Are Our Thoughts Our Own?

The normal mental process begins relatively simply. We hear something and accept it in our minds, and eventually we repeat the thought to others and thus, a thought-form moves through the mental atmosphere and touches many minds. Teilhard de Chardin referred to the mental force permeating the world as a noosphere, and like the atmosphere, it girdles the earth and carries mental energies as forces which act upon those who are able to receive these thought forms. Each individual has a particular developed capacity to tune and to receive various thought forms and this creates the bed or framework of the thoughts held by most people in the world at any point in time. We can thus say, with some amount of certainty, that most thoughts we entertain in our minds, and those which we communicate to others, are not really the product of our own individual thought-process, but are thought-forms received and re-transmitted by us.

There is, however, a potential “tipping point” where thought may become independent of this receiving and regurgitating process, where thought can develop internally beyond what is directly consumed through reading, hearing, or any other means of thought-reception. This tipping point is the time when the complexity of the mind has developed to such a degree that it can begin to entertain, weigh, examine and even synthesize new formations from ideas that may be contradictory to one another on their face.

There is a huge debate about whether “artificial intelligence” will someday bring about a ‘self-aware’ computer or robotic brain. This debate about AI is analogous to the process we can see within the human being, and thus, resonates with us as a serious consideration. The framing of this debate is that as we provide more and more data, and develop more and more complex algorithms for the computer to process the data, it reaches a state where it goes beyond the limits of raw data-crunching and can begin to make independent connections and associations, and extrapolate from these newly found relationships to something entirely outside the scope of the programmed responses, thereby becoming both self-aware and capable of independent thought.

The principles are active within the human mental development as well! As individuals become more capable of what we may call an ‘open-minded’ approach that can look at and receive information about an enormously complex number of data points, and can shift the standpoint away from mental ratiocination to one of silent observation, correlation and receptivity, a complete shift of the mental process can occur. This has been reported by individuals who are considered to be geniuses in human history, who have not only gone beyond their peers in terms of their specific areas of focus, but who have also described the differences in their mental process that took them outside the framework of being simply receiving and transmitting units for ready-made thought-forms.

The Mother observes: “It is only gradually, very slowly, through the movements of life and a more or less careful and thorough education that you begin to have sensations which are personal to you, feelings and ideas which are personal to you. An individualised mind is something extremely rare, which comes only after a long education; otherwise it is a kind of thought-current passing through your brain and then through another’s and then through a multitude of other brains, and all this is in perpetual movement and has no individuality. One thinks what others are thinking, others think what still others are thinking, and everything thinks like that in a great mixture, because these are currents, vibrations of thought passing from one to another. If you look at yourself attentively, you will very quickly become aware that very few thoughts in you are personal. Where do you draw them from? — From what you have heard, from what you have read, what you have been taught, and how many of these thoughts you have are the result of your own experience, your own reflection, your purely personal observation? — Not many. … Only those who have an intense intellectual life, who are in the habit of reflecting, observing, putting ideas together, gradually form a mental individuality for themselves.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pg. 154