Have you ever wondered where your thoughts come from? At any moment, there is a thought in my mind- verbal, non-verbal, a sound, something. There’s something at the top of my mind.

Propagating the thought forward is easy- one of my middle school teachers made a game out of it. You’ve got a minute to make a list of as many words as you can, starting from the given word. There must be a meaningful link between every two consecutive words. The one who gets the longest list wins. This is a “let the brain jump” game. I was good at this game, and used to come up with long lists of words with wacky connections. Others made shorter lists, but there was a theme, or a direction.

I tend to take 5-minute breaks at work. I walk out the office door, and stroll in the sun. A minute of walking, and I find myself in the middle of my stream of conciousness.

Between the time when I wrote the last paragraph and this one, I walked over to the kitchen and grabbed a glass of water. Here’s the thing- I left the desk hoping that I’d find myself in a stream of conciousness. At the moment when I got up, however, I was convinced that I wouldn’t. I expected a single thought- “I need to manifest a stream of conciousness somehow, and I won’t be able to”

Here’s what happened instead.

  • I’m too sleepy, maybe thoughts die down when I’m tired

  • Let me go into my room and walk around a bit, maybe lie down

  • I see chocolate wrapper , and threw it in the dustbin.

  • Possibly: Make a habit out of keeping surfaces clean, haha!

  • I see farsan on the counter, grab a fistful.

  • Hmm, I’m eating loads of BAD snacks these days

  • Sodium levels high, my face is becoming puffy, I should drink more water

  • The friend who was here an hour ago wanted a SNACK. Huh. Lucky guy, eats unhealthy shit all day and has no health problems

  • I should eat something *juicy*

  • I eat a dried prune, and wonder if the bag is sealed. I keep a cup containing a half-eaten pickled egg in the refrigerator.

  • I should drink some water. Wow, I keep using up cups, now the shelf wont have an empty cup

  • I find an empty cup, fill it up with tap water.

  • Tap water, I wonder if I should filter it

  • I drink the tap water and am back at my desk.

The whole sequence of actions was on impulse- I saw stimuli, which led to actions, which exposed me to more stimuli, which led to thought, which led to action, and so on.

Interestingly, there was a parallel train of thought going on-

  • At work, I end up doing things that I didn’t intend to originally, going down rabbit holes and forgetting what I initially set out to do, I wonder if I should write about that.

I’m going to do one more excursion, to generate another example. Hopefully, that’ll help me recall my general insight about these streams of thought.

Its October 9, 24 hours since I typed the previous sentence. I’m back.

My general insight about these streams of thought is this- most of the time, there is atleast one thing going on in my life which I will keep thinking about. Like a “strange attractor”, all trains of thought have one station that they go to- the thing that I’m worried about. Once I get to that point, the name of the game is speculative problem-solving. Endless replays of ifs and thens, contingency plans for situations that are never going to happen. If you let me out into the wild, without anything to distract myself with, this is what I’ll be doing.

The promised land, for me, then, is a state where my mind, when left to itself will jump to random ideas, or be still.

If you play around a little bit with your thoughts, you might observe patterns similar to the ones that I have.

It is very rare for a thought to manifest out of “thin air”, in isolation. Most trains of thought are tied to a stimulus in the environment, something captured by your senses. An itch on my shin might trigger thoughts which have me thinking about a sad memory. Scratching that itch might trigger a completely new chain of thoughts which goes through- reels that I watched on facebook half an hour ago, how I relate to those reels, to a friend, to a comment on one of his posts, …..

These trains of thought aren’t isolated. Sometimes, there’s thoughts in the background. For example, today, I remember repeatedly thinking of the phrase “Gore Vidal” while I was thinking of something else.

I find it interesting to trace these chains of thought backward to reach the external impulses that initiate them. With some effort, at the least, you’ll be able to find these “floating” nodes in the chain- flashes of activity in your mind which verbally, or nonverbally are indicative of some thought or some idea. Its hard to enforce order on this chain- and for good reason. In the absence of a true authoritative record of the order in which my mind went through thoughts, the order that my mind can recollect becomes my record. With some reasoning, and memory, its possible to impose partial order. (I definitely thought about A before I thought about C, but did B come first or C?). However, the source of the chain of thoughts, and the logic that seeks to recall the order in which they occur, both belong to the mind, which makes things complicated. In any case, this backtracking effort makes me aware of what I’m thinking about, of the fact that the train of thought was not deliberate, and that it has no real purpose.

