Happiness - Where Do Our Thoughts Come From? (Part 2)

In the first part of this article, we have seen that not only many of our thoughts are from our own making, but that we have also learned a panoply of them through the contact of our parents and/or immediate environment. Let's continue our exploration of the origin of our thoughts and ideas. For most of us, we started out school around the age of five. And if school often teaches children knowledge that is useful, it often conveys unhealthy prejudices as well -- alas, it does! After all, teachers are also human beings reared in the same way as their students. On top of that, the very structures of school (rankings without originality, first place, last place, rewards, punishments, "good students" and "bad students") offered us -- little children whose critical thinking was almost absent due to the naivete and innocence of our young age -- with countless opportunities to create unhealthy thoughts and ideas. Alas, many of these unhealthy thoughts and ideas simply added themselves to those we had already made ourselves and learned through the contact of our parents and/or immediate environment. Even today, it seems that most of our schools are not structured in a way to support the development of critical thinking of our children. Finally, the various communication agents of our culture -- newspapers, radio, television, publicity of all kinds -- also carry along a huge mass of nonsense. Not only these aberrations are repeated endlessly, through the technical means that we have, often for years, but the little children that we were didn't take long before learning to repeat them to themselves without even realizing it. As we grew up, we gradually got rid of a certain number of myths and nonsense (Santa Claus, for example), but we also continued to hold unhealthy thoughts and ideas. And even if we hold them unconsciously, these unhealthy thoughts and ideas cause us a flow of unhealthy emotions and lead us to act against our own interest. Here is the situation of most human beings on this planet. It is most probably your situation as well. However, as I mentioned in the first part of this article, we are in no way condemned to continue thinking as we have learned so in the early years of our lives. Related article: Happiness - Where Do Our Thoughts Come From? (Part 1)