I recently watched a video that presented an idea that resonated with me – that idea was that thought (and thinking) is a sense.
The video brought this up in reference to the ancient Egyptian symbol of the Eye of Horus. The symbol itself has six parts, each one corresponding to a sense: smell, sight, hearing, taste, touch, and thought. Thought isn’t even the biggest or most important part. I’m not an expert in this Egyption Mythology, but I was and am fascinated by the idea of classifying thought along with other sensory inputs.
The problem is that I’ve always identified myself as my thoughts – maybe you have too. My ego and most of how I value myself and my contributions to the world are based on this premise. My thinking causes me to succeed at work (I’m an office clone, my work is “intellectual”), improves or hurts my relationships (I can “overthink” them, I under-communicate my thoughts), and generally is the source of my own self worth (I’m a smart thinker and can think my way through any problem therefore I’m awesome!).
As I consider my thoughts, I realize that they are mostly spontaneous. They just happen. Generally they are response to the situation or environment I’m currently experiencing. Then as I think them, my thoughts are reflected in my body language and/or my verbal language spontaneously. A person with proper training can easily recognize and understand what I’m thinking without me saying a word – (and you can learn this skill with the Know What Someone is Thinking training here at NextStage).
I don’t always control the generation of my thoughts.
I’ve only just learned to examine them somewhat objectively through a second layer of awareness before I act on them. They come from some unknown place, filtered through many years of life experience and non-conscious lessons and personal mythology – not all of which are helpful, and they just bubble up into existence.
Didn’t Mom always tell you – think before you speak? What she meant was – think about your thought before you speak it.
It seems to me that emotions and thoughts are two sides of a single coin.They are both ephemeral in their nature, they both seem to be spontaneously generated from our circumstances filtered through our histories, and they can both influence the other. A thought can “feel right”, and you can think about or “work through” a strong emotion to explore its origins and reduce its impact.
So if my thoughts and emotions are senses, like vision is, and since I can’t yet initiate or control many of my thoughts/emotions (although I can control my reactions to my thoughts/emotions) any more than I can control seeing my coffee cup on the table when I look at it (although I can choose to focus my thoughts just as I can choose to look at my coffee cup), then who or what is receiving all this thought/emotion stimulus and why? Something has to receive the input, and for a reason. A sensor has to be sending its information somewhere, or why build the sensor in the first place?
If I’m not my thoughts, what am I?
Thought is a sense, and that sensory information is received by that which is our real selves – consciousness.
My goal now is to become more aware of my consciousness, to understand the receiver instead of self-identifying with the information. To do that I will need to become both the observer and the observed at the same time. In a world without mirrors, how do you see yourself?
Very impressive post, Dan. This is advanced stuff. Remember, if thought is another sense and if you can control what you see, hear, taste, touch, … then you can control what you think.
Further, if thought is a sense, and your eyes see light and your ears hear sound, …?
One remaining element is to recognize what the sensory organ is. Your eyes see, your ears hear, …?
And again, great work here.
This causes the analyst in me to want to differentiate between the sensor itself, what is activating or stimulating the sensor, the signal the sensor transmits when it’s activated, and the end system that interprets and reacts to the incoming signal from the sensor.
For the most part, I tend to react to “regular” sensory input without thinking, or at least without significant conscious thinking – hence the comment about thinking about your thoughts before speaking above. Taking reactions like that out of this, I do have thoughts but I don’t consciously generate them – they occur spontaneously. If I use the sensor analogy and assume that a spontaneous thought is the signal of something (?) coming from a sensor (?) that was initiated by a stimulus (?).
To your point there must be another sensory system – and if thought is the signal sent by that system, then it can be controlled. The stimulus will be there, the sensor will still get activated by it and transmit the signal, but the reaction can be focused on, ignored, or changed. I can choose to focus on listening to a conversation happening in a far corner of a room (or ignore it) – but either way the sound will be there and the sound waves will bounce off my ear drum and send the signal to my brain. Similarly I can choose to focus on thoughts or ignore them. Hearing can’t be turned on or off – ears are a sensor – but the signal they send can be tuned out.
So what is the sensory organ? Perhaps that which we call our consciousness? Our consciousness is aware of and sensing the input, thought is the reaction to that input. This makes me wonder what the incoming signal that consciousness is reacting to really is. What is the thought equivalent that sound is to hearing?
And if consciousness is actually another sense, we can’t just be a pile of sensors that react to a bunch of stimulus – there has to be an end system that interprets the signal and reacts – and hopefully learns. There’s no point in having a bunch of sensors transmitting information to nowhere, without anyone or anything to to pay attention to them. That leads me to believe that we are actually focus.
Further, we are no more our thoughts than we are our reaction to a strong smell. Since we can smell, and we also do smell (we give off bodily odors), it’s not a big leap of logic to know that there is a thought transmission system as well – which can also be controlled.
Make sure you clearly differentiate the sense organ from the thing that is sensed, the response to what is sensed, et cetera.
Your eye (the organ) sees light (the thing that is sensed). You act on what you see (the response to what is sensed). …