August 14, 2024

Let’s see if we can come to this conversation as though we know nothing. Not referring to things somebody else said, or we read in a book somewhere. Just what spontaneously appears in our experience now and that we share with each other, and that could be whatever it is right can be a question can also be a thought.

One of the themes of the book is likely something about thought. And we could start with an investigation into right now in this group, in this conversation.

What do we think thought is? And what is it good for? What is it not good for? And what do you think when you hear that there’s the joy of not believing, not having to believe any thought? What is thought good for? What is it?

That sounds like a cue for a song. Thought, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Tell me again. That, yeah, there’s some truth in that, it’s, um, it’s a very convincing reality. I’ve always been confused with that. It doesn’t belong to us. So why do we adopt it? It’s a neutral thought. We take it on board. We build something out of it. We manufacture it. It’s got a lot of things attached to it. Emotions associations, quite powerful, quite evocative, whichever way they may be going.

It’s a bit of a mystery. It’s an energy, as far as I understand it. Constant energy, 60, 000 thoughts a day. Some of them we’re not really aware of. I’m just quoting what I’ve read because it’s all theory, isn’t it? A lot of is BS but it’s the realities attached to it, it’s the feelings and the associations attached to it that make it feel real. It’s fleeting, which is very fortuitous for us. I do that part of it. I’ve recognized that in the studies that I’ve done. This is shit, but it’s not going to last long. A thought believed is a reality in inverted commas for the person believing it, but it doesn’t resonate with anyone else.

The word that came up for me was innocence because we weren’t born wanting to believe in thought. It just happened.

And how would we explain thought to an eight year old? 

I always think of thought as part of the mind. They’re synonymous for me. I see the mind, the best way I see the mind is when I’d like to stop. If we’re talking to an eight year old, I would call the mind a pair of psychedelic sunglasses. It’s just a pair of psychedelic sunglasses we’re looking at the world through. An aspect of that is It’s a, it has all sorts of capacities, to label things, categorize things, organize things and can be extremely useful, and organizing patterns of information, sensorial information, all of that is included in mind for me.

And thought is part of mind, that’s how I see it. I always think there’s three types of thoughts, which are constructive thoughts practical thoughts, enthusiastic thoughts, and thoughts full of fear. And I can’t think of any other type of thought outside of those three categories.

Practical thoughts, like I want a cup of tea, I need to go and pay that bill or something like that. And then we have fear thoughts, which are all identification thoughts,self critical thoughts, so those kinds of classification of thoughts. And then we have enthusiastic thoughts, inspirational thoughts.

To a young child, I would talk about physical movement and and movement of the mind as a play, or mental movement. I would talk about thought in terms of that energy that, that movement, that energetic movement. And then I would add the word spontaneous to that. So it’s not something that I decide, but thoughts just randomly appear in one or more of those three categories. It’s linked to the mind and to me it’s linked to the notion of concepts and how all thoughts are concepts and how all concepts are just thoughts. 

So what comes to me would be to ask a question. Have they ever noticed that it seems like there’s a voice or something explaining something or talking to you that you don’t hear about or see anybody, but that there’s something trying to talk to you, tell you something, explain something.

I sometimes talk about this with my children and it’s quite funny. So I explained it like that. So it’s a kind of a speaker in your head. It’s a constant stream of language and it’s telling stories. It’s expressing fantasies in words. And what I then said is it’s something you could question if you believe it or not. And what was funny is when I asked check what happens to your body what emotions come up when you believe the thoughts and when you don’t. And this was like, Oh, actually nothing happens when I don’t believe them.

We could actually do that as a loop for the content of the book. So we create content and we check it with an eight year old and it just, we just get the feedback.

I have no idea how I would explain it to an eight year old because I’m not entirely sure how I can explain it to myself. But I think if we tested on an eight year old, I think they would probably grasp it a lot better than we can. So their understanding would more probably be better because of the less conditioning that they have. So I think it’s more difficult to explain it to an older person than a younger person. For me thought is a sort of an indication that I’m still consciously alive, and that show up as my experience of life. And it tells a story about how I experience life.

How would I understand as I imagined myself when I was eight years old or ten years old, for that matter? How would I get a clear establishment of this point in my mind or in my consciousness?

Yeah, so back to this notion of eight year old, and I would ask them, you know how you sometimes have the hiccups? So I use the metaphor of hiccups as an involuntary kind of contraction on it. And I would say thoughts are like an involuntary movement are involuntary movements of your mind, much like hiccups, like mental hiccups.

And if I would want to think about my day tomorrow, right? Because I have a big day tomorrow at school or whatever. Is that still a mental hiccup?

