The Pharmacy(tm)

I’ve been spending a great deal of my blogging time on the critical thinker and this was deliberate for me: I needed a venue to ask questions, or more appropriately a venue to learn how to ask questions.

Opening that blog with rickyM, aratron, and receiving feedback and comments from friends and bloggers all over was a welcome experience, since it allowed me to openly explore areas of inquiry I never consciously considered–although many questions have been perennially on the table for me (appearing on an occasional coffee chat, lunch musings, dinner talk, etc.). The fantastic thing for me as a result of this deliberate blogging is that it felt refreshing, almost cathartic, to have those thoughts laid down in a formal manner for other people to see and criticize.

One unexpected benefit of the critical thinker experience is that it had put me in touch with many people who also consider themselves “truth-seekers” and were looking for kindred souls and intellects who not only had the capacity to understand the questions they were (albeit haphazardly) formulating, but had the spiritual fortitude to go ahead and ask them especially when traditional sentiment favored silence.

I was not born a critical thinker, but now having experienced it briefly, I think I was born to be one (and caveat: that it will always be a work in progress).

Which brings me to the more poignant note.

Ever since starting that critical thinker site, I’ve been more and more active in scientific, religious, and philosophical discussions with many parties. One concrete example in particular is a regular study group I’ve been attending with rickyM every week which started out as a book review of ricky’s book: The Force, but has grown to be a forum not only for religion but for critical thinking in general.

I’ve been meeting that group for well into several months now and the discussions have been very varied and entertaining–we simply don’t focus on one topic but allow our minds the freedom to probe and expand in any direction. Just to give a flavor, some of the questions and topics we’ve touched on:

• Does God evolve?
• The myth of the given
• Is unconditional love absolute?
• What are absolutes?
• History of theism/God
• Astrotheology and conspiracy theories
• Evolution of consciousness

I don’t plan to elaborate on these topics in this post, but only to show the extreme lengths the discussions have taken–and the list is not by any means exhaustive at this point!

One thing the study group has helped leverage for me is that the amount of material between rickyM and myself, the critical thinker blogs, and the videos and documents even on this personal blog have been put to excellent use as research material for the discussions–and I think we’ve only begun to scratch the surface in terms of the kinds of discussions we would like to take. I helped introduce the group to the Zeitgeist videos which were very eye-opening for them, and those represent only 2 of the list of videos I’ve already accumulated on image therapy–clearly a long road full of insights ahead.

And where does this put me? Well even if the amount of research is already piling, I consider this point to only be the beginning of the journey–which is for all intents and purposes a spiritual journey for me. Actually there is another line of thought that logically follows this brief flashback but I’ll save that for the next post–specifically that my foray into the critical thinking blog has just helped set the stage: by providing me with an excellent framework to approach issues, linking me up with like-minded people, and encouraging me to pursue lines of thought I previously never conceived or simply ignored. But a stage is only a stage and the real action is: now that I am learning to think, it will eventually beg the next question, What Do I Want To Think? and more importantly: What Do I Want To Believe?

Like the process of developing a critical mind and approach, adopting a philosophy can’t (and shouldn’t) happen overnight and without due deliberation. In the next post I’m going to try to make furtive steps in that direction.

Time to finally make a stand.