We all
have a certain degree of admiration for those forward-thinkers who were ahead
of their time or for those free-spirited individuals who had the courage, the
will and the foresight to speak out their minds despite risking being labelled
as non-conformists and cast to the outer fringes of society.
Well,
truth be told, that is never a real threat for free thinkers. Actually,
that is where they belong and makes them what they are. Free-thinkers
breathe and thrive at the margins of society where structure and chaos
cross at the borderline. If you want to be a free thinker, embrace chaos,
novelty, disruptive change and non-conformity. Free-thinkers live on the brink
of social breakdown. They live on the edge, away from the anesthesia of
normalcy and institutionalized control.
They are
not held captive by the rigid walls of the dominating worldview. They do not
fear change, poverty or conspiracy. If you want to free your thinking and
become an agent of change and novelty, there are a few things you need to
recognize and understand.
1) Creativity is your natural birth right
We
stereotype creative thinkers as artists or bohemians who are different than the
rest of us. Well that is plainly false. We are all endowed with the gift of
creativity. Education, or rather schooling, has successfully stripped us from
that natural disposition. It has molded us into mechanistic and reductionistic
images of humanity – into cogs in the wheel. The schooling system is
designed to make people think within the same parameters – those laid down by
the dominating view of society and culture.
Students
are discouraged to deviate and think freely outside of those parameters. They
just have to follow curricula which channels them to examinations, higher
institutions and eventually become part of the workforce. Yet creative
thinking is your natural birthright. They only taught you how to unlearn it
without even noticing.
2) Beware Group thinking & Herd Morality
Group
thinking is the silent enemy of free-thinking when we unconsciously follow
the rhythm of the crowd. When the crowd shouts, we feel compelled to
shout. When the crowd panics, we panic. Emotions, sentiments and ideas can be
very contagious. So is thinking. It’s quite easy to follow the line of thought
of your peers and those in authority. Yet as we become sedated with group
thinking, we lose the power to claim the authenticity of our own mind.
Besides
thinking, we judge people and events as being right or wrong following the
morality of the herd. We succumb to morally feel what the rest of the herd
feels about an issue. Morality is a highly debatable philosophical
idea but the short end of it is that herd morality limits our potential to be
free-minded, responsible individuals.
Remember,
if you’re in a small, focused group of like minded individuals, your thoughts
become focused. Group thinking CAN be a good thing; it is only when it is
unconscious and misguided that it causes problems.
3) Perspective is key
The
free-thinker knows the power of perspective. Perspective changes
everything. What we feel or think about something can dissolve or flip the
other way round just by changing perspective. Even the strongest of views and
beliefs can change when a newer perspective is reached. What seems like loss
can be seen as opportunity just by changing your perspective. Adversity can
turn into a learning opportunity; problems can turn into a solution; what
is failure from one perspective can be seen as a launching pad for success from
another.
When you
think freely you know that there is always more than one perspective on a
given situation. You just need to view things from another angle. I like to use
the internal courtyard analogy. We are all windows in a circular building
overlooking an internal courtyard. The perspective from my window is
different than the others. Hence, if I want to have a better picture of the
courtyard of life I need to look at it from other windows.
4) Knowledge is provisional
Conservative,
authoritarian, religious or institutional structures resist change forcefully
because their worldview rests on the premise that their knowledge or beliefs
are absolute. Even Science can and did fall in this trap at times. Yet the
free-thinker is sure of only one thing – that knowledge is provisional. What we
think we know today will be debunked or dramatically changed by what we know
tomorrow. Free-thinkers run away from individuals or organizations who claim to
know something, or worse, know everything. They are fully aware that we haven’t
got the faintest clue yet, despite big leaps forward, about the world, life and
the Universe at large.
5) Popping the time bubble
Free-thinkers,
especially visionaries and forward-thinkers have burst the time bubble. That
means that they recognized that we view the world through the narrative of our
time. That narrative changes over decades and centuries yet we are closed
in a time bubble so to speak that limits us to see the world only within the
narrative of our own time. The greatest innovators, futurists, visionaries and
thinkers saw beyond that narrative. They burst the time bubble open and saw
ahead of their time.
6) Defying institutional pressures
Society
had two major forces at play. One is a top-down control transmitted
hierarchically through the institutions. The other is a force of change,
novelty and innovation which is built bottom-up from individuals and
slowly accepted and adopted by larger social structures. One crazy innovative
idea from a free-thinker on the fringes of society can be taken up by some
influencers and spread virally through the mass media until it becomes a
norm. OK this is a simplistic overview but it’s enough to show the basic
mechanics of social change.
Free
thinkers are those individuals on the fringes of society cooking up shockingly
new ideas. They refuse to succumb to institutional pressures of
uniformity and control. The institutional top-down forces are there mainly
to preserve their status-quo, the stability of the social system and its
identity hence they resist novelty and change. The power of the free-thinker on
the other hand, lies in constantly defying these institutional pressures to abide to the rules and accepted norms of society.
7) Perception is to be altered not accepted
Another
powerful tool in the free-thinker’s toolbox is perception, or rather its
bending and shifting. Philosophers have debated the nature of perception for
ages. There are some who hold that perception gives us a reliable view of how
our outer reality is and some other argue that perception is greatly influenced
and fixed by our beliefs and knowledge. A classic example is color perception. Color
is only a conventional label. What may seem plainly white to you is only one of
a large variety of hues for the Inuit Eskimo who practically lives in a white
world. They can differentiate between a wide range of ‘whites’ and they even
have words to describe them. The perception is different and so is their
reality.
Free-thinking individuals understand how
perception is fixed and limited by our consensual view of the world. Yet in
reality, perception need not be fixed; It can be altered and changed. It comes
to no surprise then that many free-thinkers turn to ancient traditions who had
studied and tinkered with perception for millennia either by disciplined
practices or entheogens. 