I would then talk about, how we’re all programmed differently, like computers and how different programming will lead to different thoughts appearing or rising or not arising because you can say, but you’re, the person sitting next to you in class will not be thinking about what homework they, they’ll be thinking about the next soccer game or something like that.

Aanother way of explaining it for me would be to talk about images and ideas that appear in your head.

Maybe we could think of it as the radio and the radio waves in in particular. Radio is everywhere and there’s so much information flowing around and you can only receive it when you’re tuned to it. And why should we not listen to it? Because it’s just radio. Unless you think, oh maybe I can do something with it, right? How that works, I really don’t know, but maybe so far this analogy goes. So it’s just there. We can all receive it, but we need to tune to it. And the only way we can actually handle it is by converting whatever we receive To spoken language, so the voice in your head, or images? Kind of the same. In the end it’s all rubbish, right?

I was just saying that for an 8 year old, it’s the same with an adult. Surely, the only thing I would focus on myself is to say, I don’t care about any type of thought process at all. That’s the only type of thought process I care about, is a thought that makes me feel bad about myself. That’s the only one I want to get rid of. The rest of them are beautiful, angel thoughts, whatever they may be. They’re not in the way of my life. They’re just part of my life. But the thoughts I’m concerned to try and explain to an eight year old are those thoughts which make me feel bad about what I am. Frightened, or a sense of lack, or something like that. The rest of the thought process is fine. I can’t stop thinking. And that’s not really the issue for me, the issue for me is just to try and get the child to understand that there’s a class of thoughts here which are self defeating thoughts. So I focus on those. I’m not too sure how, I’m just trying to think how I could explain those thoughts to an eight year old.

There’s a class or a category of thoughts where I think they’re nice, they’re good. Like, “Peggy is my friend and I’m happy to have her here.” So this is a good thought, and it makes me happy, but it also implies that I would be unhappy if Peggy were not here.

Yeah, like a thought that makes you feel like a person. That’s where we end with it. Any thought that personifies you is where it’s That’s really the issue, isn’t it? Any thought where there’s personalisation involved is very important. So how do you explain that to a child, that being a person? 

Do we need the different types of thought? 

Yeah. I think to some extent, yeah. And that goes back to the question you just asked me, which is because I think there’s two categories of thought, which are intentional, or at least we perceive two different kinds of thoughts, which are intentional and unintentional.

What’s an intentional thought?

Like you said, I know that I’ve got to go shopping in an hour and and I better think about a shopping list, but, and I realized I could be thinking about something else. Now, I know that’s not really intentional but I think in the minds of most people, they would understand that distinction and unintentional thoughts are just random things that appear. Like little brain farts. 

Okay, now we have intentional and unintentional farting. That is a great way to explain it to an eight year old. That’s true. That’s true. I would totally get that. 

It’d be fun to ask an 8 year old that hadn’t been taught what a thought is. It’d be real fun to ask somebody that never had been around this conversation to ask them what do you think the thought is that’d be fun.

I want to move away from this eight year old thought experiment because I have the impression that it’s limiting us too.So let’s just be ourselves again. We can go back and forth on this. Maybe next time, we’ll go back to the eight year old.

Why are we interested in thought? 

Our brain maintains a reference of whatever has been happening with us. And and in current moment, it will reach to that reference based on experiences, it will get some understanding. It will try to join that with whatever the interpretation of current moment is. And combinedly it will derive some meaning. And this will be reflection and this will reflect into positive, negative or just thoughts. 

When you have many thoughts, why do you do that? What are they for?

I think we need to see the source of thoughts, where they’re coming from. So I think my experience is that the source is the conditioning that gets formed right from the time we are born. So all the information that we get from the environment that gets into our system and it creates some kind of a conditioning. What we call assumptions, beliefs even all the behavior and the skills that we demonstrate, it comes from that conditioning. So if you really look at all the thoughts that are coming, these are all some kind of a memory based thoughts or images. It has come from outside, right?

And and of course, it’s like a tool, mind is a tool mind-body is a tool through which the deeper part of self wants to achieve something. So that is why, the thoughts are guiding us to, to do whatever our inner self wants to do. They’re aligned with that. Deep intentions are there for you to mention intentional thoughts. Intentional thoughts are those thoughts which are something which we are so passionate about. That is our drive or whatever we want to do in our life. So let’s say whatever I’m saying right now, it’s basically because of my interest. I have done some self studies and all that, and because of which I got this understanding and that has shaped my conditioning and because of which these thoughts that are coming up and these thoughts are getting converted into action, or so to say speech, that I am speaking right away. So in a way, those thoughts are serving me. Thoughts are dual in nature. So there are some positive thoughts and then they have to have negative thoughts. So it’s like it balances out because of the duality.

