change of thinking. One must change ones pattern of thinking.

Living is thinking. The universe is a thinking universe. The neurotic must give up desiring to be perfect and ideal on this world’s terms. He must eventually give up his self altogether and accept a different self, a different world, one that is not a product of his separated thinking, but is a product of his unified thinking.

THINKING PRODUCES HEAVEN AND EARTH

Like this present world, our mutual thinking is responsible for producing what people call heaven. Please note this fact.

Our collective separated thinking produced our present world; our collective unified thinking produced heaven.

To heal your neurosis, psychosis and normalcy is to stop thinking in a separated manner, individualized in neurosis and collectivized in normalcy, but to think in a unified manner.

Go into meditation, stop ego based thinking, tune out this world, exit it and return to the world of union.

Our real thinking, unified thinking, produced heaven…but because that world is unified and knows so, it is permanent, changeless, eternal and immortal…this does not mean that it is static; thinking still goes on in heaven and that thinking adds to heaven; heaven is forever expanding, for our thinking is creating new things that are added to heaven hence expand it. Heaven is perfect peace and happiness. These are facts, not conjectures.

HEALED HEALER

Each psychotherapeutic method is first meant for the person who propounded it, and eventually for those like him. The therapist is a sick person. His sickness is his separation from his real self. If his therapy is any use, it must first heal him. Having healed him, he knows from experience that it is useful and then extends his therapeutic approach to other people.

Alfred Adler was a neurotic. He felt inferior and compensated with superior feeling. His individual psychology helped him reduce but not eliminate his inordinate sense of inferiority. Karen Horney felt worthless and aspired after becoming an ideal woman. She studied medicine, at a time few women were admitted to medical school. But despite becoming a supposedly prestigious medical doctor, she still felt worthless. Her psychoanalysis somewhat helped her reduce her intolerable sense of worthlessness. Unfortunately, she died before she fully understood the Zen Buddhism she was beginning to explore. If she had succeeded, she would have healed her neurosis. Sigmund Freud was a neurotic. His psychoanalysis, apparently, did not heal his neurotic anxiety, for he died a very anxious person suffering from all sorts of phobias. Since his therapy could not heal him, it could not heal pother people.

Skinner and behaviorists were empty vessels making a great deal of noise. True, we do learn a great deal of things. Our whole educational system is based on learning. Nevertheless, it is infantile reductionism to claim that all we are is learned and that you could modify people through classical and operant conditioning. You can practice positive and negative reinforcements all you want; you can not change neurosis until you change the neurotic’s pattern of thinking.

I have scrutinized extant Western psychotherapies, psychological and pharmacological, only cognitive behavior therapies seem useful. Aaron Back’s Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Albert Ellis Rational Emotive Therapy seem useful. Both enable folks to understand their thinking patterns, and where there are bad thinking patterns, help them correct them. Ellis wants to reorient people’s thinking to a more positive and adaptive pattern.

For example, the neurotic bedevils his life with lots of “should not’s” and Ellis helps him to understand that morality is a social construct and that there is nothing wrong with many behaviors per se. If a behavior does not harm other people, Ellis urges you to engage in it. Do not say that you should not engrave in it just because someone said that you should not. Consider sex. There is nothing wrong with it. If two adults consent to have sex, that is their business. What other people think is not relevant. (However, it is always wrong to have sex with children, for they cannot legitimately give their consent. On a personal level, it is wrong to engage in homosexual activity. Homosexuality is a defiant behavior, defiance of natural sexuality; it is based on power struggle, an effort to seem powerful by defying the obvious. However, I am not motivated to crusade against homosexuality; I am just stating what seems self-evident to me. I know that if you oppose homosexuals they will be defiant and doubly engage in their absurd behavior, so one will simply keep quiet over this insane behavior.)

Each psychotherapy is meant for the person who fashioned it and to the extent that it is good must first heal him. Helen Schucman noted that the atonement is first for the atonement worker. It is for the healer to first heal himself before he can pretend ability to heal other people.

