Thinking About Thinking

A meditation on the origin of thoughts

Have you ever wondered where thoughts come from?Now you might be thinking, “No, because we know where they come from: they arise from associations in the brain as a response to stimuli in the world.”

This is probably partially right; certainly it squares with common experience. But have you ever noticed the arrival of a new thought that seemed to stem neither from a previous thought nor anything external?

The thoughts and impulses I’m asking about tend to be of moral significance. For example, you may suddenly notice a feeling of ill-will toward someone; you may then discern that the feeling has overtones of envy, covetousness, or revenge.

Photo Credit: Erikka Hagstrom

Where do such impulses come from? Might they simply arise from patterns of habit? Maybe; but then what makes such patterns move in one direction rather than another? Could our habits and impulses be the subconscious demands of cultural norms? Maybe; but then, whence culture?

Take another example. Maybe you’re meditating on love and harmony or the problems of the world (or maybe just letting your thoughts wander), when suddenly some inspiration or benevolent desire leaps into your awareness. The thing to notice about such events is that you did not “think them up” or piece them together one association at a time.

Another thing to notice about such impulses — whether of the edifying or degrading variety — is that they tend to happen to you with some degree of tendentious force that sweeps you along in its tide. This feature easily goes unnoticed if the thought is to our liking, because we just go along with it, justifying it to ourself along the way.

The tendentious force of these experiences is felt most powerfully when we attempt to resist them. We find that we are not moving against a neutral suggestion in the brain, but against something essentially willful: something that is trying to have its way in us, or even (if you can accept it) something trying to express itself through us.

This, prior to the selective blindness of materialism, is probably what gave rise to the “devil on my shoulder” motif. Until categorically rejected as a serious explanation by scientific authority, I would surmise that most people recognized something intuitively correct about this understanding. Now, however, in an age when frank introspection has been abandoned in favor of scientific edict, such notions have been relegated to the realm of storybooks.

On the other hand, sometimes when I have sent my children to look for something, they come back with the report that “it’s not there,” only to be awed by the discovery that it was “not there” because they were looking in the wrong place. Given the expansive, mysterious, and intricately woven nature of existence and the universe, I see no reason why the same error might not apply, in this case, to the searches of science.

This line of inquiry was recently spiked to new heights (for me, anyway) by a book I read. In it, the author asserts that our thoughts are constantly being influenced, for both good and evil, from the spiritual realm, and that we get more of the kind we choose. He avows also that the vast cultural shifts of history have come about in this way as well.

In the freedom of our nature, each of us has the prerogative to contemplate and engage or ignore these phenomena. Various explanations may account for the raw data of experience to some degree — from the Freudian unconscious to the biological determinism of someone like Dawkins.

But if our thoughts are given from within the spiritual realm, and if what is given there is curated by the habit of our responses to what is offered, then it is there that we make our most meaningful moves toward or away from holiness and a heavenly nature.