“The sea drowns them out with its wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise,
 and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confu

Where Thoughts Come From (part 1)

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2021-07-07 22:30:06

“The sea drowns them out with its wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused.” — Rainier Maria Rilke

This series on the origin of thoughts presents a constructive answer. I’m not sure why others are not answering this question or why other approaches to understanding thought don’t provide us with more opportunities to ask the question. The topic is large and I’ve been working on it for a long time. This series could become fairly long but I expect I will wrap it up when it gets too complicated. It does get complicated and that can be a good thing, but in this series I want to focus on the basic ideas.

We’re built not to ask, not to care, and not to see where our thoughts come from. Because we don’t see where thoughts come from, we have the illusion they come from nowhere. They seem to be spontaneous, and that leads us to believe they are our own. We have the similar illusion that our identity has come from nowhere, which we interpret to mean that it has come out of ourselves, that we have spontaneously arisen. This is the user illusion, the illusion of free will.

We are built to act with a sense of autonomy. If we have the sense of being governed by a long chain of rules, situations, obligations, and consequences, then we’d have great trouble responding to situations. We need to see things simply in order to act within a context we understand and in accordance with the rhythms we perceive. Our minds need to start with a simple game.

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