Thinking, Thought and the Self

Consciousness: First, we have no clear definition of consciousness, except saying that it is the mental theater, and perhaps also its contents.  This is where I not only experience things and think and feel, but also where my mental world is created.  In fact, my world as far as I am concerned, is what I experience as the world.

In this theater there are actors and actions, and interactions among them.  Each of the elements has consciousness as an attribute, i.e., each of them is conscious of other elements as well as themselves, as well as anything else presented to it as an object, whether ‘internal’ or ‘external’, and all the happenings that occur in the theater. Thus one definition of consciousness is that it is the sum total of all the elements.  There is also a constant witness, who also acts as a commentator, accompanying all these actions and reactions. And I would include it in my picture of the theater, but not as part of the definition of consciousness.

On the other hand, one could go on to give an objective definition of consciousness: We say someone or some being is conscious when it responds to stimuli (in which case, plants and animals, as well as inanimate objects such as magnets and thermostats are all conscious -- but this is too wide a definition), pain stimuli, for instance, and acts purposively, and so on.  But none of these really capture consciousness, although they are manifestations of it.  And there are grades or levels of response to stimuli:  reactions, verbal responses, reaching out, and what not.

Or, you could just take consciousness as a fundamental undefined notion and list the classes of items or beings we normally consider as conscious.

We designate something or some being as conscious by virtue of the presence of what we conventionally consider as conscious activity.[1]

Thought:  We use the word ‘thought’ with so many different connotations, with different meanings in different contexts.  But for the purpose of discussion of the self, I need to be a bit more precise as to what the term could mean.  ‘Thought’, ‘idea’, ‘concept’ are related terms.  Concepts may be implied in thoughts, but do not constitute their entirety, as thinking may be carried out through images or some other tokens.  A thought presents itself to us mostly as an idea, in the form of a judgment.  But when I mention that I have already gone too far.  What’s more immediately present even before something is understood as a judgment?  What occurs to us (to our minds) more immediately are sub-vocal sounds, images,[2] visual or auditory, sensations and other impressions, memories and reactions to them and such.  These are tokens which must act as concepts which constitute a thought.  I.e. they must represent things other than themselves.  In some sense we ‘understand’ them either by recognizing what they are or what they stand for.  For thought to be formulated completely as a thought, a judgment (such as ‘this is such and such’, ‘he did that to me,’ ‘what I said then was not right,’) must be made about the situation.  Of course, most of the time we stay within the realm of the tokens or what in our minds they represent and not formulate judgments.  But the very fact that we recognize something, or read an image as a representation of something is sufficient to say thought is present.  That’s when we automatically are within the ‘realm of thought’.  Every other mental activity seems to be a derivative of this.

It’s extremely hard to remain at the level of pure sensation or impression without translating into what it represents, or at any rate, without recognizing as something.  In fact, the view that we are ever merely aware of anything, be it a sensation or an impression or an image, without naming it, recognizing it as such and such can be challenged.  Indeed, any investigation in this area presupposes that thought has already occurred.

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What is thought? My initial answer is that thought is a response (most in verbal) of our past to anything the past responds to, be it something that is remembered, that is perceived or imagined, and so on.  What precisely is the nature of this response?  It normally our saying to ourselves, things, mostly as judgments, say, this is good, this is bad, this is ugly, I feel guilty, I am sad at remembering my mother, and so on.  Sub-vocal movements occurring as self-talk have a lot to do with thinking, so far as I can see.  But then the sounds we make to ourselves as words or the images we ‘see’ have to ‘mean’ something.  It’s is in that meaning world, we have the thought world, i.e. the world of intentionality.

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This leads to another major question that needs to be addressed and resolved, viz. whether or not there is such a thing as consciousness which can exist without any content such as ideas, thoughts or images, and perhaps can even be experienced as such.  And that brings forth the further question of what constitutes experience.  There indeed seem to be moments in experience, which only can exist in recall, when we seem to just be, or be the awareness, or just be aware of the various parts of the body or of feelings, without necessarily naming them.  And the naming seems to occur immediately, as soon as we reflect on it or recall it, which cannot, of course, be done without memory, i.e. using past concepts or experiences.

However we resolve the questions, one has to inquire into what precisely is the significance of the idea of consciousness without content.  Why does it really matter?  Or why would one say one thing or the other: that consciousness can be without content, or it cannot be?  What hangs on it?  In order to really solve one’s psychological or other problems, it seems as if one has to deconstruct the mind to the point of unpacking at some content of the mind, especially the content involved in a problem. 

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The Build-up of Thought: The self in the form of the ego is inflated or deflated by the build-up of thought.  Every word of appreciation, praise, insult or condemnation, indifference, scope for inferiority or superiority, any of these and many others add to the many occasions in which thought is active to weave its web around the ego to boost it or deflate it, all of which, of course, is governed by the principle of search for pleasure and avoidance of pain. 

