Our consciousness is like the ECONOMY.
If a flow and a balance between extremes is maintained we profit emotionally and materially with well-being and satisfaction.
After all, if you earn more than you spend you have a profit to invest.
If you spend more than you earn you choke in debt and spiral downward.
Change is constant. It is the one feature of life you can count on without fail.
Put all your values into one outcome and any sudden downturn destroys the expected payoff.
Wise investors are told to spread their investments over many diverse venues.
But, THINKERS are often less wise!
Polarization is the common thread: putting all of one's values into one rock-solid belief, prejudice, faith, bias, presupposition or policy.
And worse still; when disaster strikes the polarized thinker becomes stubbornly convinced to cling tighter to what failed policy brought on the downturn in the first place!
THINKING is a matter of BALANCE between extremes and not doubling down on one number on the roulette wheel.
DIVERSITY of opinion is hard to come by because, biologically and evolutionarily, total commitment has huge payoffs for a species.
It has disastrous outcomes for the individual losers, however!
Ever sit down to lunch and have a common housefly buzzing around you and lighting on your food no matter how wildly you chase it away with curses and gestures?
That is total commitment to cause!
That fly will either be totally rewarded by the food it steals or totally annhilated by the blow from your flyswatter!
But, can the individual human afford such a total commitment to a belief, an idea, a concept or a cause?
Does life have to hinge on the extreme of fanatical monomania?
1. If you believe your emotions are the source of information you should follow ("listen to your heart, follow your gut") you can end up broken and ruined.
2.If you totally invest your life in one "true faith" ("my country: right or wrong", The bible said it, I beleive it, that settles it") the outcome can be disillusionment, dishonor and reckless abuse.
Why?
Emotions are not the source of information about what you should do; emotions are the consequence of values already set in place.
Your values, as such, were either arrived at by vigilant conscious decisions and choices (about what is good, better, best, bad or worst) or they were passively absorbed through inattention, family prejudice, peer opinion, urban myth.
The point being this: what you FEEL actually follows what you value and not the other way around.
THINKING is a matter of BALANCING your values so that they are selected consciously and not passively and destructively!
Are your beliefs based on passively absorbed bias or rationally determined foundational principles?
How do you determine if your thinking is BALANCED or not?
The simplest way is to make a list and ask yourself what you LOVE....LIKE.....DISLIKE...and...HATE
and then---do the most difficult, fearless and searching inventory of WHY--WHY--WHY?
If you cannot immediately give a rational, foundational REASON for your emotions---you are in a state of IMBALANCE in your thinking!
If you don't know HOW YOU FEEL then you don't know how you think either!
The mind is only controlled by the feelings (emotions) when the mind is not in charge of the VALUES.
Which means you are inhabiting an EXTREME.
Think of the battered wife who says (after being beaten up by her husband): "It was my fault. I still love him."
Think of the Catholic who says (after the child molestation policies of the Church become public) "That is just certain bad priests and not the churchas a whole."
Think of the Jehovah's Witness who says (after the umpteenth change in doctrine, chronology explanation and flip-flip) "There is only one True religion and I'm just going to trust Jehovah to set things right."
Think of the debtor who says (after their house is foreclosed and their job is lost) "It was the bank's fault for lending me the money when they knew I couldn't affor it" and "Shipping American jobs oversees is what greedy corporations should not be allowed to do!")
Think of the guy who says: "Blondes are dumb", "I buy American cars only"
All are examples of IMBALANCE in thinking and extremist opinion of an emotional spillover from wrongly held values both unexamined and dearly grasped.
Where is the failure in your life? Where is the sorrow or the depression? Where is the debt? Where is the disillusionment?
It is in the IMBALANCE between your emotionally motivated actions blindly followed and that disconnect with your core values (hidden and passively acquired.)