This also becomes a form of meditation. (I don’t like the word, I will never admit to meditating, I’ll play language games and call it “being quiet”). When I am trying to be quiet, I consider an instance of my mind wandering to be a tear in my fabric of calm. When I trace the path it took to a root (usually an external stimulus), it feels like the tear is gone. Of course, after a few moments, the mind wanders again. By repeatedly going through these cycles, the mind can become still. Sometimes, these attempts will fail, and the mind will keep wandering with a vengeance.

A slight variation of this is me trying to sleep. If my mind is racing when I lie on my bed, I trace my thoughts backward, and try to construct a chronology. Its funny- the cogntive effort of doing so makes me sleepy. When I reach a point where I can’t remember what the previous thought was, I fall asleep.

The easiest way for me to be quiet, is to first not be quiet. Eliminate all distractions, and sit down in a comfortable, isolated environment, without a time constraint. This allows me the luxury of letting my mind do whatever it wants. Sometimes I deliberately think about something that is on my mind. Sometimes I let my mind run on its own, jumping across connections between ideas, converging towards my strange attractors- mostly my current worries, but sometimes catchy songs, and rarely, nonsense chants. I am likely to start yawning and fall asleep- and I allow myself to. There is no rush. After a while, I start trying make my mind calm, and begin to backtrack my mind’s wanderings. Given the luxury of time, these efforts slow down my recurrent thought loops, and I run out of things to think about. This might take several hours. But when it happens, the “surface of my mind” becomes still. This is a nice state to be in.

A detour- I imagine the mind as a surface of water. It can be still, but every stimulus that disturbs the surface sends out waves, each wave-crest representing a thought. In the absence of more stimuli, and no deliberate thought, those waves will die down, slowly, and the surface of the mind becomes still again.

Serendipitous creativity, where ideas or beauty spontaneously jumps out of my mind, without new stimuli, is very rare. (But I distinctly remember one occurence of this phenomenon. This was a few years ago). However, when the surface of the mind is still, I have experienced serendipitous joy- a tune, sunlight or the wind on my skin, warmth, the shape of clouds. Sensory experience becomes mere sensory experience- or as some mumbo-jumbo Gurus call it “being in the moment”.

This is a good way to examine my state of well-being. If stimuli are making my mind race, especially towards my “strange attractors”, I’m probably worried, and not happy. The less this happens, the happier I am. Deliberate thought is an exception- because it eliminates unconcious thought chains. I strongly suspect that “keeping busy” forces deliberate thought, prevents the mind from converging towards the “strange attractors”, leaving you in a better state of being than if you weren’t busy. The best state of being, however, is one where the mind is at peace, or is spontaneously joyous by default. Given that most trains of thought run toward worry station(TM), the absence of “the next thing that I’m worried about” will give me this state of being.

Now I’m devolving into things that I don’t have good answers to. One way to solve the “next thing that I’m worried about” problem, is to solve the problem in the real world. This quest usually makes you climb levels of something similar to Maslov’s hierarchy of needs. This is a good idea, to a degree. The flaw, of course, is that there’ll always be a “next thing”. There might be long-ish periods where there is complete satisfaction, no “next thing”, and no thoughts racing towards worries. But a dissatisfaction always appears on the horizon, given enough time.

The other way to solve this problem, is to solve the problem internally instead of externally. Instead of making the mind calm by taking actions in the real world, make the mind calm by being oblivious to the real world. This is easier said than done. To be pragmatic, this should not be done- for example, if the “next thing” on your mind is hunger- not taking action in the real world to resolve this will make you starve and die.

I’ll offer one strategy that has a positive track record. First, understand that any unconcious thought that races towards strange attractors is very unlikely to produce useful knowledge. On the other hand, this thought does not “feel” nice, and makes me restless. So, if I were able to, I should get rid of unconcious thought. Thought loops are not an essential, they’re harmful. Because I haven’t renounced the world, I cannot be equanimous to all outcomes. So I will analyze possibilties and try to make good decisions. However, when I catch myself worried, I can replace my thought train with deliberate thought. Do I want to think about this right now? If yes, then let me actively, logically, properly think about it, and try to get a useful answer. If not, then know that I’m not going to remember any of what is going on in my mind right now. If any of the imaginary problems that I am planning for in my head occur, then I will deliberatly think about them then, and ideas produced in that delibration will be strictly better than any “solutions” that I make up in my head right now. This awareness doesn’t completely get rid of loops, but it does reign them in somewhat. Traceback is also a useful tool here- when I realize that the “big problem” that I’m thinking about popped up in my head because of some completely random stimulus, I become aware that I’m not conciously thinking about the problem.