The pleasure principle is facilitated by the fact that experiences have an emotional tinge or shadow to them, which is either pleasant or painful.  Let’s call these charges.  Of course, there are multitudes of experiences with little or no charge of either kind attached to them.  And those don’t come into play later in our lives. ((See also below the discussion about Story Line, in The Destiny of the Self.)

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Mental Debris:  Experiences past or present not only leave traces behind in terms of impressions, but also fragments with varying degrees of coherence or integrity.  These fragments thrust themselves into consciousness at various times in the day or at night and are experienced as thoughts of free-association, images, day-dreams, fantasies, dreams and what not, or woven into some of these phenomena.  These fragments may have no apparent cause or motivation to occur, and may be quite random.  After all, we are at the bottom at the mercy of movements of the brain of which we may never fully understand, or over which we may never exert any sort of control.

Thus the power of the Unconscious cannot be underestimated, for it generates not only these various phenomena, but is also behind obsessions, prophesies, and such other.  Although these are significant in their own right as mental phenomena, they do not occupy the focal point of our discussion about the self. 

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The associations between sounds or images (and, therefore, ideas) are practically infinite.  There is absolutely no way to track them all or order them in any fashion. This was especially evident when I was just lying down in bed this morning.  The imagery is not just from daily life, but also from all the numerous videos and TV and movies I watch.  And they are multiplied in various combinations ad infinitum.  And yet we manage our daily life with some amount of order, because the needs, desires and necessities of life dictate it.  We think of order in life and such, but look at the possible combinations, just like dust particles coming together and moving apart.  Life comes and life goes!

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The Creative Space:  In the mental theater, many of these elements interact with each in an apparently random fashion, be it free association, problem-solving, or sheer creative scientific or artistic endeavor.  There is a ‘space’ within the mental theater where such activity takes places, although this is not limited to the conscious mind.  In fact, what takes place consciously in the mental theater may only be a miniscule part of the total activity of the mind, as much of it occurs subconsciously, especially when the conscious mind is not interfering, ceases its effort or when a person is asleep or in a reverie of some sort.  In other words, what we know of the conscious mind and its activities is only the tip of the iceberg. But unfortunately we have no way of addressing those elements, except when they surface into consciousness, when we develop proofs, apply techniques, and provide explanations, thus elaborating on what has surfaced.[3]

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There is also an internal ‘mental space’ between ourselves and our emotions, such that we can give ourselves the opportunity to reflect a heat of the moment in a calm atmosphere and reconsider our responses to the situations on hand. 

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Intentionality: By virtue of intentionality, remembered images, impressions and experiences act as virtual objects or persons or situations in my mental life, and past events can reoccur as if they are happening now.  The past is not most of the time seen as the past. The past events are in some sense ‘frozen’ in time, but they come alive as ‘real’ in my mental life.[4]  We become ‘engaged’ or ‘involved’ in the experience. This is generally the case whether we remember an event we have experienced before, or imagine a future scenario, or just imagine any situation. The events have the quality of ‘as if’ they are happening now.  And we respond to them emotionally or with different attitudes. 

The ‘mental screen’ or the ‘theatre of the mind’ on which the dramas are played has the body with its consciousness and speech mechanisms, together projecting the mental object either in the form of an image or plain sound (inaudible), and the image and sound meaningfully each represents a real object to the watcher.  The ‘subject’ only exists as the watcher without itself being projected on the screen.   However, what was a previous subject can at the present moment be reflected as a remembered event, thus being aware of the point of view of the subject (his or her biases, attitudes, feelings and prejudices) as well the object of the previous thought, or to put it simply, we can remember what we thought a moment ago, and even think of the point of view from which we thought something (or said something). This reflection and reflection on a previous reflection can go on ad infinitum.[5]

One could say that the intentional world is the mental world.

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There is a constant interplay between my thoughts and experiences and what I feel inside my body.  This is all part of the theater of the mind.  In it there is no cut and dry division between my body and my mind. The conscious self is something that is generated through our thought faculty.  What is the self in the first place?  The sense of ‘I’, what I think I am, what relates to other people as a person, what defends itself, offends, worries and is depressed, gets angry at, and so on. 

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The intentional world, in other words, is the thought world, and in that world there is the ‘I’ and what I think, and what I see as the world around me.  The ‘I’ is part of the each thought that occurs when we say things to ourselves. 

Our mental world is the intentional world, it’s our world of meaning.  Our mental world is our world, which includes ourselves, our thoughts about it, our feelings, our doings, our desires, our fears, our relationships with people, our beliefs, attitudes, and so on.  Our talk within ourselves, the sounds we make within ourselves and ‘hear’, and the images we ‘see’ in our mind’s eye are the primary fabric of our mental world.  But by themselves these are meaningless.  When our past plays on them, or responds to them, ‘sees’ or ‘hears’ them, they acquire meaning.  It is these units of meaning we can call thoughts.  We are not mere passive recipients of these sounds and images and do not somehow use our past as a mere lens to view them through.  We are also producers of these sounds images, as well as interpreters of them.  These tokens thus acquire significance because we view them. 