So negatively, some thoughts are, which are, maybe they are there, but they are not serving me well they are associated with the feeling which is not so good. So those thoughts, maybe I simply be aware of it and just let it be, because I know that it will be there because it has come from outside.

Somebody has said something to me and they are simply showing up. I think we just let them be. Because here the understanding goes that I am beyond the conditioning. Something that I have to experience experientially that I’m beyond the conditioning. So these are the, conditioning I’ve created to serve me some purpose. So that is how I would look at it, the whole scenario and just use the thought or let’s say I choose the thought. As the situation demands in the present moment, right? Whatever rationally, the, I feel that this is the right thing to do. Let’s say, I’m just feeling whatever I’m expressing right now in the conversation that this is what I should be speaking to the question being asked or the later point being discussed in the context. I’m using it and using this whole mind body mechanism To to express myself, right? So in my experience I see this whole business of thoughts and conditioning.

I forgot at one point you had asked the question of like, why are thoughts important? Like, why do we care? Why are you even talking about them? And this touches upon what for being was talking about, too. And it seems to me that thoughts are important to us when we think that they’re ours, when we identify with them. So they’re important because. It’s funny, it’s almost tautological. They’re important because we think they’re important, because we apparently own them.And apparently use them to better our lives or whatever. But in my experience, there is no control over what thoughts arise.

Thoughts can arise that make the experience unpleasant. Thoughts can arise, which would suggest to me that that’s conditioning, but that would also suggest that if we were looking at it from the sense of a soul or something like that’s not something that would, serve this body mind, to have pain, to experience painful thoughts or something like that. On the other hand, there tare certainly practical thoughts that arise that seem to help facilitate this body mind to to move through the world. But I think that we care because we think they’re ours. That there’s some entity that actually owns them.But when it’s recognized that there is actually no entity there, that the thoughts are just coming up, usually in response to some kind of condition in the environment that it really doesn’t matter. Then there is much less care and maybe even no care, what’s whatsoever about thoughts.

Thoughts are an escape, like they are a release. When the mind fails, it resolves in thinking. I see it as a failure because I feel the opposite of that. And then getting into the thinking, whether in the good or the bad, actually, I think even in the good, there’s a justification to some sort of thing we, Think, when there is true love, like the thinking stops when there is, true connection, that kind of explaining kind of drops. So they’re a release of some sort as a failure mechanism to the interpretation, which probably got stuck somewhere. And then it resolves in thinking. It’s that’s and they phase in into attention and out of attention as a consequence of that.

Is thought ever necessary? There are practical thoughts, but are they needed?

No, much of those are not needed. I won’t completely say like all of them are not needed, but I would say that and the source of this is, I think That I have idea of myself and then I have some definition of myself and when I am in some situation, I am going to think in order to feed that idea of myself and that’s where the thoughts will come. Now as long as my idea of self is going to be there, let it be big or let it be small. I’m going to have thoughts. Maybe most of them are not needed.

But can find a necessary thought? Let’s define it as it is needed for something to occur. So to realize something, to achieve something, to do something, to get somewhere. To survive.  So what would be an example of a thought that we need to survive? 

Oh, the light turned red. I better go to the doctor. Oh, I should go to the, yeah, I should stop. Okay. 

We need to think that thought in order to stop at the red light or go to the doctor.

What if you have an important red light? We don’t think about it. The thought comes maybe after. 

Who are we talking to when we say, are we talking to ourselves as people who have done some thinking about all this, or are we talking to people who are absolutely not finding joy anywhere and need, we need to come somewhere, start at the bottom. Because most people in the street that I meet will think, I need to make a decision. I better think about this. For them, that thinking is very necessary. 

How is it necessary for them?

It feels necessary. They’ve been told that they have to think to get something done.

So one perspective is: Action is needed but before action, thoughts are needed. Is that the case?

So in a way I want to do some action because it is a really need of the moment. Okay. It is a need of the moment, the particular action, but in order to do that, there has to be a thought first and then there will be an action. 

How do we know that there has to be a thought first before an action happens?

I’m not sure. I think I assume that, but. 

Let’s say if you want to plan a holiday. So naturally, you’ll just do something, a conscious thought, that, on such and such date, I need to travel. So what do I need to do? So I need to book tickets, I need to book flights, I need to book hotels, all those kinds of things. So you’re consciously using those thoughts based on your past experiences, conditioning.

