1. Know what you are thinking about (The focus)
Unless we know precisely enough about what is exactly we are thinking about, we cannot have reasonably usable thought.
The focus of our attention needs to be precise and practical enough, as well as stable and not wobbling, jumping, scattered, for the duration of the particular thought.
This can be (and should be) very obvious for all of us, but it's not the case for majority (if not most) of humans. In other words, we do not know what we are thinking about, very often, and yet we think we are thinking and we can think, and even we are intelligent. The situation can be considered as "sad", overwhelmingly funny, crazy, normal and quite ordinary, etc, depending on the perspectives (and expectation/presumption/beliefs we may have).
In practice, when we are interested in something and when we start thinking about it, we can verify the nature of our interest so that we know the perimeter, the borders that separate what we are interested and the rest, in at least a few different ways. This way, we know the subject matter we are focusing on and thinking about, and we will be thinking about what we are really interested, attracted, rather than vague and mixed bag of concept far from the real point of interests to us.
This is the first step of what I may call "Desire based thinking" and/or "Perspective logic". And this allows us to be aware of the perspectives we are taking, and the perspectives would be aligned with our interests and desires.
When our focus of awareness is in-line with our interests/desires, it usually fulfills our needs and tends to produce satisfaction, which will fill up the particular interest/desire, eventually, and let us move on to the next one.
So, it will prevent us from thinking vaguely and turning around in the same place for long long time, often with (lots of) frustration. In other words, we can say that the majority of humans do not know how to think in "satisfactory" manner because we are not aware of what we are thinking about and we are not aware of what we want (to think/investigate).
For example, there is a (long) thread about "beauty", in ILP.
And quite frankly it's pretty mixed up, in different ways.
But one of the problem is the lack of clear focus on the subject matter.
The term/concept "beauty" includes wide range of aspects, related to preferences and attraction in general, in my opinion.
When we talk about "beauty" of two females, for example, the interests behind our mind may well be the "sexual attraction" to be more precise.
If we talk about the "beauty" of paintings, our interests can be the preferences on colors, geometries, styles, arrangement, theme, motif, and so on (and it englobes very wide subjects).
Unless we probe our own interests and limit the focal point to practical and manageable area, we are likely to loose the perspective awareness and stray into the wander land of associative thought chain and/or other non-satisfying way of thinking that may produce strange conclusion that may confuse us, again/more, in turn. And some of us may even call such mess as "philosophy"
in the desperate attempt to raise self-esteem, positiveness of overall world view, etc.
To reduce such nonsense, it's better to stick to what really attract us and treat things one by one according to the priority list of the instance.
The focus, with its perimeter and criterion, is the key and we can't really think without out it.
Practical methods that can be helpful in cultivating the habit to think more clearly with better perspective awareness:
- List up your interests/desires.
- List up what you tend to think about.
- List up things you like and you don't like.
- Try to be more precise about each items.
- Think about the relations and differences of each items.
- Draw sketches, diagrams to visualize them.
- Try to focus more in the area you don't like to focus, if you can.
- Do not overlook subtle/slight senses of discomfort, uneasiness, contradiction, etc, as they can be the sign post of hidden treasure for our personal evolution.
- Dig and investigate preferences and presumptions in detail, as they are the launch pad (and the restraining devices) of our focuses.
In actual thought process:
- Stop the thought stream, rewind if needed, to (re)identify the clear focus you had so that you can regain perspective awareness, as soon as you feel confused, lost, unclear.
- Type your thought, take a note, to (re)trace and reevaluate your thought stream and notice where you had (and you lost) the perspective awareness.
- Verify the perimeter/criterion of the focus of each perspective segment.
See ILP thread for what some people think about this:
In general, we are not even aware how badly we think. In this case, there is not much to do. Unless we feel/detect something strange without our thinking, we won't have the motivation for observing our thought and find out the problems and solutions, as well as practicing them and verifying them.
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