Around 6000 to 7000 thoughts every single day, this is the average estimate what our heads cook in twenty-four hours minus the deep sleep time, but I think even this estimate overlooks the matter a little. I used to think we all think, like we choose to think, like we can stop thinking whenever we want to, but we just do it anyway, however, that’s not the case, we don’t think, we have to think. Thoughts are not just sentences in your head; they come in many different forms and shapes. Imagination, thinking, feelings, emotions, memories are all different forms of thought.
All you know are thoughts.
You may think that in anger there are no thoughts just rage, but without any thought rage cannot arise. You can only be angry after your thoughts make you to be, if you look closely there isn’t any real distinction between thoughts and feelings, thoughts give birth to feelings and feelings arise more thoughts.
Then there are thoughts that arise from our will, like even to lift a finger you need a subtle thought to do so. The best way to describe a thought would be any kind of fluctuation in your being no matter how much insignificantly small. Although in any form, we cannot stop them, most we can do is to delay them for a while. Have you ever tried to stop thinking, if you had, you may be familiar with the utter helplessness of that situation, it’s impossible to stop thoughts for more than few seconds. Design of our minds is such that we are driven to continuously think.
Thoughts, at a glance.
Our definition of being focused is, to have a string of thoughts about a specific thing. To think about something means you are a somewhat intellectual being, but most, if not all thoughts are nothing but useless gibberish. Now, you yourself may not call your thoughts nonsensical gibberish, but if someone else can look at the chart of your thoughts they will surely think you are insane or something.
Broadly thoughts can be divided into two categories; one is the mindless kind, which is the majority of our everyday thinking, these kind of thoughts have the least amount of any real meaning attached to them, in other words they have the least depth to them, these thoughts are random in nature and even if they don’t seem random, most of the time these thoughts contribute to more unnecessary and useless train of thoughts.
The thinkers and the thinkers.
If we make notes of this kind of thinking, we will find that we are not that far from a retarded person. These thoughts are also repetitive in nature, a continuous gibberish like a group of flies roaming around you without any real goal and direction. The other kind is the mindful or deep thinking. This is the kind of thinking that is considered the boon of humankind. Planning, creativity, deduction, reasoning, logic, all are signs of an intellectual being, and all require this thinking fundamentally.
All the great thinkers are bestowed with this thinking hence have done something prominent. These thoughts can turn into philosophy and these thoughts can turn into math, these thoughts can turn into art and these thoughts can also turn into ideologies. This is what separates extraordinary from ordinary, intellectuals from regular Joes, but thinking as a whole is composed of both of these kinds, everyone have both of these types of thoughts in the structure of their thinking, it’s just the difference in proportions in different people.
The deep thoughts arise from the line of shallow ones. These surface level thoughts can drag you to the deeper ones; honestly, all deep thinking starts with the shallow beginning, but that’s not the case all the time, that’s not the case MOST of the time, that’s actually quite a seldom case. You may need shallow thoughts to an extent, but not to the point of insanity, we have way more than we need.
Something is wrong with our design.
If the purpose of our thoughts is to make us intellectual, than why our mind’s design is such that it can’t stop thinking useless thoughts most of the time. Useful thoughts are rare and few, mostly our mind just waste time with stupid random thoughts. Most line of thoughts don’t take us anywhere; they just keep dragging us into circles and loops. It would be immensely beneficial if our brain could only give preference to thoughts that have potential to take us on an intellectual journey rather than spending most of its time and energy in thoughtful distractions.
If it’s a mistake, then it seems like a ludicrous and odious mistake of our design. Why a mechanism is creating random meaningless gibberish seventy percent of time, when its real purpose is to create intelligent reasoning and thinking, also it’s not a necessary process for our body either, design of our minds is such that this occurs.
It seems like these nonsensical thoughts are a different kind of oxygen for a different kind of survival, therefore, these random thoughts should have some hidden purpose that we are not seeing right away.
Or is there?
Let’s look at it step by step then, if you pay little attention, thoughts are a constant process in our waking hours, but most thinking is automatic processing of information which happens in nanoseconds, basically if you are aware of something, there are thoughts working. What I am saying is, we need constant thoughts to survive and to keep us meaningful and PERCEPTIVE.
Perceptiveness is usually allotted to senses, but senses don’t give you perception, senses only give you a sensation. What is the meaning of that sensation is a different department’s job; it is the job of your THOUGHTS as you may know. Look at a wall without any thought about it, or anything for that matters, not even a single one, not even a tiny winy one, NOW, what is that wall for you, you simply can’t make out anything from it. Without thoughts things mesh into incoherence.
When you see a wall, have you ever wondered what makes it a wall? It’s the knowledge of the wall that makes it a wall, knowledge that comes in the form of thoughts. Walls can be all around you, but you cannot recognize a wall until and unless you don’t think about it.
