What is thought?
I’ve thought about this a lot ... thought!
This question intrigues me because I have autism and my thoughts are different to most, yet, they’re still only thoughts!
Most people to my knowledge, think in words and others think in pictures.
I personally believe we all have an ability to add more power to our thought, to increase our ability to think ... differently and this statement comes from experience.
For most of my life I’ve thought in pictures, abstract thoughts that detached me from communicating with others but connected me to thought, connecting me to the world. Shapes, light and colour shifting endlessly through the eye in my mind. My life from a personal perspective has certainly been a journey of discovery.
But where do sound or pictures come from in the mind?
When I stare at objects in front of me, what eye inside my mind still allows me to see a thought in full colour yet not confuse or obscure my actual visual sight ... if I am walking down the street, how can I see myself driving a car in my mind and not get distracted, i.e, why don’t I mix both sets of visual information ... after all, I can see both clearly at the same time.
Logically, if I can see in as much detail in my mind as I can in the physical world, then there is in my opinion, proof to an extra sense or sixth sense. A third eye, something we’re all supposed to possess.
It is difficult for science to understand how the projection of sight works in the brain, so far science really has no idea how images are displayed to a consciousness. Where is the TV in the brain and if there even is one, is this the same TV that displays our thoughts and our dreams.
The eye is just the camera, it is an optical device, but the television, the screen of your mind ... where is it?
Personally, and this leaves logic behind, but personally I believe there isn’t one. The screen is you, your thought is the screen.
As crazy as it sounds, current scientific thinking supports this notion in many different guises. The most common being the possibility that our existence is a simulation created by a deity or advanced alien race. But for whatever reason life exists ... it seems observations is existence’s main intention.
To see with both your senses and mind is what creates your reality ... you have two sights, you can create, you can feel and invent, both in the physical and in the mind. Your second sight literally creates landscapes in your mind when you sleep ... worlds indistinguishable from your waking life. Texture, light, sound and colour ... are you an artist? How did you create this world that you immersed yourself in, that dream where you saw the most beautiful buildings or that dream where the damage that was being wrought would put any Hollywood Blockbuster to shame. How did you create worlds so rich and literary bursting with ‘life’ in your mind ...
... the screen in your mind?
No ... you’re the screen, your brain is the eye!
You created a world that was more than memory, a stable world with substance and depth. Allowing you to move through that world physically. Who put it together, when your dreams are showing you things that people could only (pun intended) dream of.
And when you wake ... in your lucid dream. That feeling you get when you can press your foot into the earth that you created That moment of clarity when all that you see is as real as the world your sleeping body sleeps in ... separate from you, but still you. A million miles away from your dream point of view, but from the conscious thought awakened in a dream there is the most powerful feeling that ever could be evoked in realising that you have a body that is beating outside in the abstract sense ... because you are now on the inside.
In a dream you’re free of your body in a hyper reality with a heightened and focused sense of thought.
In the waking life you’re confided to your body in a heightened and focused reality with a hyper sense of thought.
The dream life and waking life being exact opposites, both conditioning your outlook, your experience ... both interchangeable, malleable, and ultimately both are ‘thought’
The hyper thought in waking life is what distracts us from what is right in front of us in the focused reality, while in the dream state in the hyper reality we are distracted by having a heightened sense of focus, we pay attention to detail while the dream world around us changes.
When you wake in the dream world it is amazing ... but when you can waken yourself in the waking life ... life will never be the same again.
So to try and give an answer to what I'd consider a thought, I’d say ... it’s a reality that you’re in the process of making.
There is more to thought than you possibly thought ;)