What we mostly have in the world are unhealed healers. We see neurotics who have not healed their own neurosis pretend to be therapists and or ministers of God. To be separated from God and his creation is to be sick. To unify with God and his creation is to be healed.

If you are joined with God and all creation, you are healed and can heal those who feel separated from God and people. But until you unify with God and all creation you are an unhealed person and has no business trying to heal any one; you cannot heal any one, any way. All the unhealed therapists and ministers making noises about their ability to heal people are frauds.

Unfortunately, Schucman did not adhere to her own advice and did not heal herself with her spiritual psychotherapy. Clearly, she did not let go of her ego. She continued to live from her ego and, as such, experienced fear. She died an anxious and depressed neurotic woman. Yet, if she had attempted to practice her theology she could have become what she called one of the saviors of the world (what Orientals call an avatar, Buddha vista). It is a pity that she chose to retain her over blown ego and instead of identify with her unified self. In unified self she would have found the peace and joy that eluded her all her life on earth.

I am not really interested in criticizing other persons. I am interested in me and what helps me heal my own neurosis. Science of thinking is first meant for me. If it heals my neurosis, then it can heal other persons’ neurosis.

The question is whether my methodological approach to human beings has healed my anxiety? Am I still a fearful person or have I found freedom from fear?

I have found freedom from fear. Of course, I still have some residual fear. I still live in the ego, I still wish to be a separated self hence am on earth, in the dream of separation. As such, I still feel some fear. Fear is, after all, a means of protecting the separated self.

My approach has healed me and I recommend it to other people. I give to other people what I found useful to me. I give to other people what I have first given to me.

I found Western psychology and psychotherapy useful in a limited sense. I studied Oriental spiritual psychotherapies and found them more useful. I am not an Oriental person. I am me.

What works for other people may not work for me. I am not looking to be any ones disciple for the sake of being a disciple but to seeing what works for me. I am not interested in religious mumbo jumbo. I am interested in what works and helps me overcome my ego and anxiety.

I am not seeking escape from this world and do not want to live in a cave as an enlightened person. I want to be in the world of space, time and matter, but do so with appropriate thinking, thinking that give me and those around me peace and happiness.

Beginning in childhood, at least by age six, I found me and the empirical world imperfect. I found other people and social institutions not good enough. I rejected these so-called realities. I then invented ideal forms of them. I tried to make my ideals replace these so-called realities.

The mental cannot replace the physical. Much as I wished to have a healthy body, my actual body remained weak…a cup of coffee, for example, spoils my whole day, that is how sensitive my body is.

I leant that my fantasy self and fantasy world are not going to come into being. I gave them up.

On the other hand, I still do not like the so-called normal world. I am a very moral person. I do not have conscious awareness of stealing since I became an adult. On the other hand, I see normal persons stealing. The so-called normal person I see out there seems amoral; he seems more like an animal, really. I see normal racists who discriminate against other people. Simply stated, I loathe normal persons and do not want to be like them.

So what to do? I looked into spirituality and through rigorous experimentation found out that there is a different way of thinking that produces peace and happiness.

I came to understand that it was me who tried to make the world I see around me ideal, but that the world itself is not this or that, but is neutral. It was me who made other people seem Ideal.

Let me illustrate this phenomenon. Self hating and self rejecting black persons often think that to be ideal is to be white like. Such neurotic black persons make white persons seem ideal like. Having idealized whites, such blacks want to be like them. Some such neurotic Black men, for example, think that white women are ideal and or are better than black women. It is them that give white women prestige hence desire them.

Since it is one who made what is desired seem desirable, one can also make it not desirable. One can deconstruct ones earlier construction of certain women as ideal persons hence not desire them. The individual gives other things worth and desire them. He can choose to see things as worthless and not desire them. For example, a man may choose to see women as not desirable and not desire them. He withdraws the value he had hitherto given to women. This is what Arthur Schopenhauer did, not see women as even worth a second of his time and women see him as a misogynist, a hater of women.

Feminist women who imagine that all men live to do is desire to have sex with them actually do not realize that sex is a function of desire and that men can choose not to desire women and the very presence of women becomes oppressive to such men.

