Discovery of Free-Thinking: The discovery of free-thinking is a specific type of intellectual peak-experience (a peak-experience caused by a great insight or realization), in which a person discovers the correct, or a key part of the correct, method of thinking—what I have called free-thinking (see previous post).

It is, thereby, one of the single most powerful, eye-opening, transformative experiences possible to a human being—the moment he learns how to think for himself.1 In my third book, Self-Actualized by Poker, I also called this the “epistemology experience;” the term epistemology meaning, to quote one famous philosopher, “the method by which [a person] acquires and organizes [his] knowledge.”2

I greatly prefer this latter, much more concise, much more elegant term, for it denotes an experience of paramount importance. After all, once one’s fundamental method of thinking changes, one’s entire relationship to oneself and the objective world has to change along with it.

Here are a few self-reported examples of the epistemology experience from historical self-actualized persons.

(1) As described by Albert Einstein:

Thus I came—despite the fact that I was the son of entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents—to a deep religiosity, which, however, found an abrupt ending at the age of twelve. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached the conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. The consequence was a positively fanatic orgy of freethinking, coupled with the impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies.3

(2) As described by Ayn Rand:

At the age of twelve, I underwent a very conscious change epistemologically. I observed my whole method of thinking change. I began to think in principles—that’s what I called it then. Before that I had very definite convictions about whatever I was concerned with; but at age twelve I began a process of mental integration. I began to question myself: ‘This is what I believe. Why do I believe it? What is the reason?’ I began consciously to construct a chain of whys; and from that time on until today, I would always try to go one level deeper in my thinking. I did not consciously decide ‘now I will think in principles.’ I had always been mentally active and interested in things, and I suddenly found myself, in effect, asking a lot of whys in an abstract manner, and beginning to define the reasons for what I believed. And then I realized [that] what I was now doing was thinking in principles—what I was doing is what I now call drawing wider abstractions. The content of my ideas did not change, just my epistemology. I began to think in broader abstractions, more consciously organizing and integrating [my] ideas. Today I would say it was a process of integration, but that I did not know then. . . . It was a period of . . . enormous intellectual excitement in my switch to an adult epistemology (a level that few adults rarely reach). I was beginning to think in principles, to form my own ideas.4

(3) As described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in his autobiographical novel about his time in the Soviet forced labor camps, The First Circle. The following is a dialogue inside a prison between the autobiographical hero, Gleb Nerzhin, and his good friend and Orthodox Communist scholar Lev Rubin (who is based on the very real person of Lev Kopelev, with whom Solzhenitsyn spent three years in prison):

Nerzhin: “As the Taoist ethic has it: He who knows how to be content will always be content.”

Rubin: “You’re an eclectic. You pluck pretty feathers from every bird to beautify your own tail! . . . And what do the great books of the Vedas have to say on the subject?”

Nerzhin: “Never mind the philosophers of the Vedas. . . . I, Gleb Nerzhin, I myself, a prisoner in harness for five years, have risen by my own efforts to a level of development at which the bad can also be seen as the good, and it is my firm belief that people do not know themselves what they should aspire to.”

Rubin: “Harken, child! Your words come from an unformed youthful mind. You prefer your own experience to the collective experience of mankind. Your mind is poisoned by the odors of the prison night bucket. . . . We ourselves have come to grief. . . . But how can a man allow his convictions to be changed or swayed one little bit just by that?”

Nerzhin: “Of all the pigheadedness! . . . Instead of learning from prison, instead of absorbing this new life . . . you have willfully sealed your eyes, stopped your ears, adopted a pose—and you think that shows intelligence? Is refusal to develop intelligent? You struggle to believe in the triumph of your infernal Communism, but try as you may, you don’t believe—”

Rubin: “It isn’t a matter of belief, you dunderhead, but of scientific knowledge! And objectivity! . . . Just try to rise above your own molehill! Try to look at things in historical perspective! Historical necessity. Do you know the meaning of it? The inevitability of conforming to the inherent laws of history. Everything goes the way it must! Historical materialism could not cease to be true just because you and I are in prison. Don’t root in the mud, just to grub up the moldering corpse of skepticism.”

Nerzhin: “Try to understand, Lev! It gave me no pleasure, it made me sick at heart to part with that doctrine! It was the clarion call, the ruling passion of my youth; I forsook and cursed all other things for its sake! Now I’m like a blade of grass in the crater where a bomb has uprooted the tree of faith. I’ve lost so many arguments since I’ve been in prison—that I was bound in all honesty to jettison your rickety constructions and look for others. It isn’t easy. My skepticism may be a shelter by the wayside, to sit out the storm. . . . Well, it might make more sense this way: Skepticism is a way of silencing fanaticism; skepticism is a way of liberating dogmatic minds.”5

(4) And, finally, as described by Abraham Maslow, who called it a “transcendence of one’s own credo, or system of values, or system of beliefs,” and which he says:

has involved for me the continuous destruction of cherished axioms, the perpetual coping with seeming paradoxes, contradictions and vaguenesses and the occasional collapse around my ears of long established, firmly believed in and seemingly unassailable laws of psychology.6

The above article (except for the second example) is adapted from my fifth book, On Rotting Prison Staw: The Self-Actualization of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. It is a brief definition of one of the most powerful experiences possible to a human being, which I have called the “epistemology experience.”