And then you need to make a decision, right? Which flight to take, which hotel to book, which date to, which date to take flight on. So for that, all that there’s a decision making involved and for that, you need to think, the mind is the tool. It’s understood that we do not identify with it, but we know that we are beyond it and we are using this mind body mechanism as a tool to accomplish our inner, sense of self, what we want. Let’s say my sense of self wants to go on a holiday, so that’s what this main drive is. So that driver I’m using and then using my intellect and mind and body to plan that visit and then the visit happens.

We’re back to the question of our definition of thought, definition of thinking, Is that the use of our mental capabilities or is it the voice in our head the language we hear in our mind?

Because maybe it’s possible to actually plan a holiday without thinking. If we define thinking as language in our mind. There could be probably an intuitive way of doing it, right? You simply, go on doing whatever comes to your mind. It’s an intuitive plan for a holiday that just emerges.

Is that thinking or is it not thinking? 

I think this comes back to belief too, though, because in my mind, ultimately the question is, are these thoughts causing actions to happen? We’re back to the question of cause and effect. And if we don’t believe that thought is the cause of these effects, then what is there? 

So I’m planning a holiday. So what if it would be described as the body opens Google Maps? Looks at Google Maps, sees little signs for interesting views or interesting places to visit, because it entered that in Google. Then these things show up, then the body chooses these and puts them in a folder with starred places. None of that requires thinking anything.

People maybe who are more in the present moment, probably you will intuitively go and look at Google and do whatever comes to your mind at that very moment. But then there are a set of people for them, there will be conditioning. Oh, where did I have my last holiday, right? Or who, my friend has visited this place. Okay, you went to the Google, you saw a site and say, okay, let me see who has, my friend has visited this place. So there would be some past element will come into picture. Past is where, you are imagining something, something has happened in your memory. The conditioning also includes memory, right? It simply pops up. It’s just that when you’re aware you may choose to go through it or you may ignore it. Or if you are not develop that practice of being in the moment, then you may just simply led by it, then it will drive you rather than you being governed by it. 

So I think the agreement is that there is conditioning involved in what we think, how much we think, whether we think whether we think of the past and all these things.

But is thinking ever necessary to do something?

I think yes and no. Because there is no one way of saying that or not necessary. Because it’s a very interesting mechanism. So depending on the context in hand, you may choose to use the thoughts. Or may ignore it. So that much choice making should be with you. And that will come to you the more you are aware. From the point of view of who you are. So if you are aware, then you know, you will be in a much better way to use this as a tool. Just like a laptop or Google, these are all tools, structures. The same is the mind and conditioning. It’s a structure. So whether we use it or not, it’s a, it’s what makes sense in the moment. Because we want to do a good job, whatever it is.

The big assumption that’s being made here is that there’s even to ask the phrase the question in such a way there’s our thoughts necessary is there’s almost like an underlying assumption that there’s something doing the thoughts, right? There’s something that’s going to choose to make those thoughts happen. And they’re necessary is almost like an after effect or interpretation of what has apparently happened. Oh, such and such events occurred in the past in this particular order. And so we’ve interpreted these thoughts to have been necessary to cause this ensuing stream of events. But without all those interpretations. What is there? There are maybe thoughts arising. Maybe there are actions being taken. Maybe thoughts don’t arise and actions are just being taken. So then to ask the question, are thoughts necessary or not, just overlays a conceptual framework on the raw experience and now we start entering into this conversation requires a whole set of other assumptions to be made.

I think as far as living is concerned, thinking is not necessary because this concept of thinking is more prevalent in cities. The more one reads, the more one thinks. If you go to a village, people don’t think so much, but they still work. They still are happy. They are still also living the same life, rather a better life, I would say. So thinking as such is not necessary as far as living is concerned. You see a child, how he plays, how he runs, how he eats, when he does all these things, he does not think, he is not thinking. It is we who, force thinking into him that you should think before going, you should think before talking, you should think before writing, so many things. So thinking as thinking is a tool, as somebody said, but it is not at all necessary for living as far as living is concerned, being happy is concerned. Thinking is not that. And as you see, the more you go into cities, there is more thinking. Everybody’s thinking about something, but if you move into the countryside, there is less thinking.

People are not talking too much about any subject, but they are still living. They are still doing things. eating everything. And the other thing I noticed in my experience is that thinking is a social construct. A child is not born with a lot of thoughts in his head. It is the conditioning which we, which puts a lot of thoughts into him or her.

So we keep continuously telling our children that think before you speak, think before you write, think before you do this, that. Otherwise, 80 years old, as we are talking about that he never even asked about things. It is only we who wants him to think, otherwise he’s living, he’s playing, he’s learning things, he’s inventing things also.