This is what mystics do. A human being can choose to change his thinking and change his behaviors. He can choose to not have negative, or for that matter positive judgment. He can choose not to experience shame and guilt. (I used to feel shame over sex until a woman told me that she has absolutely no shame over sex. To her, sex is a natural thing, an itch that she satisfies when she wants to; to her, sex is neither good nor bad, but just is; she does not attach morality to her sexuality. She is a realistic woman.)

We must learn to correct our thinking. Science of Mind attempted to accomplish this end but did it from a religious perspective. New thought religions like Unity Church and A Course in miracles try to correct human thinking from a metaphysical perspective. Cognitive behavior therapy attempts to correct people’s thinking from the perspective of reason. I build on these antecedents to produce a science and technology of correct thinking patterns.

INCORRECT AND CORRECTED THINKING

Experience has taught me that all that man is, despite his body, is thinking machine. We are always, thinking, conscious of it or not. Even what we call emotions are really products of thinking, thinking that we are not conscious of. Consider the emotions of fear and sex; they would seem outside the realm of thinking, but upon further scrutiny are really produced by thinking. In fear the individual has perceived a threat to his physical and or psychological survival. He has made an evaluation that his life is threatened. He then tells his body to pour out the neuro-chemicals that stimulate his body into behaving in the rapid manner it does in fear, with the goal of making him do what he has to do to survive. Thus, he runs faster or fights more efficiently. The goal is his survival and he survives. This whole response is based on thinking and not feeling. Sex would seem like a purely physical response, but upon closer examination is a result of thinking. It is thinking that desires a particular sex object. A man sees a woman, likes her and thinks of her in a sexual manner. His thinking arouses his body. It is his thinking that aroused his body. If he did not desire sex, he would not have his body aroused. Body responds to thinking.

All of human existence is thinking. Therefore, we must pay attention to our thinking. Where our thinking is disordered, we have mental disorder. (I prefer the term thinking disorder, not chemical imbalance or brain disorder, as neuroscientists, who reduce us to animals, would like us to accept.)

Mental health is thinking health, or ordered thinking. Mental disorder is disordered thinking. Bad thinking leads the body to respond in a certain manner. We then make the mistake of focusing only on what is going on in the body and think that body determined thinking.

Where there is thinking disorder we have to correct it. Corrected thinking patterns are what mental health are all about? In corrected thinking one sees ones self as one with all people and accepts that all people are joined and unified. Corrected thinking means loving every person around one.

When a person loves and forgives all people, he tends to feel lighter. Life becomes a thing of joy. One laughs a lot and is almost always humorous, finding the absurd activities we engage in playful, and not take them too seriously. Laugh, life is not that serious.(My mother used to tell me to laugh. She would sneak behind me and say, Laugh, Tom, laugh, life is not all that bad. I was tense and serious, always wondering what life is all about. She is correct.)

This world is a dream; we ought to make it a happy dream. The world is a drama of our mutual construction; we ought to kick back, have fun seeing the play we wrote enacted before our eyes. What is a play but something meant to entertain?

EXTENDING AND PROJECTING

At night we sleep and dream and the world we see is produced by our thinking. This is obvious enough. What is not always obvious is that our day world is also produced by our thinking.

Unlike night dreams, which are produced by single individuals, our day world is produced by all of us, including all animals, trees, and everything in being. The world is our collective dream. The world represents our collective thinking.

We think and project our thoughts out and see them as the world. The world is the out picturing of our collective thinking.

We deny that we did the thinking that produced the empirical world. Indeed, we see the external events in the world as things happening to us against our will. In reality, the things happening to us are things that we did to our selves, for our thinking produce them.

If another person attacks you, your thinking produced the person attacking you; simultaneously, the person attacking you produced you to be attacked by him; it is a mutual dream, after all.

The issue here is denial. We deny ownership of the events in our world and see ourselves as victims unto whom good and bad things happen to, when, in fact, those things are produced by our thoughts.

In extending, on the other hand, we take ownership for the world we produce. In heaven, we are thinking. Our thinking, this time called creative thinking or extending thinking, produces what we experience. Heaven is not the boring place we tend to think that it is. It is an exciting place. Our minds, unified and working in tandem, as they work in the temporal world, produce the events in heaven.

