We are free to think, or not to bother…

Page 48. We are free to think, or not to bother, or to actively avoid thinking. The choice to think it’s a choice to rise from the Sensory perceptual level and the awareness of mood, feelings, or floating mantle images to the active, conceptual level of consciousness. The choice not to bother, or to actively avoid thinking, is a choice to remain stuck at the level of sensory awareness and passive feelings in a room in relation to whatever it is we are not dealing with.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit · Art of Living Consciously

In the book

Cross-check your beliefs against evidence. Take an important belief and treat it as a hypothesis: try to falsify it, and ask whether you are truly sure. When you catch yourself wanting something to be true, deliberately flip the question from "can I believe this?" to "must I believe this?" And ask the plainest precaution of all: am I taking real steps to avoid fooling myself? - Choose to think, on purpose. A thousand times a day you choose between thinking and not thinking — you are genuinely free to think, to not bother, or to actively avoid it, so choose the harder option more often. But also learn useful thinking: distinguish what is actually worth your thought from what is not, and refuse to spend the instrument on noise. — The Mind in the Cockpit

Start with focus, because decisions are made of attention, and attention is your scarcest resource. The very first decision, under all the others, is whether to think at all: you are always free to think, to not bother, or to actively avoid it — and choosing to think is the choice that rouses you out of mere reaction. Every moment you spend attending to one thing is an opportunity cost paid against everything else you might have attended to. — Decisions & Choices (Decision/Choice/Focus/Forethought/Consequences)

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