Thinking
starts form the very birth of man. The family environment contributes a great deal to the
development of the child. The child may have been born in any family - Hindu, Muslim, Sikh
or Christian - it cannot but be influenced by the religious faith, customs, traditions and
way of life of the family. This is the stage, when its thoughts begin to shape.
Thereafter, it is influenced by the children in the neighbourhood, the school and college
education, social norms etc. Everyone passes through these stages and if one does not, one
remains mentally undeveloped. In this context, we have the story of child having been
carried away by a wolf to a forest and brought up there in the wild environment. As a
result, on growing up, the child began to crawl, roam and growl like a wolf. This shows
that in the beginning a child is like a clean slate or a blank paper and it is gradually
influenced by the environment and the people it comes into contact with and it ‘collects’
innumerable thoughts.
There
is no doubt that man is what his thoughts are. It is impossible for him to be bereft of
thoughts and since thoughts float all-round, he goes on gathering the same. However, man
commits the blunder of considering the acquired thoughts as his own. Practically everyone
nurses this illusion although the thoughts acquired from the parents,
from the environment or from the society, cannot be one’s own. If the thoughts are
original or the result of one’s own experience or thinking, it will be alright to
call the same as one’s own even if they have been experienced by someone else before,
but it is not proper to consider another’s thoughts as one’s own.
Nevertheless,
man is busy in learning by heart the books and scriptures so that he may have the
solutions to the problems even before they arise. In other words, he wants readymade
answers to all possible or probable questions so that as and when the need arises, he may
pour out the same instead of raking up his brain for the answer. It has become a habit of
man to acquire thoughts because amassing of thoughts is considered a sign of learning. The
bigger the bank balance, the richer the man. Similarly, the bigger the repository of
thoughts, the more learned the person.
There
is nothing wrong in acquiring new and healthy, thoughts to enrich and sharpen one’s
own intellect. One should always be open-minded and eager to learn: one can learn even
from a child, common events and day-to-day happenings. However, one must ponder over the
same deeply and objectively to sift the grain from the chaff. If man feels content in
blindly accepting and owning borrowed thoughts, his own intellectual capacity is not only
weakened but is dissipated in the course of time. Falling of an apple from a tree was
neither a new nor an unusual event. However, when the great scientist, Newton, watched
this phenomenon and applied his mind, he was able to discover
the Law of Gravitation.
Is
it not a fact that mostly we have acquired thoughts and, knowingly or unknowingly,
consider and flaunt borrowed thoughts as our own? What a self-deception! As a poor man
tries to conceal his poverty by putting on borrowed clothes, an ignorant person conceals
his ignorance by borrowed thoughts, though neither poverty nor ignorance can be got rid of
by borrowed clothes or thoughts. Unfortunately, this very attitude prevails in the
religious field as well, with the result that man has become superstitious, orthodox and
closed minded and is blindly following the beaten track of rites and rituals instead of
searching the reality and grasping the essence of true religion. Over laden by borrowed
thoughts, he has virtually become a slave of the same and does not think for himself but
accepts whatever is told to him in the name of religion. The solution lies in applying one’s
own faculties of thinking and discrimination to arrive at the truth.