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Eligio Gallegos

 

 


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p 55

I had been confusing thinking with the wrongful way I had been educated. I soon began to understand that thinking is deeply organic and intelligent and that education distorts thinking by requiring that we imitate other people's thinking rather than nurturing and respecting our own.

Thinking becomes a dancing bear, responding to other people's questions rather than remaining in its own natural pace and rythyms.

Proper education should help the student learn about and understand his own way of thinking, not to imitate someone else's thought.

The thinking part of who we are is brilliant and can learn anything, but we are taught many things that go directly against the natural wholeness of our own being.

 
p 56

Thinking was not meant to be a dictator. Thinking broadens and deepens itself by learning from our other modes of knowing, but it was never intended to be their boss. Thinking must have patience and allow room for deeper processes. Our education system hardly promotes this.

Thinking also works by focusing our awareness on differences but also by capturing those differences into generalizations, allowing us to both see how things are different and how they are similar. But because of one particular propensity, polarization, we frequently come to be lodged in only one end of a difference... we then assign the opposite...to another location or to other people.

And we can readily do this, for several reaons:

a. We gather together with other people who are similarly polarized,

b. It becomes uncomfortable to embrace both sides of a polarity, primarily because of a rather rigid sense of identity that we have learned to hold (which itself is also one end of a polarization),

c. We have learned to live in our intentions (or anticipation or expectations) rather than in the fullness of the present moment (intention involves holding a rigid focus on the outcome, which is itself a narrowing of awareness),

d. We are unaware of the nature of our knowing through feeling and this allows the attribution to others of an experience that belongs to us, commonly known as projection