Unlike on earth where we deny responsibility for what we produced, in heaven, we accept that we produced what we experience.

Heaven is not static. Heaven is always expanding. (Expanding to where, you ask? Our thoughts create where the universe expands to.)

Heaven’s thoughts are unified and, therefore, produce additions to what already exist. Heaven is permanent, changeless and eternal, we merely add to the permanent and what is added becomes part of the permanent universe.

Even our miscorrelations on earth have some good aspects to them. Whatever we invent in this world with love is purified and saved and added to heaven. For example, the good music produced by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart etc are saved and are heard in heaven. Whatever you value in this world, if it is loving, you will experience in heaven.

A PROMISE TO MY FATHER AND ANCESTORS

My father is like me. My grand father is like me. I did not see my great grandfather, but I hear that he was like me. We all lived pained existence. We all rejected our problematic bodies and our world and used our thinking to imagine better bodies, selves and world and pursued them.

My grandfather and father were neurotic. They wanted to become ideal. At all times, they had an ideal self image in their minds and used the standards of that ideal self to judge their real self, to judge their wives and to judge their children.

We, the children, are imperfect and, therefore, could not live up to father’s expectations. He was frustrated with us because we were not angels.

White racists like to say that all black persons are criminals. My father would literal die rather than take a penny that does not belong to him. He would have experienced heart attack if any of his children stole something. He wanted us to be morally perfect.

Of course, we were not morally perfect. At age eight, I remember stealing a few pennies from my grandfather’s room and spending it on candies. However, I felt so ashamed of myself that the very next day I went to confession (we are Catholics) and confessed my sin and was given penance…pick up trash from the Church yard, and return the said amount of money from my allowances. I do not remember engaging in another stealing episode during my childhood.

The point is that my family is motivated to become ideal, perfect persons. In pursuing our ideal self images, we felt uncomfortable with our real selves. We could not live with our imperfect human nature. We lived in fear for if you desire to be perfect, you must experience fear of not being perfect.

Father is a very handsome man. But he felt like he was ugly. I am not too bad looking, either. But I have always seen myself as not good enough. Why? Because I have always posited an ideal self concept and ideal self image and used them to judge my actual self and found it not good enough. Simply stated, we pursue idealism and could not tolerate the real world.

I promised my father that I would study and understand why we lived in fear. I could not relax until I have found the answer. In searching for the answer to our problem, I studied philosophy, psychology, Oriental religions and new age religions. I learnt a lot from all these. But, ultimately, I found the answer by thinking about what works for me, not other people.

I have fulfilled my promise to my father and ancestors. I have found out why we are unhappy. Our self rejection began in heaven. In heaven, all human beings reject the unified self and seek separated self. In heaven, the children of God opposes the will of their father. Their father wills that all things be unified. To be unified, all things must be the same, equal and be in spirit. We sought special-ness, inequality and differences. To seem to gratify our desires, we seem to separate from unified state.

By opposing the will of heaven, everything we made opposes us. Everything in our world opposes every thing else.

We rejected union and on earth must reject every thing we made. Thus, despite seeming handsome we reject our bodies. Despite having good egos, we reject our egos. We seek ideal bodies and ideal egos. In doing so, we live in fear.

My mother is more self accepting than my father. She is, as the world sees these things, a normal woman. Nevertheless, like all human beings, she has her fears and anxieties from desire of separation and rejection of our unified self. On the whole, mother adapted to the world better than father.

Mother was aware of the futility of this world and dealt with it by taking refuge in ceaseless work. She escaped into work and worked fourteen hours a day. She could not stand a moment of idealness. If she had free time, she cooked or cleaned up, but could not be idle. Was she to have idle time, she would be forced to think and in doing so appreciate our human existential nothingness hence feel depressed and unhappy? Work was her way of coping with our meaningless and purposeless world.

DISCUSSION

This world is not our real home. We are aliens in this world. Our real home is unified spirit.