It’s not that there is an abstract thinker thinking these thoughts, but a concrete ‘I’ who is the active past looking at itself as the other and responding.  This world is divided as ‘I’ and ‘That’ and through the division our mental life is perpetuated. 

Although thought is a mental unit, it too is composed of parts which may be called concepts.  Even proper names act as concepts, as long as there are applied even to the same object or person at different times or places, or in different contexts. 

How does this relate to the idea of the past acting on elements of what are remembered or presented to us at the moment?  The assimilation of the present into the past is a matter of varying degrees.  It can remain at the level of a pure datum (one could call that a pure sensation -- although it’s doubtful we are ever aware of pure sensation or sense impression without any recognition  -- but if we are, then that would count as pure sensation).  On the other end of the spectrum, we have the most abstract and general concepts such as being, thing, time, universe, etc., many of these being higher level concepts.

So, any datum that is recognized is automatically turned into a concept.  But the mechanism of translation doesn’t stop with merely recognizing it.  More often than not, it turns it into a judgment, a thought, such as “It’s beautiful,” “That color is red,” “He is running away,”  “How do I do this?” and so on and so forth.  Notice that all these statements are composed of concepts which are stringed together as judgments through language, with its own semantics, syntax and grammar. 

Thought has a relationship to the thinker.  But what is the thinker?  It’s just our past with all the relevant accumulated knowledge that takes an active role and contemplates what is thought about.  That’s when we have the subject-object dichotomy.  There is not one thinker for all time, but a thinker each time there is a certain interest prevailing with a knowledge associated with it which strives for ‘fulfillment’, since each thinker in relationship to what it relates to or looks at, finds itself inadequate in relation to that and strives to fill that gap between itself and what it would like to be.

All this is a somewhat intra-subjective objective discussion of thought, and the substructure which underlies the mental theater in which I and my world interact with each other, producing the mental dramas of various sorts. 

Mental Lag (Pull or Drag):  Perhaps because of our identifications (See p.79  below, for a fuller discussion of this topic), when we are experiencing things and events, such as another person saying things to us, or our being involved in a intense discussion, or our being angry with someone, the experience doesn’t end abruptly then and there.  It has a pull or a drag which keeps us in the same track of mind until the ‘energies’ are discharged or dissipated.  This is a fundamental reason why there is the self-dialogue or self-talk (see below for a fuller discussion), and why our minds keep chattering on.  The chatter is how our past background is responding to the remembered situation in the form of my thinking about the situation remembered.  I think this is the reason why and how past identifications lead to the notion of ‘I’. When there is no such pull or tension from our experience of the past moment, i.e., when we are totally relaxed, the thought process, and the self-talk also slow down, as does the self or ‘I’.  [6] ^[7]

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Thoughts and ideas both use concepts.  And they both involve prior experience and, to some degree or other, memory.  Without memory or previous experience, we can think about nothing.  ‘Thought’ and ‘idea’ may at times be interchangeable, but generally thought and idea are both products of thinking.  There is such a thing as thinking.  And this is done by our past knowledge acting through our minds, using our intelligence.  Intelligence is not anything that can be defined in a specific way.  It’s just a faculty or ability to think, imagine, solve problems, and so on.  Ideas are the tools that thinking or thought uses to solve problems, project into future, plan and so forth.  Given this preliminary discussion, it would be best to move on to the main topic of our discussion, i.e., the self.  It should clear that there is no self or the sense of self without the past and thought being somehow involved. 

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But then when we talk about the theater of the mind, we talk about the conscious mind.  Just as we don’t know what underlies intelligence, we don’t know what underlies consciousness.  It’s not an entity.  It’s more like a property of thoughts.  Thoughts can be conscious or unconscious, or subconscious.  I have no doubt that we do think thoughts without our being explicitly conscious of them, just as we solve problems, usually through thinking, even during our sleep, without our knowing, i.e. being conscious of the process.  More often than not, we are startled and pleasantly surprised to find a ready-made solution thrown at us to a problem we have been struggling with before, which may have been going on for days, months or even years. This idea is consistent and compatible with the notion of thought as a response of our past to the present. 

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When I am talking about thought, I usually have conscious thought in mind which is in the form of a judgment, a question, an observation, a remark, an expression of surprise, a plan, an expression of feeling, a desire and so on and so forth.  Ideas are the means through which we represent the world to ourselves.  Outside of the ideas, we really have no clue as to what the world really is.  The world we have is constructed from our past experience through our mentations.  When I say this is my world, I am saying this is my idea- or thought- world.  In it, I stand in some fashion apart from what I think about.  The rest of the discussion about the self could now be carried on in picture of the theater of the mind.  