So of course, it is a very difficult word how to first define it, because it is all mixed up. Mixed up due to importance given to this word thought or thinking, but life as such does not require anything. There are so many books now, but a hundred years ago, there were no books or less books, but still people who are happy, still they were living. 

Planning does not require thinking. The thinking is the after thing, I would say. Suppose you feel hungry. Do you think that I should eat now? Do you think before eating? The hunger happens before you think. So I often tell my children that when you are driving, don’t think, just watch. Keep watching and you will not hit any other car. Driving does not require any thinking. Just keep watching and you will not hit any car. I call it a layer thing, thinking. Otherwise basics of life, do you think before breathing? No, our body does not think before breathing. All the essentials of life, they do not think at all our blood circulation, our body. Do you think they think before digesting? So that is what I want to emphasize. Thinking is not necessary for living. 

From my perspective, I think I understand what you’re saying, but at the same time, there’s nothing wrong with thinking, is there? 

No, no, nothing wrong. I did not say thinking is a wrong thing. I said it is a tool. It is a layer thing. It is a privilege.

How would it be possible to have any kind of conversation without the power of thought? How would it be possible to have a language and even have this conversation without the power of thought? 

I am not saying that language is not required. Language is a good tool to communicate.

It’s very interesting to see whether language is the sameSo for example when human beings developed language in your past, let’s just say that’s the way it happened. Did that come before? We internalize that language and thought. Some people have suggested, that first we developed the capability to speak and then we developed language. But that is not the same as thinking. So internalizing that language and thinking within our apparent selves.

So I’m wondering how you would see the difference between language and thought, or do you not see a difference?

What I know experientially is, if someone mentions the word body, that it’s a thought memory for me, and I can visualize what that means here. So I can’t distinguish between language and thought. I think that’s synonymous. I don’t know how it would be possible to have a language without some kind of thought process around it, even if it was rudimentary not recognisable by what we understand here. But I’m not an expert and I’m not a linguist, so I don’t really know, but I would agree that thinking is overrated.

But it’s not like we have any choice, it’s like saying to me, the question would be like saying to me, is touch necessary? And not really, you could live without touch, you could live without five of your senses.

The reason the question, is thought necessary, is so interesting to me, is because if you ask people on the street, they will say, yes, it is absolutely essential to think to get something done.

But the question is for what? The question is not, is it necessary? That doesn’t mean much. The question is thinking necessary for this, that, or the other? Is thinking necessary for writing this book? Could we write a book without thinking? What’s the square root of nine? Or how much is 54 multiplied by 17? Do you need to think for that? 

So that was the thought experiment. Can we find something that requires us to think? 

Try multiplying 54 times 17 without thinking. Good luck. 

Actually, I’m personally not sure whether you need to think about it, because actually I’ve found that many people who are really good at mathematics, they don’t think about it.

If you practice math, then you can do a difficult math exercise while thinking about the holiday and not thinking about doing the actual calculation at that point in time. It just becomes automatically. And I think that thoughts just come and go and it’s got no, it’s, we don’t have control over it. And it’s, it arises. And even if we use the traffic light example, you can probably stand at the traffic light and it can be red and you can tell yourself, okay, you must drive and you will still not drive. So we ignore our thoughts, probably all the time, to do things. If we ignore it, constantly while still doing things. And I can think now and talk and have completely different thoughts while having this conversation, but I can still have a conversation. 

But remember when you took your first driving lesson, You thought very hard about which pedal to press and how quick.

I didn’t. I was too nervous. It was so nerve wracking. I didn’t think. 

Can I just ask, how would you teach a child to stop at a red light without thought? 

You can’t. You can’t do it.

So what does language mean? Are you saying the word “body” is not a thought? 

I honestly don’t know. We really have to define this thing. 

We really have to go. What is a thought? A body cup of tea is a thought.

That is an identifier actually, identifier of a thing, naming something, but the naming and the thing is different. Supposing a sun, which we all see daily, it is named differently in different languages. And suppose you some you use the word sun in a remote Indian village or any village, He will not understand that you mean the word sun is the one bright star rising in the day. So language is a identifier. It is not the thing. The sun has nothing to do with the word sun or Surya or whatever is called in other languages. The sun still exists, even if we do not use any word for it. 

This is precisely the type of conversation I hope we can have because we see that we don’t even know. We don’t know. So how are we going to explain it to our eight year old? So we really have to get clear. And I’m not saying we can’t find out.

And I hope you enjoyed this As much as I did. And we can pick off, we have the transcript, so we can pick up where we were next week, if you want to.