I’ve been thinking a lot about thoughts (bizarre, I know, but go with me for a minute). Why do thoughts feel different to different people? Some people’s thoughts sound like their voice, some like someone else’s, some think in pictures, but no one can actually explain properly what their thoughts are like. My favourite description when I asked what thoughts look/sound feel like was ‘I dunno. Like thoughts.’ This probably sounds incredibly simplistic and actually a little stupid, but when you think about it, it’s so hard to define something with no reference. If you don’t hear your thoughts, and you don’t see them, then do you feel them, or just think them? I think without words, without pictures, often without feelings. I’d say I tend to think in concepts, and sometimes in stories. Maybe that’s why things I sat often come out wrong, or I lose a sentence halfway through saying it. I understand the concept, but I don’t have words or pictures to go with it.
Is that the same way I experience God? Is that why it’s hard for some other people to experience him and hear his voice? Maybe it actually sounds the same to them as their own… Maybe the pictures God places in their head are indistinguishable from the ones that they put there. But the concept of God, the feeling, the experience, is different from my thoughts. My thoughts are mine. I understand them.
Side note: Do I create my thoughts or do my thoughts create me? I know that question sounds really existential and philosophical and various other forms of bullshit, but do we actually get to choose what we think, or do our thoughts shape and define us? It’s like the chicken and the egg. It’s a cycle, so how do you figure out where it starts? Like, can we control our thoughts with enough willpower? I know we think some stuff on purpose, but I’m really talking about those thoughts and ideas you find floating around your being that you didn’t create. You know when you realise you’re thinking something and it gives you a bit of a shock? I always kind of enjoy that. Especially when it’s something a bit confusing. It makes me feel really intelligent that I’ve accidentally thought something so bizarre.
But, anyway, I guess my question here is; where do those thoughts come from? Is that what they mean by your subconscious? Can you ever become so aware of what’s happening in all your various areas of being that you don’t get caught unawares by thoughts you didn’t think on purpose? I imagine that would be a really boring way of living, but then, if you knew yourself that fully, maybe it wouldn’t be boring… Maybe it would just be peaceful. But can you ever know yourself that well? My first thought is that we mere mortals don’t have the mental capacity to understand something as complex as ourselves, but if we’re the ones who are so complex surely we’re built with the capacity to understand that complexity? No? Probably not, actually. I have a lot of spare time, so I spend a lot of time thinking, but I don’t think I could ever understand absolutely everything that’s going on in me physically, spiritually, mentally, psychologically, emotionally and all-the-other-forms-of-self-ally. Am I just stupid or is it not possible? Will we eventually evolve to a point where we can understand all those things, or are some things meant to remain a mystery?
As I’m typing this I’m starting to feel more and more stupid. Of course we can never know everything. I don’t really have much evidence to back this up, except for that no one ever has. Maybe that’s what nirvana is? That’s true enlightenment? But then, people tend to experience that after meditating for several years of their lives, so maybe they’ve just got less stuff going on with them than everyone else… or have meditated themselves insane… Hmm…