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The ‘I’ in my case, at least, is more than my past or certain elements of it taking an active role and responding to various things.  By virtue of its sub-vocal speech, the ‘I’ along with its past knowledge, memories and experiences, is acting in such a way, that it enables me to feel it is ‘I’ who is thinking, feeling, responding, deciding, willing and projecting and so forth in my world.  Of course, for good reasons, I can abstract myself from myself in reflection and further reflection and get the idea (or illusion, if you will) that I am the pure subject, separate from everything I am aware of.  I am at the center of my universe. 

It is through my memories that I form the notion of myself as a separate person,[8] set apart from other people and the rest of the world. And I am the one to relate to everything and other people as well in the world. 

Through reflection on my doings and performances I form an image of myself, and in so doing I always tend to perpetuate myself, preserve myself and protect myself.  I engage in comparisons, offenses and defenses, as well as pride and superiority or inferiority. The result of these comparisons is my ‘ego’ operating, playing games, seeking power, and even forcing my will on others, if I find the need for it, and so on and so on.  Because my outlook is always from ‘my’ biased point of view, I can hardly ever be totally objective, impersonal or impartial. 

Time and the Self:  There cannot be a self without time.  How does, psychologically speaking, time come into being?  Without thought there is no time.  What is thought, then? How and when does it occur? Both thought and time stem from a replay initially of some past experience, or a current experience lingering even after the situation in which it occurred has past.  The recall of the past experience, pleasurable or painful is the beginning of thought and that is instantly transformed into desire or future expectation of pleasure or if it was a painful experience, an attempt to avoid it, or dread it, at any rate.  These movements are what time is fundamentally. The self is automatically created when there is a pleasurable or painful experience, as identification positively or negatively with either is the self.

Thus through reflection and comparison I form the notion of time and myself continuing in time, with a past, present and future.  Because of my sense of time, I worry about the outcome of things, for I am concerned not only about my welfare, but also what will happen to me in future.  So I plan ahead and try to mould the future to suit my interests and requirements.  Through fear of non-being, I fear death and long for immortality, even if I know full well that’s a totally unreal expectation and demand on life.  I look for unknown powers, such as God, for protecting me from death, disease and old age, as if that were possible.

When I am deeply frustrated in my activities or relationships, my reflection launches me into a search for meaning of the things I do, of my relationships, and indeed, as well of life itself.

The world is my world simply because I am identified, positively or negatively, with it and with the elements in it, in some fashion or other.  If someone I am identified with is hurt, I feel hurt (maybe not literally, but hurt nevertheless).  Same goes with other relationships such as love, hatred, fear, anger and so on and so forth.  To get my way in the world, I even invent morality, passing righteous judgments on others, and excusing myself or feeling guilty when others point my own wrongs. 

But when the identification is absent, those elements of the world that may be there ‘objectively’ has no interest for me, they do not really form part of my world.  Then, in some sense or other, what happens out there, happens here. 

Each thought I think is an attempt to change the world to my liking, and look in some fashion to the world, seeking some value or other, which I have acquired from my past.

 

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[1] This discussion is continued in the chapter on “Self-Awareness,” on p. 53.

[2] In Indian Philosophy there is mention of name and form: In Hinduism, the phenomenal world is the world of name and form (the world of Maya). In Buddhism namarupa (name and form) is the term used for the mental and physical components respectively of the human being.  In both Hinduism and Buddhism transcending the world of name and form is also realizing Ultimate Reality.  Perhaps this may be the reason why image (form) and sound (as speech – name) are the sources of thought.  I shall revert to this idea in the chapter on the “Self and Enlightenment”. 

[3] This leads us to suspect that not only all sorts of mental activity maybe going on below the conscious level, but also that thoughts, in whatever form, can go on the physiological or brain-cell level and we are more or less victims to them, even to the point of behaving like automata, like in somnambulism, etc.

[4] These, as most such descriptions in the following, are, of course, made from my point of view, and one could call these subjective if they are looked at from other persons’ point of view; but if they are also seen as true by others, they would have the status of being inter-subjective.   

[5] A major exception to this is the ‘computational’ thought.  Although the situation which prompts such thinking is itself intentional, within the thinking itself it is a computational process, much like a computer’s, considering various possibilities and their consequences.

[6] Sri Ramana Maharshi, from what I read, saw this in some fashion or other.  He saw it in the form of thoughts dovetailing into each other creating the notion of the ‘I’.  See David Loy, Non-duality: In Buddhism and Beyond, Wisdom Publications, 2019.

[7] See below (p.45) for a fuller discussion of mental chatter.

[8] As UG would say, “Man is memory.”