This happens really fast and subtly, it is really hard to pinpoint in the real time that whatever you are sensing is only making sense because there’s a sheet of thoughts in between working all the time. If a person doesn’t know what a wall is, it doesn’t mean that they will have no thoughts about it, it’s just that they won’t be in a specific way. The wall will still be something for that person, whatever their thoughts will create it to be. We have thoughts of our memories, and we also think about thinking our memories. Thoughts are not as simple as normally we think they are.
Inception of thinking.
We can only operate over the layers of thoughts, there are thoughts and then there are thoughts about those thoughts. You can think about a thing, but that thing you are having thoughts about is also a thought itself. In straight forward words, there’s no way to look at something without constructing thoughts about it, then you analyse even those thoughts further for gaining more information about it.
This process is one way pointed, which means whenever you think about something you can’t know that something, you can only know your thoughts about it, or more accurately you can only know your thoughts, and the fun thing is when you want to know more about your own thoughts, you set up another line of thoughts and so on.
So, this brings us back to the gibberish, those useless random thoughts. Earlier when I said that you won’t be able make out anything about a wall without any thoughts, I didn’t say the whole truth purposely; as you may understood by now, in those moments of no thoughts, you won’t be able make out anything at all not just the wall. Only wall will not fade for you; everything else will also fade in those moments.
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What is this gibberish for?
This constant buzzing in your head is necessary to keep you sentient and to keep you conscious; the moment this buzzing stop, your connection to the conscious breaks and you become a cabbage. This is why your mind creates so many random thoughts constantly. It’s like you are constantly falling into an abyss so your mind is also constantly creating these balloons with threads to them for you hang on for a while before they pop out and new set of balloons are created.
You need to constantly keep thinking about one thing or another, it doesn’t even matter what you are thinking about, you may be thinking about laws of the universe, or you may be thinking about a toffee wrapper or a tire, whatever you are thinking has a bigger purpose than just itself. Any line of thought will do. All of them are necessary for a similar purpose; they are the oxygen for your consciousness.
Automated consciousness.
The problem here is, like breathing this cannot be handed over to you, you yourself can only take part in organized thinking, like sometimes you also organize your own breath in yoga or meditation, but when it comes to keeping you constantly alive or in this case perceptive and conscious, this is a too much of a job for you, so it happens by itself in the form of random thoughts all the time without even asking you beforehand. Hence, these random thoughts are the majority of our thinking.
So, thoughts are not actually there to bring the Einstein out of you, but their main purpose is to keep you somewhat conscious, mind you, here I don’t mean conscious of something but simply conscious. It’s like the transistor device that people used to use in old days while travelling. Just like in the radio sets, whenever the antenna is incapable of receiving any signals, the music coming from transistors turns into white noise. Take the signals as continuous thoughts, then the white noise is what you are without them.
Here and now, but how?
To stay in present, one should not wander in past or future thoughts, as they say, but the problem is that the potential to generate thoughts directly from present is very limited. From moment to moment there isn’t much space left for mind to construct continuous thoughts. More you try to stay exactly in the present more the density of coming thoughts will decrease.
Truest present cannot hold even a single thought, so there aren’t any thoughts in present. This is the reason we can never be in present; at the best we can be in the thought of present. Even when you are focused or concentrated at some happening in present, thoughts about that happening continues in your head, without the knowledge coming from past you can’t even understand what is happening in present.
But let’s take it further, this time you are concentrating at nothing in particular, so there aren’t any thoughts about any happening, however, concentration or focus itself, is nothing but the will of your thought. How do you even know to remain focused? You know because of your continuous thought of it. This is the reason focus never stays for a long time, there are pauses in between because no single thought, no matter how much concentrated stays for a long time.
Having said that, even when you are in thoughts coming from the past you are still in present, I mean where else can you be? The gist of the matter is, that you can never realize present purely as present, you can only realize it in the shadow of thoughts.
To be a cabbage.
Now there is a question that may come into someone’s mind, if we become a cabbage without thoughts, then what about other creatures?
Animals do have some sort of feelings and they also have memories, they don’t sit and think about a subject matter for hours, but that doesn’t mean they are completely deprived of thoughts, their brains are also continuously working to keep them connected to the world by processing different bits of information at any given time, they have thoughts even when they sleep in the form of dreams just like humans.
Although, one thing is for sure, as you go further into the observation of other species and organisms, you will find that organisms with lesser potential to create any kind of thought activity are simpler in their activities and way of living, and if the potential is next to nothing, their perceptiveness of, and stimulation to the outer world is also next to nothing, they won’t be much perceptive to anything, just like in the case of CABBAGES. If you didn’t know cabbages are living things, you wouldn’t have considered them much different from rocks and boulders.
We are not cabbages because we have spent and will spend so much time in random useless thinking and thoughts most of our lives.