No one can ever feel at home in a slaughterhouse, this world. We are all yearning for our lost home. We are all depressed by the loss of our loving, unified home.

I love somber music, such as by Bach etc. I found solace in funeral music (This seemed macabre to those around me.) But I know why I found joy in sorrow.

This world was not my home. I feel like an orphan in this world. I am lost in this world. Somber music is symbolic of how I feel in this world.

Celestine Ukwu and Rex Lawson’s sorrowful music appealed to me for they were singing about the human condition, our sense of loss being in an unloving world. (Both men died untimely deaths and returned to their real homes, the homes they missed so much and sang about in their sorrowful songs. My fellow thinkers, I hope that you have found the peace and joy that eluded you in this world.)

I contracted a job to do and have done it. Ancestors, grandfather, Father, I have now understood why you were unhappy in our world.

My goal is to prevent other members of the family from living the tortured existence you did and to help make people happy.

Father I love you and you know it. I know that you love me, too. You are the most loving person in the world and I know it. Despite your criticisms, based on your expectation for us to be perfect, and fear that we would not be perfect, I knew that you love us. You sacrificed your life for us, working fourteen hour days, six days a week, to provide for us. Thank you, my dear fellow man. We love you. Rest well in your heavenly peace, you deserve that peace and joy.

I have done what I contracted to do and when I have spread that message to the world, shown the world how to live in peace and happiness, I will gladly lay down my worthless body and ego and join you in the peace and joy of our father, Chukwu.

Father and mother I love you two. Please forgive me for not being there when you died. I had to do what I had to do, learn about the nature and cause of human suffering and find antidote to it. Until I found the answer, I could not do anything else. My drama is part of the hero’s journey. Until the hero obtains what he is looking for, he can experience no peace and joy. But having found it, his duty is to teach it to the world, as I am now doing. And when his part in awakening God’s sleeping children is done, he leaves the abode of dreams and returns to live among the awake.

CONCLUSION

When we look at ourselves what we see is body. It would seem that our body determines our thinking. Indeed, neuroscience suggests that thinking is epiphenomenal, that thinking is produced by the configurations of particles, atoms and elements in our brains. That is not true. Thinking is apart from body.

Body is obviously there, we can see it. It is like a car with which we drive from place to place in the world of space, time and matter. But there is a driver. The driver determines what the car does. Nevertheless, the health, or lack of it, of a car affects how it performs. If the car is not well maintained, it would not run well. Therefore, we have to take good care of our cars.

By the same token, we have to take good care of our bodies. Good food and medications are necessary for taking good care of our bodies. We have to study the nature of our bodies. Every human being ought to study the physical sciences, at least, up to bachelor’s degree level.

We live in matter and must understand how matter works and design technologies to take advantage of how it works. No one should deny the temporary reality of matter, his body.

However, we must recognize that we are thinking agents. There is something in us that we might call spirit. Spirit is non-material. Spirit has mind, that is, it thinks. It thinks through whatever it manifests in.

For our present purposes, spirit thinks through our bodies. Spirit is love, and wants to love through our bodies. Bodies are temporary instruments of love.

Love your self and love all persons in your world.

Thinking can be well ordered or disordered. Try to think in an ordered manner. This means loving and forgiving all persons, including you.

A mentally healthy person is a person who thinks correctly, that is, lovingly and forgivingly, and does work that contributes to social welfare.

At Science of Thinking Institutes we teach people to think in a well ordered manner hence live loving, peaceful and happy lives. We help to generate and maintain peace and harmony in our world.

Ozodi Thomas Osuji

Africa Institute Seattle

Robot  Villager

# 1 I am interested in self-evident facts. The moment you ask me to believe something or accept something on faith you have lost me.I am interested in the science of thinking. That is, I am interested in demonstrable facts about how human beings think. This should be the mission of psychology. When I was a young person, I found Western psychology fascinating. But now that I am an adult, I find Western Psychology not useful in explaining the issues that I want explained. Frustrated, I turned to Oriental systems of understanding human nature for help. I find Oriental ideas more adult than Western psychology, and will, therefore, begin this discourse on thinking by evaluating some ...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 09.11.2005 07:58