Defeat accepted.
My sleuthhound efforts to figure out the scientific nature and origin of thoughts have fallen flat on its face.
The field of neuroscience sure has acquired a winning vita over the years that boasts of technologies to show which brain structure relates to which function, track the progress of a thought in the brain to show how the prefrontal cortex coordinates complex interactions among various regions to convert perception into action, and investigate intricate neuron circuitry that are involved in decision-making. But ask the experts how information is encoded in the brain, how physical activities like electrical impulses and chemical signals in the neurons lead to mental activities like thoughts and emotions or ask the most elusive question of all – what is the biological purpose of consciousness, suddenly a fog will roll in, viewpoints get muddled, and explanations turn messy.
But if we were to take a step sideways and enter the iffy realm where spirituality, philosophy, and mysticism all hold fair stake, the fog starts to lift and some interesting theories open up, like –
According to Eckhart Tolle, there is such a thing as a collective mind. Many thoughts are not our thoughts really, but they arise in the collective mind as energy fields or energetic entities-like little bubbles floating around. If the little bubble thought form discovers any resonance with anything inside us, for example any form of negativity, then a thought form in the collective mind with an even heavier form of negativity will get attracted to our vibration and take hold in our mind.
Next, thought is a sense, as stated by Teal Swan, the self-made author and speaker in the field of metaphysics. If mysticism could have a face, I think it would be that of Teal Swan’s, the charismatic and eloquent personality who swims in the deep end of mysticism. Throw any sort of esoteric quandary at her and she would tackle it like a boss, but whether she is neo-spiritual or cult material is anybody’s guess. I normally don’t rely on her teachings, even though some of her talks are just outlandishly brilliant, for the simple reason that I find something disturbing about her. But when dedicated sleuthing fails to yield potent results, one has no choice but to be lenient with the pickings, so this is me biting dust.
According to Teal Swan, thought is just an observational response to an external stimulus just like every other sense that we have. We could in fact think of thought as the actual sixth sense and intuition being any faculty of sense having the capacity to perceive something that exists beyond the physical dimension. We can observe a thought the same way we can perceive a smell coming from something. But because our thinking that is inspired by some sort of stimulus from somewhere takes place in our own minds, we perceive the thoughts to be our own. This would be similar to perceiving that we are the creator of every sound that we hear in the world. We are not our thoughts any more than we are our hearing or our sight. They are simply capacities that we have.
Lastly, I have to include the most intriguing Abraham-Hicks, the biggest proponent of the law of attraction. If you don’t know who this person is, let me just say that this entity is as kooky as kooky could get in the spiritual realm, but only in the most kickass manner. If Eckhart Tolle is a gentle breeze then Abraham Hicks is a force of nature. But I call this person ‘kooky’ because for one, ‘Abraham’ is not a person but, to quote, “a group consciousness from the non-physical dimension”. Abraham imparts the infinite intelligence of the source through Esther Hicks, the inspirational speaker and new age author. If that got you curious, please google for further clarity or take my word on it and read on, because who cares who said it or in what capacity they said it as long as what was said is mind opening, yeah?
According to Abraham Hicks, we live in a universe that is vibrationally oriented. Everything that we see is an interpretation of a vibration. So the things that we are calling form, the stuff of our physical world, is our interpretation through our physical senses. We are not the thinker of our thoughts, but we are the achiever of the frequency that allows us to receive and translate the vibration into a thought.
Other awakened spiritualists like Mooji, Adyashanti, Burt Harding, and teachers who have passed on like Ramana Maharshi or Swami Chinmayananda don’t dwell too much on the idea of thought itself, but rather encourage to inquire as to who the thinker behind that thought is.
So in conclusion, the gist of applicable info about thought that can be gathered from the non-scientific realm is that the action potentials generated in our neurons are not self-generated thoughts, but rather potential potentials from an information field somewhere out there, thought is an external vibration, and we are simply energetic beings that tune into these signals in order to paint our reality.
Majority of the scientific community wouldn’t attest to this idea. In fact this is precisely the kind of psychobabble that is ripe for slaughter in scientific forums, but interestingly, there is one area of science, an area that was actively pursued by Einstein and Hawking that seems to support, if not in so many words, the same vibratory concept proposed by the mystics.
