Are we what we think?

"Broken stones from a rich seam of ore - we can use them to throw at people or render and refine them to extract the precious metal. Precious metal from a rich seam of ore - we can use it to make weapons or bridges or spacecraft. From the broken stones of our thoughts we can do so many things...OR we can also choose to leave them untouched."

A thought is the seed of an idea - ideas are seeds of beliefs - beliefs are the filters by which we shape our reality - reality is what shapes our lives - and the lives we lead reveal our identity.

Now we could therefore say that our identity begins when we start to notice and harness our thinking - or we could say that our identity regulates our thoughts. However, is either of these conclusions true?

At what point on this 'Circle of Consciousness' is it best to intervene to make changes, enhancements, corrections?

There is this generally held view that the older we get the harder it is to learn something new. There is scientific (or is it statistical) backing for this view and, as with all things in our current age, anything with scientific backing has got to be right, right? I increasingly find that the power of learning is couched within an open mind, and that the older we get the more we allow our minds to become closed. And yet through history the people who have cornered the market for wisdom have been those who have lived all their lives with open minds - minds that have never accepted that (a) there is nothing left to learn because they know all there is to know, (b) their perception of reality is made up by their thinking and that if they change their thinking and their perception, that their world will be seen anew. Nothing rests or stands still - everything develops, evolves or dies out.

And so it is with thought - which either develops, evolves, grows or dies out.

The choice of how we develop, evolve and grow our thoughts is ours - how we filter them and refine them is our choice - how we nurture them and let them become ideas and then eventually beliefs is all our choice - based upon our bank of references. This bank of references (our personal reference library if you like) is based upon opinion, experience, knowledge and wisdom.

There's a curious linguistic colloquialism centred about the words "think" and "thing". This is shown in sentences such as
"If he thinks that then he's got another thing (think)coming" or
"It looked X but then it could have been something (somethink) else".

And within this usage there's revelations in there for us - that what we see is only what we think we see - and that whatever we may think, that there's another "think" coming along very soon, provided we give ourselves the chance to notice it. The thing is, once we have latched onto a "think" that is already in our Reference Library, then there's a very good chance we won't notice the new "think" because our references prohibit us from doing so.

So, the conclusion to be drawn is this:-
"The Path to our own Wisdom comes from our understanding of how our Reference Library works, and how we need to learn to best become our own Librarian."

The truth is that we are far far more than we think, and once we acknowledge this then we start to become a very good Librarian. And the good Librarians, as history has shown, are those who are never too old to learn new things, to see things from many perspectives, to direct and refine their thinking.