The mind is a strange thing. We feel so familiar with the mind, and yet, we don’t know what it is exactly. Where did it come from and does it even belong to us? Apparently, the mind is filled with these things we call thoughts, and they tend to arise and disappear spontaneously — outside of our control. They’ll control us, too, if we’re not careful. So, we should decide what these thought-things are if we’re going to continue to live with them.
Recently, I’ve written quite a bit about the nature of consciousness and waking life. Thoughts fill our consciousness, but we wouldn’t say they’re the same thing as consciousness. I think of consciousness as the backdrop — the stage that’s set for the thoughts to come and play.
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Thoughts can be judgments, feelings, reactions, experiences, and…what can they not be? That’s the question. Since everything we know is a thought, then what isn’t? We live our lives assuming that there is a world “outside” us where we actually live, and thoughts are inside us. But physical objects are only known to us as thoughts and experiences. Our lives are mental activities.
Is a table a solid object with four legs or is it a thought?
So, what isn’t a thought? What’s not in our minds? It’s hard to tell. Let’s answer some weird questions about thoughts so we can get closer to understanding reality.
Is it physical or non-physical?
Lots of people like to argue that there’s nothing in this world beyond the physical, material reality that science can study. I am not here today to say anything on this point, but I’ll tell you what: the problem of the mind in philosophy is what made me really start to doubt whether the materialist view of the world is correct.
Now, I’m sure it’s not. Minds just can’t be physical. Thoughts cannot be reduced to brain functions. Neuron firings tell us some scientific tidbits of truth, but we can’t create a thought by creating a neuron firing. What I mean is this: if we created neuron firings in a lab completely independent of a whole human body, there wouldn’t be thoughts arising — there’s something beyond the brain that makes the mind. Our physical bodies, including the brain, are just vessels and manifestations of the consciousness that was always there.
How can the thought of a rose — how it looks, feels, and smells — be a string of information in the brain? I just don’t see it. The deep love I feel for someone is not part of the grey matter inside my skull. The strange feelings I get during meditation where my energy field is spinning and expanding just cannot be explained by physicality. Science will never be able to fully express the human mind.
That’s because the mind is a product of consciousness, not a product of the brain.
Where does it come from?
As much as we feel so comfortable and familiar with our thoughts — even the dark ones — we simply don’t know how they got into our minds. We don’t know where they come from or where they go when we’re done with them.
Do they materialize out of thin air? Are they on some kind of track that gives us an experience of succession, or are they like a string that unravels? Although we feel like we’re inside them, we don’t know how we got there or the system that brings them to us.
This is a little worrisome since we’ve established that they’re all we’ll ever know. Our lives are mental.
If we don’t know where they even come from, then it seems like we need to re-evaluate our whole lives which seem so dependent on thoughts. We should start to scrutinize them and whether we even need to hang onto some of them so tightly.
Does it belong to us?
You are really attached to your thoughts, aren’t you? You have a preference for butter pecan ice cream over strawberry ice cream, for instance. You write profiles and bios for yourself with all your hobbies and desires littered all over them. But did you ever stop to think whether these preferences are even yours?
We already saw that it’s not even clear where thoughts come from, so they probably aren’t truly “ours” at all.
We just go along with our thoughts most of the time without questioning them. But you know what? We can probably guide them if we really wanted to. We can at least say “no” to some of them. When a thought arises, why don’t you practice refusing to attach to them sometimes? Just let them be.
You’re the experiencer of the thoughts. They don’t belong to you.
Change how we think about thoughts.
Now that we have liberated ourselves from the attachment to thoughts, we can live free — right? I guess it’s not so easy. But I believe that to be really happy, we must rise above them. They will do what they always have done — rise and fall, ebb and flow, surprise and guide us. But we, as the experiencers and observers of them, can choose a new path. We can decide what our relationship to thoughts is.
The choice is yours.
