Balancing Action and Contemplation

[tragula]

Are we meant to sit around all day and think? Or run around an actually DO things?

What is the right balance between Doing and Not Doing?

Are we wasting our lives by engaging in endless navel gazing? Or is it equally pointless to try and create and build when it is all going to turn to dust in the end anyway?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[Boneca]

Life in itself is pretty pointless when you look at it that way. If you're trying to only do "meaningful" things, you are going to run into trouble sooner rather than later!

I'd say, think until you get bored, then go out and do something, and go back to thinking when you're bored with the activity. It'll keep you entertained for the rest of your life. ;)

[floid]

Are we meant to sit around all day and think? Or run around an actually DO things?

If all you do is sit around all day and think it will not be long before you are unable to do even that.



What is the right balance between Doing and Not Doing?


Stop thinking about them and the "Doing" and "Not Doing" become as natural as breathing.




Are we wasting our lives by engaging in endless navel gazing? Or is it equally pointless to try and create and build when it is all going to turn to dust in the end anyway?


The dilemma is nothing but a thought itself.
Thinking is a tool by which we arrive at approximations or simulations of what is real.
But, in one way or another, everything we arrive at through thought is a lie because it is viewed through the illusion of duality.
Duality is the only framework in which thought can exist.
Turn it into your life's purpose and you will be forever oscillating between the thought created polarities of absorption/boredom, contentment/unrest, or adequacy/inadequacy.
Why not just let what is be what it really is rather than stuff if into a conceputal box?
Rather than ponder past and future, completely surrender to and accept the present.
Do this and let the results speak for themselves.

[tragula]

Thanks floid. I knew I could count on you to chime in. (I like the way your posts are more fluid and airy than other people's!)

I'm doing better at living in the present. I can bring myself to focus on Now these days. And it is very enriching and liberating.

I made Stop Thinking into the banner on my cell btw.

The whole Stop Thinking thing pops up in the movie I (heart) Huckabees. I was floored!

Even if you live the present, we are creatures of habit I think. We can set up our daily schedules to be more or less active. I'm pretty sure we have a real choice on some level between participating and not-participating. Perhaps the answer you are suggesting is to do what comes naturally. But we live in very un-natural worlds full of stress and conflict.... I just don't think we are in sync with our environments.

We should start a thread on The Illusion of Duality one of these days.

[waxwing]

A rich paradox. I think that by viewing the living human being as divided into separate realms, we always run the risk of not acting when perhaps we should. I've tried drawing out this idea many times, and I've never gotten to the point where integration and parity between realms of thought, emotion, action, and will act in accordance with each other. I see it as an ideal and a remote possibility, but action always seems somewhat divorced from the thinking, observing, and reflecting that surround the act. Even the physiological action/reaction seems contradictory at times. Think, dissociation, a phenomenom that fasninates me.

I do see that each realm affects the others, but it is endlessly confusing to try to reach some sort of balance in this regard. I definitely do not think it's healthy to sit around and think all day, but I also fear the impulsivity of behavior. If something is thought-provoking, why is it thought-provoking? Is it because we want synchronization? Or is it that we are more comfortable detaching ourselves and replacing an external disorder and chaos with a very precise internal order? By abstracting to reach understanding, are we actually getting closer to understanding what we abstracted from, or are we just ascending farther into a dreamworld? I don't know.

As I see it, at least a logical process that occurs inside our minds takes shape and even direction when we can't organize ourselves outwardly. I wonder how this beautiful order of thinking can correspond to healthy, productive action and behavior. If we are intellecual dilletantes, then it almost seems inevitable that the ideas and subjects we anazlyze will become boring with time. Sure, by thinking tangentially we will rarely run out of ideas, but I suspect that the interplay between action and thought could yield a much deeper, even productive type of analysis. Our thinking may bounce off of our action, considering that we acheive attachment. Attachment. Wow. Funny how that word almost makes me cringe yet I'm sitting here wishing I had someone "in the flesh" to brainstorm with....what a paradox.

[floid]

A rich paradox. I think that by viewing the living human being as divided into separate realms, we always run the risk of not acting when perhaps we should. I've tried drawing out this idea many times, and I've never gotten to the point where integration and parity between realms of thought, emotion, action, and will act in accordance with each other. I see it as an ideal and a remote possibility, but action always seems somewhat divorced from the thinking, observing, and reflecting that surround the act. Even the physiological action/reaction seems contradictory at times. Think, dissociation, a phenomenom that fasninates me.

I do see that each realm affects the others, but it is endlessly confusing to try to reach some sort of balance in this regard. I definitely do not think it's healthy to sit around and think all day, but I also fear the impulsivity of behavior. If something is thought-provoking, why is it thought-provoking? Is it because we want synchronization? Or is it that we are more comfortable detaching ourselves and replacing an external disorder and chaos with a very precise internal order? By abstracting to reach understanding, are we actually getting closer to understanding what we abstracted from, or are we just ascending farther into a dreamworld? I don't know.

As I see it, at least a logical process that occurs inside our minds takes shape and even direction when we can't organize ourselves outwardly. I wonder how this beautiful order of thinking can correspond to healthy, productive action and behavior. If we are intellecual dilletantes, then it almost seems inevitable that the ideas and subjects we anazlyze will become boring with time. Sure, by thinking tangentially we will rarely run out of ideas, but I suspect that the interplay between action and thought could yield a much deeper, even productive type of analysis. Our thinking may bounce off of our action, considering that we acheive attachment. Attachment. Wow. Funny how that word almost makes me cringe yet I'm sitting here wishing I had someone "in the flesh" to brainstorm with....what a paradox.

Thinking about "not thinking" is not "not thinking".
If you step back from your thought processes you see that they continue without you behind them in much the same way breathing does.
If you disidentify from them, step back from them, uncritically and totally without inner commentary, you observe that they are just phenomena that arise in the "something else" that some call awareness.
It is in this awareness that thoughts occur and the illusion of duality is born.
It is in this awarness that the illiusion of duality dies when it is seen to be created by our own thoughts.

We really are all one in an overwhelming sense that the thinking mind cannot begin to comprehend.

[bdbthinker]

Are we meant to sit around all day and think? Or run around an actually DO things?

I don't think we're meant to do anything. We just exist and we do what we do.

[booyalab]

I think it's easy for INTPs to sit around and just contemplate...but if we dont get out there and learn something, we wont have anything to think about.

[Geoff]

To an extent I agree about going out to learn.

Eventually you get so filled up with learning you have to sit back and 'blow smoke rings' for a while (to use a Tolkien analogy).

I am sure too many of us dream up ideas and they remain only ideas because we are too 'P' to follow through the detail.

-Geoff

[songbird36]

To an extent I agree about going out to learn.

Eventually you get so filled up with learning you have to sit back and 'blow smoke rings' for a while (to use a Tolkien analogy).

I am sure too many of us dream up ideas and they remain only ideas because we are too 'P' to follow through the detail.

-Geoff

This is a "P" problem through and through.

I'm a task-oriented completer/finisher, so I have nothing to contribute on this topic :lol:

[Google Monster]

I'm not a man of many words.

[Sackanaka]

Another approach is to play a game called "sit in a bathroom, empty except for toilet and sink, with an openable window, and enough food to sustain you for the day." Then think away. If you step out of the bathroom then you lose.
I never played because I know there's something beyond the bathroom door that's a little more worth my while.
Of course, it's good to return to the bathroom every once in awhile. not to mention installing a shower.
me :laser: <---the bad analogy assassins