Do you know how you think? Can you describe to me how a thought happens?

I don’t think I can describe it, no. I know I can’t or at least can’t verbalize it.

I see something and make an association.

It usually just seems to ‘pop’ up.

I go through levels of “re-activeness.”

Most of what we consider to be our thinking is just thinking about thinking. They have even examined this under FMRI. The bigger part of the thought process occurred before the person consciously reported that they had a thought. In this case a decision. Of course science says that the rest of the process is unavailable to us. It would be pointless and unnatural for us to try to engage with it. I disagree. I feel normal thinking is actually the unnatural process, like a form of intensely reinforced hypnosis.

It is if you try and define normal. Rational, reasonable, realistic. We have definitions of normal and there are socially sanctioned forms of thinking or am I seriously misguided?

Sanctioned seems too final like it doesn’t ever change. I haven’t noticed much of anything in the way of meaningful change on a societal level.

I’ve noticed I spend a lot of time thinking about my thinking after I’ve decided something.

If you let thinking happen, it parallels sensory vigilance and motor planning. Most of our thinking is trying to work the thought machine. Efforts to make thinking happen rather than having thoughts emerge naturally. It forces connections that are well rehearsed and blocks valid associations, connections that have fully valid sensory and emotional weight behind them.

Yes, I feel I should think something over. Your brain is constantly thinking something over. It’s thinking everything over, all by itself. Labs and research groups are even now working on training regimens to help people enable the natural flow of that process, accessing your “subconscious” creativity.

The Thought Machine. What a great title for a book. It sounds like something a villain would create to rule the world suction cupped on to someones forehead. Villains did indeed do that. They call it education, religion, and news media.

It’s been found we even collect new data that will only reinforce what we already think and automatically discard the rest.

Is it sort of like a built in scanner? Always searching for the unneeded bits to throw out? That process is unnatural though it is very well trained, pretty much universally conditioned. The natural way information is gathered and associated is through sensory and emotional weight irregardless of repetitive lexical thought rituals, mental mantras, self talk. This is why our self talk is so easily interrupted, or if not interrupted registers as being strange and confusing, because it doesn’t jive with the natural prioritizing process.

We’re trained that we have to be right.

It explains why those with the self talk are so distressed.

You can’t edit your thoughts after the fact, after they are already written. Once the signal is sent, the chemical shift has already happened, the memory protein is already in place. Where creative control, where the actual author oversight is, is before the self talk.

Every time you have a thought, it’s that much easier to have it again. Yes, but you have a process before the codified thought, lexical and codified mean the same thing, more or less. This process manages which of the codified patterns will receive the activation command, as well as being able to reconfigure and imprint new data on old tapes.

Repetition is the soul of learning? It’s the death of learning. Repetition is the start of inhibition. Learning arises from associations. They have examined this in the lab. We encode everything we experience on a background of sensory data, especially place related data. Where and in what state we encountered the learned thing or experience.

So, learning (REAL learning) is a gestalt? A naturally occurring gestalt yes, and occurs before the crystallized structure we call recognition. They are even studying this in the lab. There is not one process of intelligence, but two. The one we are most familiar with they call crystallized memory. It’s how we recall things in a concrete way, remember the specifics of learned data, the steps of how to bake a cake, and interestingly, it provides only a baseline range of performance. What really impacts adaptability and broad spectrum function is what they call fluid intelligence as opposed to crystallized, and nothing in our society or educational system trains or supports, in any way fosters, the development or growth of fluid intelligence.

I ponder riding the proverbial bike…

Yes, it’s a shame because that’s where innovation is.

They are heavily invested in you not being in the state where you could actualize fluid intelligence. This is why they insist so much on holding your attention, offering the model of real life and insisting you keep up with it.

They want obedient workers, not innovators.

So accessing fluid intelligence is easy, and it grows with progressive engagement, familiarity, like an infant becoming familiar with the hand to mouth motion. You will be able to feel not so much your thoughts themselves, as how the thinking process is occurring, you will begin to instinctively gut check your decision making, naturally catching those trains of thought or old attitudes that are just a well rehearsed betrayal of self.

John Cage (after sitting with D. T. Suzuki in Zen practice) said that if you are bored with something (“familiarity”) then sit with it more and more. It will eventually become extremely interesting. Yes. You get bored because you are trying to do. You are trying to do your understanding. You are trying to do enlightenment. The world offers itself readily when you open your inner arms to what is occurring without your effort.

“Doing” enlightenment seems like a contradiction of terms, to me. It is a contradiction of terms. This is why it seems too hard to experience.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~