lie, the big

n. 1. the absurd doctrine that thought originates in the large lump of gray matter behind your eyes.

Do you think with your brain?

Think a thought! I dare you! Think of a cat ... or a tree ... or a house!

Did you do it? Did you get the idea of a cat or a tree or a house. If you didn't, please take a moment and do so.

Now look at that thought you just thought. Chances are, if you have normal mental machinery, you got a picture of a cat or a tree or a house.

You actually saw that picture. It might have been clear and life-like, or it might have been hazy or changing against your will, but it was there. You knew it was there.

Where did that thought come from?

A psychologist would tell you that it came from your brain. Karl Marx and his cohorts would tell you that it came from titanic, impersonal, socio-economic forces. Other materialists will give you different explanations, but they all boil down to the same thing: That thought of yours is coming from matter.

Does that make sense to you? Look again at your cat or tree or house. Does it feel like they came from matter? I don't know about you, but to me that assertion makes about as much sense as to say that that baby over there in her mother's arms came from a baby food factory. Or that that Renoir painting on your wall was created by a copy machine.

But you've been told it again and again and again.

"You are your body. You think with your brain."
"You are your body. You think with your brain."
"You are your body. You think with your brain."
"You are your body. You think with your brain."

You've been sold it and sold it and sold it, harder than Pfizer ever sold Viagra.

And so, chances are you've bought the idea that you think with your brain. But recognize what you did: They were selling this debatable idea and you bought it.

I hear someone objecting: "But the experimental psychologists or the brain doctors have proven that you think with your brain."

To which I respond, No, they haven't. If they are true believers like most experimental psychologists, they never even bothered to try to prove it. It is a part of their belief system. Thoughts come from brains. The oracle has spoken. Zeus or Aphrodite or the Great God Googleplex has given them the straight dope. Man thinks with his brain. Amen.

This is, by the way, the main reason that psychology has failed so miserably as a subject. The psychologist has been entrusted with the study of a non-physical something called thought, but instead of having the guts to view it head-on and study it in its own right, the psychologist keeps trying to shove it over into the physical sciences. He studies brain waves and chemical imbalances and that corny subject, behavior, and forgets to study the mind.

Psychology doesn't fit there, in the physical sciences. They knew that a couple hundred years ago, philosophers like Descartes and Spinoza and Nietzsche, and before them, Buddha and Plato and Jesus of Nazareth. They knew that it was not a subject for scales and test tubes, because they had their eyes open. They looked at their own thoughts and the thoughts of their fellows, and they knew that they were dealing with something different. But for some reason we have forgotten. Perhaps we are awed too much by the the atom bomb and the personal computer and the pop-top can.

If you think about it, if you take a moment to stand back and really look at it, it's really quite an absurd idea -- that thought could ever come from a brain.

If you look at that cat or that tree or that house you made with your mind -- if you really look at it, without all the hidden assumptions and all the materialistic hoopla that has been pumped into you since you were little -- if you just look at it, you'll realize that thought couldn't possibly be a product of matter. A brain couldn't possibly think a thought. You can't get from there to here. Thought is an entirely different sort of thing.

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