Where Do These Thoughts Come From
¿De dónde vienen estos pensamientos?
A student describes the disorienting experience of watching their life and assumptions fall apart, and the teacher responds by reframing this unraveling as a healthy process of discernment, explaining the origins of conditioned thought.
Where Do These Thoughts Come From
A student describes the disorienting experience of watching their life and assumptions fall apart, and the teacher responds by reframing this unraveling as a healthy process of discernment, explaining the origins of conditioned thought.
It feels like my whole life has been this falling apart. I feel like I no longer have any sort of place in this world. I question everything that I decide or believe in now. It's like: did I make that decision from that scary place? Is my whole life built upon those scary thoughts, built upon nothing? And then I grasp at something: "This is there for me, this is going to work, this is going to be the right decision." But so many of the thoughts are just coming from a place I don't know. They change so much of what I do, and what I do is what I think I am.
Could you possibly be any of that? Anything that you answer when I ask, "Who are you?" or "What are you?" If you dive into that question, as you've noticed, the answer is going to be more thoughts. And those thoughts are coming and going, while you are there before, during, and after them. So what are we? The answer is being, but that itself is another thought. What can happen is recognition, which is another word, another concept pointing to something beyond thought.
I know how distressing this process is, but I'm celebrating for you.
Healthy doubt
What you are describing is what I would call healthy doubt, the skeptical capacity. We usually operate from assumptions, and they're false. What you're learning, what you're describing, is a process of learning to discern.
If you realize, "I've been operating from fear," and something in you tells you that's probably not what you want, that's probably not right, that is your heart singing to you. You don't want to live operating from fear. You want to decide and move and operate from something different. What, as a symbol, we call the heart. What we call love. But that is only possible by seeing more and more clearly how we are operating from beliefs and assumptions based on fear.
The origins of conditioned thought
You're wondering where those thoughts come from. Just put them in a couple of boxes.
One box is instinct. Your body and mind carry millions of years of genetic conditioning to operate in service of survival. A lot of those thoughts come from there.
Another box is education and conditioning. This is a similar principle, but now it comes from your parents, your society, your teachers, from every interaction you've ever had with another human being. All of that builds a programming that habitually produces thoughts, again in service of survival, functioning and living according to socially established rules about what is right and wrong, what constitutes a meaningful life. But it is all past conditioning.
Then there is another box you might not agree with: perhaps some thoughts are coming from other people right now, telepathically. We are all antennas of a sort, and there is a social back-and-forth of thought. If you don't like that box, put everything in the other two. It doesn't matter.
The point is: thoughts are just coming. The mind exists to produce thoughts based on conditioning, from biology and survival, and from society and the drive to fit in. We know very well even the regions of the brain that do this. Instinctual programming comes from the older structures; the mammalian cortex is all about social belonging, all about emotions and fitting in. Only mammals have that, and it is all programming.
So, to answer your question: the thoughts come from conditioning. A lot of it has been useful in the past. But if we operate from it as fixed rules, those rules are in service of survival and therefore in service of fear. Fear is useful at times, but if you're interacting with your son and what is actually operating underneath is a fear-based survival mechanism, that's not what you want.
It feels like that's all there is.
I know. Because there is a lot of that, and it is a human condition. This work is about beginning to separate from that, to disidentify from it, to see it for what it is.
I haven't had a lot of time in the group, but it's been really, really helpful.
I'm glad. And as I've said before, especially in the phase you're in, it is important to do therapy as well. It's very helpful.