On reading “As each thought arises its content is located or assigned in terms of past experience and future concerns.†It struck me that essentially not only does my field communiqué transmit forward but so too do my thoughts. For example wanting to achieve (New Years resolutions):
‘This year I want to……….’
‘I really must…….’
‘I should do……
But quite often with this type of thought my goal is never achieved. Other habitual thoughts of:
‘If only………..’
‘If I do this then that can…..’
‘Why didn’t this……….’
Me trying to control…… And the further I explore the more a see that even though I do have ‘new’ thoughts, I’m starting to see their foundation is still very much based and shaped from my accumulated historical associations, and habitual attitude. So am now trying to discover if I actually have any ‘original’ experiences or thoughts anymore………. (This weeks informal exercise is a very helpful tool for this.)
Louise
My experience with the stream of thoughts, is that yes they tend to be continuous, and –at least this morning–they were agitated (stirred up like muddy water with a stick) in a way that seemed to come from a felt insult. So my thoughts weren’t so much pointing at the future as at an imagined scenario in which I felt threatened. In either case (future or fantasized) it is interesting to observe how a sense of separation is created which covers over space. In the case of an imagined threat, the sense of separation is especially obvious; the lack of empathy for the source of an imagined threat adds emotional separation to the more physical kind of separation that seems to be present whenever we think in terms of things. –Michael
I’ll break with my usual practice and answer this with a comment rather than a post.
Somewhere Rinpoche writes that each hour there are billions of thoughts generated by all of the sentient beings on this planet, and asks, “How many of them are new or contribute anything?”
Writing this makes me think of the non-humans, the animals and insects. Do they have thoughts? It depends what you mean by ‘thoughts’, of course. But I am inclined to say that they do, and that to be an animal is to have one fairly simple thought that you live at, at least for long periods of time: to think in a very different temporal dimension, with much longer cycles between thoughts. We human beings are more agile. But in the end does all the complexity change very much at the ‘foundational’ level you are exploring?