thinking

Thinking before speaking can eliminate embarrassment.

Whatever you're thinking about is literally like planning a future event. When you're worrying, you are planning. When you are appreciating, you are planning...What are you planning? 

No one can look either our planet or our societies in the face and imagine humans are in any respect as rational as they have been mass-bamboozled into believing that they are. All the abstractions in terms of which we "think" about ourselves are free-floating and autonomous conformisms and orthodoxies, irrationalist self-complacencies and self-flattery that manifest the disconnectivity and dissociativity typifying banauseia; we will continue past the several points-of-no-return imagining in abstracto that, of course, we must necessarily possess the faculties to reverse any mistaken policies and cure any destruction. But the problem does not lie ultimately anywhere outside our own intrinsic and self-biased idiotia, our primordial and primally blind characters. To have a character blithely oblivious to the nature and concept of one's character is the doom of the vast majority of "mankind."

"Cynicism," like "heresy" and "heterodoxy" and "atheism" and "agnosticism" and "paganism" and "heathenism," is above all else a way for organized orthodoxy's caste of official censors to encyst and segregate and thus neutralize all contrarian forms of seeing and thinking, all (necessarily implicitly) prohibited and repressed ways of exercising disruptive and iconoclastic intuition and intellection (for to analyze and explain these things too openly is to give them publicity and potential cogency when the point is to asphyxiate them).

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

"If there were nothing but thought in you, you wouldn't even know you are thinking." "You would be like a dreamer who doesn't know he is dreaming." "When you know you are dreaming, you are awake within the dream."

In most mentalities language is just fashionable or banal clothing (rarely finery) that obscures the evidence of natural and human reality; it is a programmatic form of mutual or collective self-deception, a grand conspiracy of untruth or denial.  Language is a mere tool of mere banausic or utilitarian mentalities, for the most part, who are perfectly closed upon themselves.  A fulfilled mind is (as Hegel saw) an infinity-generator, open to its own incalculable richness; and it is so self-possessed that it understands the workings of its own expressive liabilities, and can parry these temptations and set them aside to see things more scrupulously.  What passes for objectivity is for the most part an absurdity, a noxious faith that holds people in the webbing of orthodoxy.  No one escapes his own gravity-traps of subjective self without prodigious philosophical energies.

The only measures that count are progress over your own self, and triumph over the vacant abstractions that most people mistake for thinking.

The music of all the different media of life--memories, images, feeling-tones, poetic-musical connotations of phrasing--is kaleidoscopic and doesn't repeat itself or recur.  --People who think they are trapped in a river of regularized and ever-repeating time are merely the victims of their own ordinarizing minds that have elaborated for them a prison-cell of everydayness.  The fountains of time, history, life, inspiration, etc. are fresh every instant, if one knows how to grasp them with some finesse: every instant within natural, historical, and personal time is unique.

Most people traffic in abstractions and generalizations because they are grossly incompetent at culturing their intuition or powers of evidency, refining it to grasp the Thisness (Haecceitas) of what is before them.  Thinking is like a Stradivarius that has more potential variations in how it is played than any human can finitely perform or capture.