Re: Where do thoughts come from?
Posted: Tue Apr 09, 2013 3:29 am
(MattJ)
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most buddhists dont understand what a thought is. thought is a conceptual mental conscuiousness...the different between a conceptual mental consciousness and a nonconceptual mental consciousness is that the conceptual consciousness makes use of a mental image whereas the nonconceptual does not. these mental images are imputedly known due to movements of the mind which are due to karma, previous moments of mind, and object conditions ie. the environmentMikeliegler wrote:Hello I am new to all this and wonder if anyone can tell me where thoughts come from. I have seen some answers that say they originate from our clinging.
Actually, it goes further than that.5heaps wrote:most buddhists dont understand what a thought is. thought is a conceptual mental conscuiousness...the different between a conceptual mental consciousness and a nonconceptual mental consciousness is that the conceptual consciousness makes use of a mental image whereas the nonconceptual does not. these mental images are imputedly known due to movements of the mind which are due to karma, previous moments of mind, and object conditions ie. the environmentMikeliegler wrote:Hello I am new to all this and wonder if anyone can tell me where thoughts come from. I have seen some answers that say they originate from our clinging.
As I know, it is called learning.droogiefret wrote:What I like about it is if awareness is the thing that allows us to break into existing brain routines, to react afresh, rather than just go with conditioned responses, then the practice of increased awareness becomes a very practical thing to do.
I wasn't saying that. I'm saying the two viewpoints seem to amount to the same thing to me. You can view the brain as thinking all the time and sometimes we are aware of it, or you can view the brain like a bio-computer and when we become aware of a particular function we label it as thought. Awareness being like the flashlight we can direct at the different processes the brain is carrying out.jeeprs wrote:It's important to get these distinctions right. What two things are you saying are 'the same'? If you're saying that awareness and thought are the same, they're actually not. All kinds of creatures are aware but few think. And as I said in my earlier post, you can be engaged in thought whilst not being aware that you're thinking. It suggests to me that they are different faculties. The distinction is not absolute but it is a reasonable distinction nevertheless.
Also the brain doesn't think, any more than the hand plays the piano. Obviously you can't play the piano without hands, but the hand is only an aspect of the process.
As to 'who or what is aware' that is in some ways a question without an answer, which is what makes it so interesting.
I was thinking more learning potential. Is awareness on it's own enough? So that it creates the possibility to learn and change - but you still have to actually do something different. Out of my depth now though so I'll shut up.oushi wrote:
As I know, it is called learning.
Everything is just a flow of karma in different shapes. Thoughts are created out of words that comes from "outside" end experiences that come from outside. So, it is like a river flowing through the mind, where the mind is nothing but the swirl in the river. The real question is, why this process involves awareness? And maybe it doesn't. We think it does, and that is our delusion.
The reason it is a question without an answer is because its primary assumption is backwards.jeeprs wrote: As to 'who or what is aware' that is in some ways a question without an answer, which is what makes it so interesting.
I'm not sure how we can be aware of our brains doing their thing - unless you're talking about that satisfying feeling of 'things slotting into a groove' that we get when we learn new skills. Trying to remain conscious of every step will often lead to failure - even if you've already learned what you're doing. {To prove this, try walking down a busy street making all the necessary judgements -as to how to avoid colliding with other people- consciously , and see what happens } 'Mileage may vary' for experienced meditators, as I get a feeling that it's the sense of 'I v. other' that tends to get in the way.droogiefret wrote:The brain does stuff, like a computer does stuff. And it does it whether I am aware of it doing it or not. I can drive all the way to work without being aware of it - my brain can organize all that and get me there safely. It can do that because it has the neural routines already set up.
I've heard this before here, but can't make much sense of it, as we don't exactly have much direct awareness of neurons firing electrical signals at each other, despite the fact that those same signals can be shown to correspond with our thoughts! In some sense, mental processes seem to be bound up in the nature of the physical events that constitute the living brain. So:droogiefret wrote:So what thought is, is me being aware of the brain doing stuff.
doesn't account for the fact that the subject matter of thoughts is unrelated to their physical contents (i.e. flow of neurotransmitters/electrons/etc.).jeeprs wrote:Thought itself is a material process - it is the actions of neurons and neural networks while processing information and turning ideas over.
I'm not sure what's meant by awareness -whoever's speaking or writing- but I've no idea what happens on a psychological level when we 'learn and set up new neural routines'. It makes sense, though, that not applying awareness to 'brain' activities will leave us with little leeway to change and set up habits. in that kind of way.droogiefret wrote:What awareness is I've no idea - but it seems key to learning and setting up new neural routines because without awareness the brain will just do what it always does.-
The process you describe (which I think I was also describing in my last post) plainly involves more than nothing whatsoever, and more than just aspects of reality that appear categorically distant to it (i.e. matter as conceived of in western culture). Feeling that something that could be labelled 'awareness' or "consciousness" is central to the process of mind might be an illusion; in fact at this point I hope it isoushi wrote:Everything is just a flow of karma in different shapes. Thoughts are created out of words that comes from "outside" end experiences that come from outside. So, it is like a river flowing through the mind, where the mind is nothing but the swirl in the river. The real question is, why this process involves awareness? And maybe it doesn't. We think it does, and that is our delusion.
I post regularly on another forum where most people are atheist and materialist. Many of them would say 'Awareness' and 'Mind'undefineable wrote:
I'm not sure what's meant by awareness -whoever's speaking or writing- but I've no idea what happens on a psychological level when we 'learn and set up new neural routines'. It makes sense, though, that not applying awareness to 'brain' activities will leave us with little leeway to change and set up habits. in that kind of way.
Perhaps a full understanding of materialist philosophy demands some element of enlightenment to the nature of reality . Anyway, I used the s since I can't see how a purely mental process *simply is* a purely physical one - in other words, perhaps I'm an 'epic fail' at materialism . The two parallel processes might be different aspects of the same underlying phenomenon, as I get the impression they might be said to be (more s) in Dzogchen (more of that in a distant future lifetime in my case), but one wonders how much religious faith might be involved in adopting atheist materialism as one's worldview - how much turning a blind eye to one's own apprehending of reality in favour of a unifying theory that irons out the contradictions without demanding a higher level of understanding. There seems even less sense in claiming 'there is matter but no awareness' (and it's interesting that materialist philosophers like Dan Dennett were avoiding such unqualified claims the last time I looked ) than there is in claiming something like 'the meaning of life is that Jesus died for our sins' - The former denies both our common experience and any means by which we might have that experience, while the latter appears as just a kooky flight of fancy. As definitive statements made outside any particular context or perspective, it would be a fair guess that both are gobbledegookdroogiefret wrote:I post regularly on another forum where most people are atheist and materialist. Many of them would say 'Awareness' and 'Mind'undefineable wrote:It makes sense, though, that not applying awareness to 'brain' activities will leave us with little leeway to change and set up habits in that kind of way.
Here we say 'Brain'
It takes some getting used to I can tell you!