Spontaneous Thoughts
Do you ever wonder from whence your thoughts and feelings arise? Do you accept that they come from a physical brain and network of billions of never cells, or do they originate elsewhere?
I awoke this morning with thoughts about mediation.
In the summer of 1970, I was initiated as a Transcendental Meditation (TM) practitioner ( I believe I was referred to as a TM “novice”). Before the session in which I received my secret mantra, I was taught that it had the power to “still my mind” to allow subconscious thoughts to arise to the conscious mind for passive observation. The analogy given was that subscious thoughts are each like a bubble of air which emerges from a sea bed and becomes larger as it rises to eventually burst the surface of your awareness (see the image).
I practised TM dutifully for twenty minutes, twice per day throughout my first year of university as per instructions. Eventually, life got too busy to keep up the practice but I recall many pleasant and peaceful sessions which primed my subsequent lifelong interest in consciousness as a topic of investigation and contemplation.
ECKANKAR
In my late thirties, after the divorce from my first wife, I found a renewed interest in consciousness. Besides reading books on the topic, I joined Eckankar and practised meditation to the mantra “hu” in group sessions on Sunday mornings. I will never forget experiencing the sound of thousands of buzzing bees which is a common experience of Eck practitioners who sought access to higher levels of consciousness (Eck masters claim there are fourteen).
ACIM
During my nine years as a single man (1991-2000), my interest in consciousness grew especially after reading A Course In Miracles and practicing most of the 365 daily medications prescribed in that book. ACIM promised to change my perception of reality, and it certainly did that!
To this day, I still think about the origin of thoughts and feelings. I am less inclined to believe that the human brain is their source but a mechanism to manifest their existence in the mind of beings of consciousness.
Without any scientific validation, I feel my mind (metaphysical ‘self’) to be separate from my ‘physical self’. My waking state feels the same as my dreaming state except that my thoughts are mostly intentional when awake while being more spontaneous and sporadic in a dream state.
In TM, we were taught to allow thoughts “to think themselves” as they arise spontaneously to burst into conscious awareness. This idea was to observe these thoughts while they persist without willfully acting upon them, and then let them go by returning attention to the mantra.
I read the books Cosmic Consciousness by Dr. Richard Maurice Buck and Living With Kundalini by Gopi Krishna during my single years. Both books were found in my deceased father’s library.
Their experiences of those authors with mediation were profound and moving. Those books provide insights into consciousness that few human beings ever experience.
Mind is a curious thing.
I experienced the “runners high” in two occasions when I was a distance runner (18 marathons) and cross country ski racer (about a dozen races). One day on a 15 mile training run, I lost awareness of my body for several minutes. When I emerged from that state, I became aware of my body performing effortlessly (like on “automatic pilot”) while sustaining a “race pace”. Seconds later, the awareness of my physical effort had returned and I had to reduce my speed to a “training pace”.
My cross country experience was similar but different. At the finish line of the 30 KM Muskoka Loppet race in 1978, I realized that I was experiencing tunnel vision which persisted several minutes. My field of vision gradually broadened from looking down a long tube to seeing a normal panorama. I had concentrated so intensely on my skiing technique for about two hours to achieve my best performance over the long wilderness course at minus 20 degrees Celsius. That concentrated mental effort must have produced the tunnel vision effect on consciousness.
I am rambling.
I wrote this piece to share my thoughts and experiences while wondering how many of you have similar stories to tell. Perhaps we should all share out stories and combine them in a book to be called “Unusual Stories from Consciousness”.
I enjoyed reading your “spontaneous” thoughts.
I have had many experiences that involve my mind and external influences that have combined to create the most unlikely and wonderful circumstances. These incidents (and other things) have given me confirmation that our minds are not originators of thought but conduits of the form of reality known as “information” which we then may choose to utilize as per “free will” (I have much to say on that too)
I will give you one example of this odds defying , lightbulb illuminating instance here.
Driving home from Ottawa early this spring, my children (they are 13 and 10) see lines of tubing (but-they didn’t know what it was) running through a forest along side of the road. They (I can’t recall which one) ask, “What’s that all over the forest?” At the very same moment , the radio proclaims “The sap is running and maple syrup producers are busy in our area. You can see the buckets on the trees ready to collect the bounty.” (I am paraphrasing)
I answered the child, “Did you hear what the radio said? Well , it’s the same thing, only some people use that piping and gravity to gather the sap.”
We hadn’t seen anything like that before or after the moment of that radio blurb. What are the odds the radio answered my child’s question at exactly the moment they asked it? I’ll tell you - 100% …now😆
Things like this happen all the time to us, and why? Because we notice them & the more we notice - the more they happen or…Is it just that these things always have happened but now we notice?
I think of our brain as an antenna, that can tune into our higher self and into the super-consciousness that connects us all. If we will allow it.