Editorial November 5, 1979 Issue

Being a better thinker

GEOFFREY J. BARRATT

Everyone reading these words is thinking, and each word needed thought to be written. Thinking is something we all have in common. How can we think better? Why should we? Thinking is primary to just about all we do. It precedes action. What we think is what we are.

The best thinking is spiritual thinking, what we ponder of God and man. Christian Science not only leads our thinking in a spiritual direction, it shows us how to start out from the spiritual basis. "The essence of this Science," Mary Baker Eddy writes, "is right thinking and right acting—leading us to see spirituality and to be spiritual, to understand and to demonstrate God."^{No and Yes, p. 12;}

Constructive thinking, thinking that really gets us to that spirituality and demonstration, takes self-discipline. We have to order our thoughts and give them direction. We need to pursue the more important thoughts and learn to subjugate the poorer ones. It takes effort to think more broadly, incisively, logically, comprehensively, retentively. But human thinking, even when we improve it, still has its limitations. A thoughtful film-maker and actor quipped in a recent film, "Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind; the brain is the most overrated organ."^{Woody Allen, quoted in The Christian Century, May 30, 1979, p. 620;}

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