It’s impossible to do anything without thinking, except maybe purely reflexive, unconscious things, like breathing and blinking.
However, there are different forms of thinking, and different degrees.
You can’t completely shut down what could be called linear, or linguistic thinking, and still be conscious at all, however, you can make such thinking more infrequent.
There are other kinds of thinking the brain does, that aren’t easy to articulate, more sensual or emotional, intuitive or concrete kinds.
It is possible to lessen these forms of thinking too, but some form of thinking is always going on, so long as we’re not in deep sleep, or unconscious but not dead.
Even then, there might be some thinking going on, but it’s imperceptible to us, both from an internal, psychological and external, neurological point of view.
Why would anyone want to lessen their thoughts?
Well why would anyone want to lessen anything?
Obviously you can have too much mental exertion, just as you can have too much physical exertion.
It’s important to quieten the mind sometimes, for many reasons.
One is that the quieter the mind is, the more it can hear things besides itself, perceive them.
It can also give your mind a break, a much needed rest.
The more we quieten down, dampen the analytical mind, the more room the intuitive mind has to express itself, and take over.
Sometimes there’s little worth thinking about in your life, little worth analyzing, as things can be riddled with ambiguity, uncertainty, they can’t be solved, or it’s too hard to solve them, or they don’t need to be solved, there’s little value in solving them.
You may be involved in some highly sensuous or physical activity, and your conscious attention needs to be there, or wants to be, engaged with it, rather than over interpreting.
It just needs to be enjoyed, or executed, not thought a lot about.
How much storage capacity do we carry in our brains anyways?
At some point, do we run out of room for some things?
The more we add, the more we might forget other, more important things.
The more we add, the more difficult it might be to add more.
Ultimately it’s the here/now that’s real, our thoughts about the past, or the future are just that, thoughts, at best they are educated guesses about what might’ve happened, or might happen, and at worst, idle speculation, conjecture and fantasy, especially when dealing with vast spatial and temporal distances, althou it can be fun to fantasize sometimes, and can be beneficial to open ourselves to possibilities now and then.
In any case, the past has passed, and the future, as we envision it, might never be.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, it might be worth a thousand thoughts too, and things in themselves, if there are such things, might be worth a thousand pictures, or at least a FMV.
Thought simplifies sensation, and sensation itself is a simplification of things, a scratching of the surface.
Thought compartmentalizes and stores sense and even introspective data of the inner workings of our own consciousness, it then organizes this data across time and space to show causal relations and similarities/differences between things, lumping/splitting, and that is needed in order for us to methodically act, to respond, as opposed to react or reflex.
However, in this compartmentalizing, storing, sterilizing, preserving and jarring of data, some of the richness and vibrancy, as well as some of the joy and beauty of life is lost.
Sensation is infinitely more varied than thought, and in a sense, more real, or pure, unadulterated, unrefined, or distilled.
It’s like when humans come along and try to put everything into boxes, you live in this box or house, you work in that one, we cultivate grapes in this one, olives in that one and so on, we also do this mentally, and some of the mystery and the miraculous, the ineffable relationships between things are damaged in this process, the delicate, intricate and subtle exchanges, the web of life.
We do damage to nature, both when we attempt to overdevelop it, and when we try to overthink it.
It’s a trade off, thinking is not a good, but nor is it an evil.
It’s easy and awfully bipolar, clumsy and simplistic to go from one extreme to the other, from the analytic, obsessive compulsive scientific mind towards say something more akin to a zen, or Pyrrhonian state of consciousness, but much more difficult and necessary to find the ever elusive balance between these two poles.
Humans fancy themselves and the work they do, naturally, both physical and mental, as very important, we want to leave our mark on everything, and then occasionally we become disenchanted with ourselves, disillusioned, and so we go all the way the other way, towards extreme skepticism, cynicism, primitivism and so on, but I think that if we are to increase our odds of surviving and really, truly thriving, we have to always aim nearer to the center…but the center is not easy to find, it is much less obvious than aiming at one or the other extreme.
There’s a time for everything, a time for war, peace, decay, growth, to diverge and converge, and a time to shut up, to stop thinking, and listen to what others, listen to what the birds, the trees, the wind and the rain are saying.
They speak to us very softy, and they can be a guide for our behavior, but it’s all too easy for the signal to get lost among the neural and automotive traffic, noise and pollution.
Intuition and improvisation, going with the flow, thinking on your feet, is not a form of stupidity, it’s another form of intelligence, it’s one modern man is less conscious of, but necessary to tune into for the health and well-being of our lives individually and as a specie, essentially adapting ourselves to nature, rather than the other way round.
There are different forms of awareness and different degrees, and we should not always strive to maximize one and neglect the others, or neglect to give our minds as a whole a break, to meditate, or sit by the shore, watching the waves wobble to and fro.
Of course we can only be so disciplined, mentally and physically, and cause of our collective genetics, culture and habits, there is a strong tendency within many men to overthink many a thing, myself very much included, as you might’ve guessed from reading me, much to our and natures detriment.
But we only need to be so disciplined…timing is everything.
There are also certain drugs we take, like caffeine, or foods we eat, like refined sugar, that tend to overstimulate and excite our minds.
It’s much easier to stop, or slow down the chatter when you eat a more balanced diet, and live more holistically in general.
Excess tends to foster and promote more other forms of excess.