Fancy a game?
I had a thought recently. Thinking deeply can be a bit like playing the game Jenga. You know. You have a stack of blocks piled up, each row made up of 3 blocks. The challenge is to remove the blocks one by one and not make the tower fall. For an extra challenge you then have to place each block you remove on the top of the tower. This means that as you go along the tower gets more and more precarious while also getting higher and higher.
So how is this remotely like deep thinking? Well, it is! I’m a deep thinker, always have been. I went to university expecting that I would know more by the end. If you want to come out of university feeling that you know more I recommend that you don’t study philosphy. I find that for me all that happened was that I ended even more confused about what is right and what is wrong. In other words I came out with a whole lot of knowledge all stacked up on top of itself, but it was like in that process I had been eroding the stuff I thought I knew for certain.
For me this was to do with religion, but it is a theory by no means restricted to religion. It has been happening down the ages. People believed that the earth was flat. Then some deep thinkers started to challenge the whole idea and eventually that belief was challenged. People believed that the sun revolved around the earth, and look what happened to that idea. Smashed flat! any time you meet someone with a different way of seeing the world you are potentially pulling another block out of the foundation of the tower of your knowledge and understanding.
So now I have a question. You suddenly realise you are eroding your deeply held belief system. Now what? Is it better to stop while the beliefs are still standing, no matter that the foundation is precarious, or is it better to let the belief system topple and then take on the scary and uncertain task of rebuilding?