What Do You Think? Or Should The Better Question Be Like "Do You ThinkAt All"?

This is a sequel to my previous post about being steward of our memories...

Let me share this piece to you, further towards living a successful life.

How we steward what's happening inside our hearts and minds will affect the way we think. When we think clearly, we are more likely to have a healthy attitude toward the circumstances that come our way. If our thinking is muddled, our tendency will be to develop and display a poor attitude. 

M. Scott Peck, in his book People of life, tells about one of the Vietnam War's greatest tragedies, the My Lai massacre. One morning in March 1968, in the Quang Ngai province of South Vietnam, hundreds of innocent women and children were killed. The little village was known to have been harboring Vietcong soldiers. However, when an American task force arrived that day, they searched the village and found no enemy soldiers. But commanding officer Lieutenant William Calley was taking no chances. He ordered his troops to round up the villagers in groups of 20 to 30 and, with rifle fire or grenades, kill everyone until the village was eradicated.

Dr. Peck, a psychologist, was called in to investigate and try to determine what would make men perform an act of such senseless violence. He interviewed the soldiers as well as the officers involved. Peck concluded that the massacre wasn't necessarily motivated by vindictive or evil intentions. Rather, it was the tragic result of an unwillingness of the troops to think deeply about what was going on around them. They had their orders, and without consideration or forethought for the consequences, the American soldiers acted in a mindless, barbaric fashion.

As a people, we're too lazy to learn and too arrogant to think we needed to learn. We felt that whatever way we happened to perceive things was the right way without any further study. And whatever we did was the right thing to do without reflection.

Too often our thoughts go no further than the initial perceptions that enter our minds. Rarely are we able to draw correct conclusions from this minimal input. To think that whatever just pops into our heads about a person or situation is always the truth would indeed make us a "people of the lie." 

If your thinking is poor, so will your perspective be. And if your perspective is poor, so will your decisions be.