Thoughts are the material that make up our minds. There's an almost infinite number of them; they are only limited by intelligence and the restrictions of language.
You don't experience a wide range of thoughts though. That's because most thoughts are filtered away by a belief structure that you've created. Only thoughts that your beliefs deem worthy are permitted. You see a door, you believe turning the handle opens the door. Your beliefs allow thoughts such as "I will turn the handle" but it won't allow "I'm going to have sex with the handle." Beliefs are simply thoughts that are anchored or unchanging. Without beliefs, you would have no structure to your thoughts. You wouldn't necessarily eat if you were hungry, you wouldn't necessarily think about sex when with your partner, the list goes on. Without beliefs, you would move about in a random fashion that simply follows the fact that you would be thinking in a completely random fashion.
So theres an almost infinite amount of thoughts and beliefs structure and utilize the ones that help us get through the day but how do we know which thoughts should be turned into beliefs? Beliefs are guided by emotions. You don't jump off cliffs because you (hopefully) believe that you will be injured or killed as a result. That thought: "falling can kill me" triggers fear. It's the fear (an emotion) that "glues" this thought down while other thoughts such as "chairs can kill me" float around in the infinite without getting much attention.
Okay, beliefs are thoughts that have been "anchored" by emotions but where do the emotions come from? Evolution. Animals and all humans experience similar emotions and this isn't a coincidence. At some point, some prehistoric creature adapted and experienced fear for the first time and it survived and reproduced better as a result. Emotions guide our beliefs so that we can survive in this harsh, confusing reality instead of flopping around on the ground thinking about crayons, unicorns, and bacon.
What's interesting is that you can travel outside your belief stucture and bring in new ideas. Thinking outside the box so to speak. Now I'm using this to explain a scary experience I had with my brother. It went something like this.
Bro: What if people could fly?
Me: World peace.
Bro: What if I said: What if people could fly?
Me: I would answer your question: like I just did.
Bro: What if I said: What if I said: What if people could fly?
Me: That's exactly what's happening right now.
At that point we both went silent, then experienced extreme discomfort and then fear. Just writing this brings chills up my spine.
If you were to really experience what we felt, you would understand how freaky this is. My explanation for this is that we left our belief structure (which also represents our personality and who we are) and we created a seperate belief structure through which we observed ourselves. The evidence of this is the fact that we were exploring thoughts that were far outside our belief stucture (and we seemed to be observing ourselves) and we were experiencing a whole lot of emotion (discomfort) which would act as glue to forming a new belief structure. After talking about it for many hours, we came to agree that we were judging ourselves from a blank slate. We weren't looking at ourselves through our eyes but through the judgement of a new personality (though a somewhat blank slated one).
I lay responsibility for this brilliance or insanity or stupidity to being extremely horny.
No comments:
Post a Comment