We have two faces to our minds. One in which our normal thought occurs that reminds us that we need to go grocery shopping, or speculates about what some strange comment from a co-worker might have meant, or even corrects our application of a skill like writing. This is the top down flow of information in the brain. It may not seem that way but in essence all of this sort of thought is analytical, and people do it a lot, almost all the time.

Now after something has been analyzed or “decomposed”, taken apart and seen as its respective pieces, do we readily come to new conclusions about it?

No.

It can make you see it in a new way. Only if you can see those parts in a relational sense.

It’s been said that we can’t solve a problem in the same state of mind we became aware of it in. We operate with our perceptual filters because they save time and energy, keep us from reinventing the wheel as they say. But we are more often than not locked into thinking of the world in this way, as if we already understand it all.

Running on automatic.

Yes, many times I am stuck on a problem, and only when I decide to ask for help do I realize the solution because then I see it from the outsider’s perspective, and then I don’t need to ask the person.

But there is another way of seeing things. It starts with awe, as strange as that might seem, and our ancestors lived and survived primarily on this faculty and not by thinking as we do now. This is why the survival rate of people lost in the wilderness these days tends to be so low. “Modern” thinking.

There is a process that is described as bottom up, sensations to ideas, and the current trend in artificial intelligence is to try and build this model. When you sit and just take in your environment, no matter where you are, or when you sit with someone and just listen to their stream of thought, something else happens, and honestly it likely doesn’t really register consciously in your awareness, doesn’t really stick in your memory. It’s just that foreign to your normal thinking.

There is a whole network of information exchange, and it’s been going on for a long time and even explored in various schools of mysticism. The gods, as they say, are ideas. Even an atheist wouldn’t object to this definition of them. And these ideas come from our personal experience. How rational they might be is unimportant for the sake of this argument.

Can you have an idea and think about it at the same time?

You mean at the moment of the idea’s inception? Just simultaneously. Can you experience having an idea and thinking about it at the same time?

Thinking comes after it.

No. The experience is first. Thought is secondary. Commentary on the experience.

Ideas can lead to new ideas, but do thoughts lead to new thoughts? While thinking, do you ever just start thinking in a new way?

My thinking is to “lock it down.”

In the movie Inception, they claimed that in dreams we can create and observe at the same time, though that didn’t strike me as being true.

Well, more thoughts…probably not new ones.

In neuroscience, the two processes are observed to be mutually inhibitory, and I think you can create and observe at the same time, but you won’t understand that you are doing so because that process is experienced instead as a state of being. The artist becomes the art.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~