One for All:
Physicists have been a curious lot who dare to foray into the far, eerie, and dark reaches of the cosmos to learn how the universe works armed with nothing but their brains, equations, and a whiteboard. They slogged for years and came up with two theories to explain everything about the universe – general theory of relativity that explains the large scale phenomena like gravity and quantum mechanics that explains the universe on small scale like subatomic particles. Both of these theories are experimentally solid and accurate in their own realms, but they don’t go hand in hand. General relativity presents an elegant and orderly universe bound by the smooth fabric of spacetime, but quantum mechanics is chaotic and unpredictable with its, “I could be here, I could be there, but until you actually look at me, I wouldn’t decide where!”.
This probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics being in conflict with the reliable general relativity may drive physicists up the wall, but it is never really a problem in the real world. This is because almost everything in our universe governed by the laws of physics use only one or the other theory to explain its workings – except for the two hulking phenomenons in our universe, the big bang and black holes that incorporate both contradicting theories in their works.
“In the central depths of a black hole an enormous mass is crushed to a minuscule size. At the moment of the big bang the whole of the universe erupted from a microscopic nugget whose size makes a grain of sand look colossal. These are realms that are tiny and yet incredibly massive, therefore requiring that both quantum mechanics and general relativity simultaneously be brought to bear.”
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene
So the physicists strongly believe that there is one elegant and mathematically-consistent higher theory that can explain what was before the big bang, what is inside a black hole, and can fill all the gaps in between to tie everything together beautifully. Why do the physicists want to fix the universe of its chaos and contradictions is truly beyond me, but like I said, physicists are a curious lot and their persistence pushed them back to their whiteboards to find the one grandiose Theory of Everything.
Einstein was one of the first enthusiast to propose the possible existence of such a theory that would bring all of the fundamental forces and particles in nature together, but even though this did not happen in his time, in the subsequent decades numerous physicists and relentless efforts later one theory emerged as a promising candidate to resolve the search – String Theory.
Vibes of the Universe:
Up until not so long ago, atoms, the greek term for indivisible, were considered to be the fundamental particle of all matter. Upon smashing these atoms together, physicists figured out that atoms are after all very much divisible and the misnomer fundamental had to be passed over to protons and neutrons. Thanks to quantum theory, it was found that protons and neutrons further contained quarks, which became the new fundamental, and suddenly the standard model of elementary particles looked like a messy array of bosons, fermions, charges, spins, flavors, and masses. To put everything in place came along string theory, the magical unifier of quantum gravity, which boldly asserted that –
- Deep inside every zero-dimensional fundamental particle is a one-dimensional string-like energy structure that vibrates in different frequencies to give rise to different particles. In other words, all particles of matter are fundamentally different vibrations of the same string. The string vibrating in a certain frequency will give rise to electrons and the same string vibrating in another frequency will give rise to photon. Strings are the bottom-line fundamental of all fundamental particles, which means that strings are not made up of anything but it is what make up other things.
- Our universe has 11 dimensions in total out of which we can only observe the three spatial ones and one for time while the rest of the dimensions are tucked away from our perception within the tiny oscillating strings. Just like how a three dimensional car at the far horizon appears as a dot or a cylindrical overhead electrical wire appears as a thin line from a distance, it is all about the scale and these tiny extra dimensions are infinitesimally small that they are simply ‘compactified’ and curled within our observable dimensions.
- The shape of these extra dimensions determines the vibrational patterns of the strings which in turn determine the physical laws for our universe. It turns out there are an innumerable number of shapes allowed by the mathematics of string theory, which leads the theoretical physicists to claim that these innumerable shapes would give rise to innumerable universes, or rather multiverse, in the neighborhood of 10 to the power 500 universes, each with its own physical laws.
Any theory that can explain the universe on extremely small distance and high energy cannot be experimentally tested because of the enormity of the cosmos and limitations of modern equipments, which makes string theory untestable. Also, it is a speculative theory that hinges precariously on many hypotheses, which in the way of explaining the first speculation ends up throwing five different speculations in the mix. But string theory also stands tall on robust mathematical framework that conversely makes it promising, profound, and hard to ignore.
But testable or untestable, cosmic unifier or a scientific dead end, in light of what string theory hypothesizes, my pesky dots of the past few months seem to pretty much lasso themselves into connection.
