Published by Arktos 2025
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Introduction
What is thinking? What is it that calls on us to think? Who decides what’s good and bad? Do modern societies really understand the meaning of peace? Has science become closed-minded? Does freedom mean the same for everyone? How does language affect the way people think? Is it possible to understand consciousness? What is it like to step back from a world riven by confusion? Is humanity on a collision course with destiny?
This book is about thinking. It is not a philosophy book, a spiritual book, nor a medical book, though it is a little bit of each. It is mostly about how people in the West think, and about how they don’t think.
Those who live in the West have developed a closed mindset, bereft of spiritual freedom, and it is leading humanity into a dead-end: the risks are existential. Their thinking has become boxed-in, inflexible and blinkered. Like a deep-sea diver’s suit, Western thinking is weighed down, with restricted movement, and an outlook in only one direction. It has become stifling and constraining. Western minds have become trapped, while another world exists outside.
This book doesn’t offer a way out of this prison of the mind. As the final chapter explains, it is up to each of us to find a way. The book offers instead some of the tools needed to escape, some hammers and spanners to pry open the bars.
The way out of this mental gaol is both simple and difficult. It is simple because it only requires some thought. It is difficult because it requires people to understand where they are, in this prison. It requires them to look at the world a little differently, to question deeply held beliefs and ideas. It requires them to understand that the way they view the world is not the only way. It requires them to see that there are alternatives, and that some of these might actually be better.
Contents
1 – A letter from my uncle, on freedom
In a nutshell, I see several strange paradoxes. There has been a great decline in people’s freedom and this has made them much less happy. It has made them prisoners in their own minds, prey to the whims of big companies and the state. I worry that people are being reprogrammed inside their heads without them being aware of it.
Inspired by Hermann Hesse’s short story “The Old Days” 1907
2 – What is this thing called thinking? Part 1
What is this thing called thinking? Does thinking have mass or energy? Is there a universal consciousness present in all living things? Is it what gives us life? Where do new ideas spring from? Does everything we perceive depend entirely on our consciousness for its existence?
The first part of an essay inspired by Marin Heidegger’s book “Was heißt Denken”
3 – On war, and the meaning of peace
Over the last few years there has been a hardening of hearts, a forgetting of the past. Peace is not some sort of paradise. It is not coexistence by mutual agreement. Peace is not the absence of war. It is something humanity does not yet know, something to discover. We need to sense and search for what it means.
Inspired by Hermann Hesse’s book, “If the War Goes On: Reflections on War and Politics” .
4 – What is this thing called thinking? Part 2. The ethereal.
Humanity’s thinking is not capable of wisely confronting the coming challenges, the historical shape of which we can already glimpse. We have mislaid the instinct to see this, to repair our thought. Can we gather thoughts that please us, that take us forward positively? Is there some way of thinking that does not oppress us? There is. It is there, if we learn to look.
5 – On love
Does science help us understand love? It measures heartbeats, and describes the way people blush. But does science offer us any real guidance? Does it help us understand the essence of love? It does not. For that, we need to look elsewhere.
6 – What is this thing called thinking? Part 3. The currency of thinking.
Western minds have been shaped by systems of thought that are designed to constrain them, limit their freedom, and channel their thinking.
7 – On giving up the fight – Enough: Fragment from the notebook of a relinquished global citizen
It is time to draw back, time to keep a firm hold of the head and to ask the heart to be silent. No more to brood over the sourness of vague, seductive hope, no more to sigh quietly at each easy-fix solution, no more to hang onto half-way thinking, no more to silently witness those smug advocates deluding themselves that the way ahead is simple and self-evident.
An essay inspired by ‘Enough, Fragment from the notebook of a dead artist’ by Ivan Turgenev, written in 1864
8 – What is this thing called thinking? Part 4. The role of language in thinking.
How much of what we call thinking is limited, or made possible, by the language we speak? Is language the fabric of thought, as Humboldt claims?
9 – On the impact of AI on thinking.
AI is a substitute for thinking, a replacement. It purges minds that are increasingly running on near-empty, like buckets being rinsed of their contents.
10 – On meaning and purpose.
I find it hard to accept that human existence is for nothing. Is there not some greater purpose to our Being?
An essay partly inspired by Chiang Yee’s book, The Chinese Eye, first published by Methuen in 1935.
11 – How others live