Thinking About Thoughts

When I go out walking, I think. Lately, I’ve been stuck on our political nightmare. The other day, while walking my three mile route around the “plantation”, I was thinking, about thinking, which led me to think about the relationships between the thought processes and politicians. While trying to sort out these hard to understand relationships between thinking and politicians I began wondering whether thinking begins with internal stimuli or from external stimuli. Perhaps this came into my mind because I recently read somewhere that Voltaire said, “The first philosophers, whether Chaldeans or Egyptians, said there must be something within us which produces our thought.”

This idea doesn’t actually hold up when considering a politician's thoughts, which I think baffles most of us at times. Their thinking usually stems from ego, favors, pay-backs, promises, contributions, votes, etc., which is really a mixture of both internal and external stimuli. For example, when I see President Obama or Senator Reid on TV, I immediately begin thinking about how my America is being kicked to the curb, that’s external provocation. Which immediately brings to mind various genres of thinking, and thoughts; fear, hate, disgust, plus other stuff I won’t describe here.

In this respect, it’s valid to say that emotional relationships can be built upon thoughts and imagination; obviously, deep emotions can be quickly provoked by a bunch of politicians in Washington. It was because there are so many possible “relationships” that exist within the many kinds and uses of thoughts, or thinking, that I began wondering about the nature of thoughts; like, just how many classifications of thought are there and how might thoughts in so many thought processes fall into more than one genre, e.g., “thought process”, “thought pattern“, “thoughtless” (a liberal identity), “thoughtful” (a conservative process), and so on. So my thought process for thinking about thoughts made me think I should drill down. “Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid…”, Bertrand Russell.

First, I looked-up the definitions of both “think” and “thought” in my 1970 edition of Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary and was totally overwhelmed by the definitional implications of the word think. Maybe Bertrand Russell was wrong; and maybe politicians have a valid excuse. So I must admit, I had to retreat from Webster’s positions on thinking to my own thoughts about thinking and thought, in which case I thought, “I gotta think about this!” So, I started looking into thoughts, which is easier to deal with because thinking is now over.

Thoughts! Think about this: there are billions of people on this earth, and most likely more than half are awake and thinking at any given moment in time, except for politicians. So we’re talking about billions of thoughts here, but little political thinking, and that’s not even thinking about animal thoughts. This is heavy-duty thinking, which produces a lot of thoughts. Well, except maybe there are other issues related to the liberal thought process, e.g., "Belief is when someone else does the thinking." (Buckminster Fuller, 1972). Since thoughts are the past of think, I suppose I could think of thoughts as mental exhaust, trailing behind thinking, you know, the residue of thinking. And this raised the question, “exactly when, in the process of thinking, does thinking become a thought?” It's tricky, because with liberals, thinking does not always lead to thoughts and this could leave you hanging.

I’m not sure I really understand the relationships between thinking, as a mental process (or a series of thoughts) and a thought (past of think); I find it hard to grasp the concept of an isolated thought, a thought. Like, does a think become a thought? Just kidding. But consider the statements, “I have a thought!”, or “don’t give it another thought!”, in both cases there is at least an underlying concept of a thought. That or we are simply not saying it correctly: should we say, “I have some thoughts” or “don’t even give it more thoughts?” Realize, though, we are using the concept of a series, one thing following another, which implies single, isolated thoughts, one following another. I‘ve been trying to pull down an isolated thought from a series, but its like trying to find a meaning from a single word in a sentence; it leaves my mind begging. But, I was rather intrigued by the idea behind this thought, because I thought I had found the riddle of the liberal thought process.

My final conclusion is: there’s no such thing as a thought. The only way the idea of a single thought can even be considered is to apply it to the liberal thought process, if there is such a thing. Conceptually, since liberals don’t appear to be capable of connecting thoughts, they can only collect them into “disconnected think." In order to understand this, one would have place their disconnected think within parenthesis (using set theory), and then call it a thought process, even though it wouldn't make sense.

Now consider the many, many kinds of thoughts: serious thoughts, fleeting thoughts, passing thoughts, amusing thoughts, exciting thoughts, stimulating thoughts, dirty thoughts, frightening thoughts, disturbing thoughts, wonderful thoughts, religious thoughts, political thoughts, complete thoughts (conservative), incomplete thoughts (liberal), rational thoughts, irrational thoughts, considerate thoughts, inconsiderate thoughts, rash thoughts--okay! I know, enough is enough. Realizing that there are so many ways to think about thoughts, you have to know there must be some interesting aspects of thoughts to think about.

If you were able to actually track thoughts, you would immediately see that they are a constant, though not consistent; thoughts are jumping around like crazy, from one classification to another, and back. Good thoughts get hit on a lot (next date with Alice) and we tend to keep them foremost in our mind (man, was she wild or what). The good stuff. Unfortunately, there is always a downside; the depressing, bad, political thoughts keep coming to mind: news coverage of President Obama, or Nancy Pelosi. And, you never know what power hungry politicians may be thinking..."What luck for rulers, that men do not think." - Adolph Hitler.

My conception of thoughts, for the most part, resemble flat-lines that are subject to non-routine spikes, returning to flat-lines, then spiking again, as stimuli comes and goes. It’s just a mental picture I have of our thought processes. The classifications which cause the flat-lines are simply low adrenalin thinking; the spikes are caused by high adrenalin, or maybe testosterone. Each thought type has a color: the flat-lines tend to be dark colors, where the total absence of thought is black. For example, black or bark brown could indicate a liberal who is trying to think. It of course would be reflected on the far left side of the flat-line, while spikes travel to the right into the brighter colors, like orange and red. Red would certainly be the highest thought process, and this might be indicative of conservative thoughts; but, it could also be a Muslim's radical, genocidal thoughts as they are also derived from intense thinking.

Using my concepts, let’s have some fun with a quick thought exercise. We are all familiar with thought exercises, you know, we’re thinking all the time. Well, maybe there are some exceptions. But, anyway, let’s do an exercise: first, we want to think of a globe, let's use the earth, and we’re high above it. Now, think of thoughts as a mass of electrical impulses covering the earth, which will represent the billions of impulses from the thinking minds that cover the earth. We’re up in the ionosphere, in about the middle of it, 125 miles or so, looking down on this mass of quivering thoughts, and thinking. We can see the colors of the different kinds of thoughts, and thinking that’s taking place. Wow! What a color spectrum; and this spray of colors is identifying all the thought processes taking place at every instant, and the colors are constantly changing in kaleidoscope fashion. We can see where the various thought processes are actually concentrated. See! Over there! Those in the Muslim countries, streaked with large areas of yellow, orange, and red; totally different from the mostly pinks, pastel yellows, and tinges of orange we see in the U.K. Oh, but there, you can see a couple of little red spots around London. Now, if you look close, you can see Washington D.C. Yeah, rather hard to detect, so little color; nothing serious going on there. Wow! Look at the San Francisco area. What the---? What kind of color is that? There's some strange thoughts and thinking going on there. Stop! If you followed this exercise to this point, it just goes to prove, you can be easily led to follow the thinking of anyone.

We can invent all sorts of ways to stretch our thoughts, twist our thoughts, and thinking, and amuse, or torture, ourselves. You must admit, “some” thoughts and thinking by others may just be convincing enough to grab you, and you'll be a follower. And I use the word, “some”, because we know that realistic and meaningful thinking isn’t consigned to everyone.

The greatest thing and the worst thing about thoughts: they come first in bringing about a reality--nothing was ever done or made by man that was not first a thought; but, they also arouse emotions, and bring forth such motives as, kill.