Thinking About Thoughts Thinking...

When is a thought not a thought?

When someone asks us NOT to think of something it is impossible for us (most of us*) to not think of that thing, make a picture of it first so that we can scrub it out, or try to. You see even when we try to erase a thought it is there haunting our conscious awareness of its existence.

Try this, DO NOT THINK OF A PURPLE TREE!

Those of us who have the amazing capacity to ‘see pictures’ will actually produce a picture of a purple tree so that we can tell ourselves not to see it.

It’s not just that we think we can’t not have a thought on a particular thing, we don’t have much of a choice in it. We have our own internal and potentially multi-verse capacity search engine; our unconscious mind, you may have heard of it… this is how many people describe it. I don’t call it that because it’s not ‘sub’ and it’s not ‘un’, it’s so much more than that for me it’s Universally ubiquitous, omnipresent, omnipotent and pretty damned good at what it does.

Before you’ve even begun to comprehend the letters forming the sentence, your Universal Mind was on the case.

In fact your Universal Mind is the reason you are reading this at all… it knows your preferences. It seeks them out and it offers them to you all day, every day. Some you will notice and some you will not. Some may be filed away for later use, just in case.

Those will be the ones that are on the tip of your tongue one day, something you saw, read, heard etc. that was vaguely interesting but right now, well if you could bring it to the forefront of your mind you’d be the font of all knowledge…maybe.

Anticipatory reactive responses. This is how I describe what goes on. It’s the epitome of perpetual motion.

As Nick Hall put it in his lecture series and book, ‘I know what to do, so why don’t I do it?’ The synapses in the brain are so many that if we had to look at something and process it section by section, or as in a sentence letter by letter then how its construction shows it to finally be something we already recognise, we might as well be rocks for the length of time it would take to respond would be eons. I paraphrase.

So, we make shortcuts. Our mind bundles up memories of things we’ve learned and in a millisecond has constructed the source, meaning, relevance and response to have to that item. Our endocrine system has oiled the machinery with the necessary hormonal and neurochemical solutions and that also tells us how we feel about the item too. This explains the interesting emotional reactions we can have to what others around us might think, are fairly innocuous statements or actions.

?We never truly have an empty mind, while we are consciously active, even then we are not entirely sure about thoughts in vegetative states. We know we cannot measure electro chemical signatures of them running along dendrites and jumping synapses, but does that mean, necessarily, they are not in there? Did that make your mind wander off for a moment, chasing that thought?

?Someone says ‘Don’t even think about it’ our search engine is off just at the initial tone of voice and the micro movements of body language, oh yes, even though we don’t know it, we all read body language in some subtle way.

Yes, the tonality is also really integral to how we process information too. Going back to that anticipatory reactive response mechanism that we have that likes to ‘bundle up’ you see someone, a stranger who captures your attention, immediately you have given them a voice, a vocal tone that you perceive they would have. Or is that just me?

There is no exact correlation to how a person looks and the vocal tone they will have. Neither will they look the way they sound. Not all the time anyway. This doesn’t stop us from ‘gifting’ these attributes to characters in books or indeed the authors.

?We have this space inside our skull, which holds a treasure chest of innumerable levels of conscious awareness. So many levels that we may never be totally aware of all of them – ever. This doesn’t really matter, what matters is, this is all working for us ALL the time.

We can easily get lost inside a barrage of thoughts that we cannot find a way to release which makes the inside of our heads so noisy.

For some people there is no volume control and not off switch.

There is a pattern interrupt that takes out the ‘safety valve’ of certain hormones that are tasked with dampening down our initial spike of adrenaline, which gets flooded into our bodies when we are nervous, excited, freaked out or indeed terrified.

There is a physiological triumvirate that holds things in balance. Sometimes we override the circuit and that is when we can get anxiety, depression and burnout.

The point is, we can actually change the way we think, and how we feel about things we think about.

It’s a kind of binary orbit thing, one gravitates and holds the other in sway by attraction of energies.

Emotion is just emotion, neither high nor low, until a memory is attached to it. We get into the bundling and our Amygdala spurs that idea that there is danger so watch out! Be suspicious, after all you got hurt the last time you did, said, went to etc. If we didn’t have the other parts of our brain sending out the explanatory signals we could get ourselves into really interesting states.

There are many ways and strategies we can learn to re-train our mindset, or even to re-mind ourselves of earlier skillsets and productive activities that we may have stopped using for a while.

The mind is a muscle that can move the World. Like any muscle it works best when it is exercised, oxygenated and fed nutritiously.

Are you ready to work on the matters of the mind?

Say yes in the comments. If you’re curiosity is really piqued send me a message, I would be happy to have a chat with you to see what we can do together to make your mindset work for you.

* there are people who have Aphantasia, which means they cannot 'see' things in their minds.

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