by John Winter

Created on: October 09, 2009

My father in his own way was a huge advocate of "discipline, and yet he was not very much of a disciplinarian. I was always left to my own devices and years later when he told me he "raised" me to be the person I am today, I had to recoil, and tell him that to my mind he hadn't raised me at all, that, ever since I was a child, I basically raised myself. He just grinned at me and said: "And that did the trick."

I was inclined to be argumentative, but something in the complete lunacy of that statement made me stop, and think. And of course, isn't that the point? Once again my father had disciplined me without having to try very hard- and there I was again, paused and contemplative, and of course thinking before I spoke- thinking before I acted.

Without getting too deep into the reasons why we are as we are, it is common knowledge at this point that our consciousness is actually a very small portion of our actual brain activity at any given moment. The rest is impulse, and our centers for impulse vary from affection to violence. The question 'should people be punished from wrongful thoughts?' is actually a very easy one to answer. Of course we should. Lets talk about why.

We all know about Pavlov and classical conditioning. What we perhaps don't grasp fully is that our brains are affected the same way a dog's is at the smell of meat. We salivate, if mentally, to self fulfilling stimuli. You might ask how a wrongful thought could be self fulfilling, and you'd be asking a good question. The answer is in another under-appreciated fact- our thoughts follow our emotions. Beyond that, our thoughts validate our emotions. My emotional response to being ignored is to get angry, and in order to maintain my state of anger my mind begins firstly to summon relevant memories that make me even angrier, IE this isn't the first time this has happened, this isn't the first time this person ignored me, and then, of course, my mind begins to summon irrelevant memories in order to fuel the anger, IE Some guy cut me off in traffic this morning, so I didn't need this today. The procession of thoughts gets less and less about what is the actual trigger for what you feel, and more and more about why you should be feeling it. And then, a miracle happens, my thoughts begin to affect my actions, and of course then my actions begin to bring about situations which also validate my emotional state. Now that I was ignored by this person, I'm going to ignore that person, and suddenly I'm mad at just about everyone and everyone is no doubt mad at me, and no doubt they are now going through the same process as I am. As my father was NOT known to say, but claims to this day to have taught me, all of that could have been avoided with just a little bit of discipline, and because actions follow emotions, and because emotions are catalyzed by the types of thoughts we allow ourselves to have, discipline does not begin with actions. Discipline begins in our own thoughts.

There should be and is a punishment for wrongful thoughts, just as there should be and is a punishment for wrongful actions towards others, because in essence, they are identical. The punishment for wrongful thoughts invariably is a wrongful action, so my condition to the justification of punishment is that before the action ever has a chance to take place, mentally punish yourself for having the thoughts, and use Pavlov's conditioning to discipline yourself. Emotions themselves are addictive, and since our thoughts are linked so closely to them, it is possible to become addicted to thinking wrongly.

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