understanding thought...

Questions I have in mind right now are:

1. Why thoughts come in my brain?

2. At times, why can’t I choose what to think?

3. Can this process of thought creation and propagation be brought under my control?

When I think, I don’t think linearly – which I presume is the case with most of people. Most of thoughts are jumbled. There is no absolute start and absolute end of a thought. Stories don’t always begin with ‘once upon a time…’ and end with ‘happily ever after…’ Definitions are the things which people arrive at the end of a subject.

After a lot of analysis I have come to the conclusion that my thoughts are basically of two kinds:

1. Ones which are the result of instant situations. E.g. I look at the clouds with a relatively blank brain and I become the thought – ‘Oh! What a nice weather!’ or ‘Oh! Today there is no work!’

2. Others which are the result of the previous ones. E.g. ‘I think it is going to rain’, ‘The wind is so fast’, ‘I was once caught in a storm’, ‘Storms are bad’, ‘Many people died because of cyclone in Orissa’, ‘Why do people die’ and so on…. Or ‘I don’t know what to do’, ‘Why am I doing this job’, ‘I never wanted to do this kind of work’, ‘So-and-so is working in so-and-so company’, ‘That company is far better than mine’, ‘Oh this sucks’ and so on…

Earlier I used to think that action is different from speaking and thinking. But now, I realized that thinking and speaking is just another form of action. The physical, tangible form of action that I see at the outermost level is a result of the actions (i.e. thinking and speaking) at the micro level.

At the bottom of every action lies a thought – conscious or unconscious. While walking in the crowd I never think that I should avoid hitting anyone – that comes instinctively or unconsciously. But while making a choice when buying chocolates or a mobile phone – I think consciously.

Now – what lies below thought? I don’t know.

I think, thought is another form of energy, E=MC*C, which can neither be created nor be destroyed, just transformed from one form to another. The food that I eat gets digested inside my body and becomes energy. This energy keeps changing forms and blood keeps getting pumped into the brain which in turn keeps stimulating the billions of neural links which are there. That in turn stimulates the area of my brain which knows that I am thinking and finally I realize that, one thought crossed my brain.

Now, this stimulation and realization process is pretty weak and without any control mechanism. Brain is like an overloaded hard drive and its operating system is filled with unnecessary processes. Ultimately what I see is a slow running system with highly uncertain, unpredictable behaviour.

Well, what I think is totally dependent on how I have formed my first thoughts about my surroundings throughout all these years I have grown up. My brain is a machine of stimuli and responses.

But then I think – ‘Is there an end to thought?’

They keep changing, with time, with surroundings, with people, with seasons.

Can I stop my brain from thinking?

I don’t know.