Why doesn’t anyone study thoughts today like physicists study their particles?

genep

The answer is supremely simple; so simple that there is no ego simple enough to understand it.

The answer: If we studied thoughts the same way physicists study their particles there would be no physics or anything else to study. This might sound supremely insane but only to the intellects or egos that think (they think) that they are sane.

The study of thoughts in meditation tells the student that the same thoughts the mind works with in its sleep dreams are the exact same thoughts it works with when it thinks it wakes up in the morning for its life, maya.

The joke of modern civilizations: even though the thoughts of our dreams are the exact same thoughts that make up our “life” we cannot accept that they must all be the same: dreams, or, at best, dreams inside of dreams.
If this is too simple to understand then let us turn to physics that tells us the EXACT same story.

In physics we learn that although molecules appear to be totally different from the atoms that make them up the differences are pure illusion because the atoms in molecules are EXACTLY the same as the ones that are not in molecules.

If a physicist would claim that since atoms are totally different from molecules then atoms have to be unreal and molecules real he would be considered insane by his academic cohorts. AND yet for over 5000 years even the greatest intellects of civilizations have been doing just that. They have been claiming that our sleep-dreams are unreal compared to life – EVEN THOUGHT THE THOUGHTS OF OUR SLEEP-DREAMS AND “LIFE” are EXACTLY THE SAME.

Most anyone can study thoughts. When the mind slows down in meditation even a relative fool, like me, can figure out what is supremely obvious:
1: thoughts cannot be controlled
2: thoughts cannot be observed (the mind is the thought – so it can never “observe” a thought that it is. IN other words, “observing” is just a thought, the mind)
3: there is an utter-VOID between thoughts. (This is the same utter-VOID between physics’ quantum-levels.)
4: The mind is not what it thinks but what it thinks it thinks. (thinking is just a thought)
5: The mind ALWAYS thinks it is AWAKE. ( A “lucid-dream” is just a dream inside of a dream. And a sleep-dream is just a dream inside, or outside, another dream we call life.)

And for over 5000 years even the greatest intellects of civilizations have been thinking that they were/are awake when OBVIOUSLY they had to be dreaming that they were/are awake.

And if all this is utter rot then which genius can prove that there is a duality so that the thoughts that make the mind think it is awake when it is sleep-dreaming are totally different from the thoughts the mind needs to think it woke up in the morning.

-- just thoughts

KonradKorzenowski

An interesting analogy.

Canute

genep - Welcome to the discussions. I'm with you on this one. Thoughts neither arise nor cease. Not sure I agree about the 'utter void' but no matter.

genep

The utter-VOID: think of quantum gaps that particles have to routinely pass through but can never/ever enter. IN this quantum-gap there is no space or time – there is no universe inside or even outside – it is an UTTER-VOID. (ie the Unified Field )

When the mind slows down in meditation the same utter-VOID surfaces.
IN meditation we have a thought AA and then the next thing “we” – the mind -- knows is that we have a memory of a thought mem-ZZ with this same utter-VOID between mem-ZZ and the original thought AA.

The mind then assumes that there must have been a (virtual?) thought ZZ between the AA and the mem-ZZ.

Between thoughts there is this same utter-VOID in-which/ from-which comes the “virtual-thoughts.” The way these thoughts work is that there are no thoughts only memory of thoughts … when there is no memory only thoughts.

Actually it is very simple to explain this utter-VOID between thoughts. The mind can never observe the thought ZZ because it is the thought-ZZ .. thus the non-duality cliché: the mind is what it thinks, which is wrong because it should be: THE MIND IS WHAT IT THINKS IT THINKS. This is because there is no thinking because thinking is just a thought, the mind.

If this is all insane then what about the universe that exists but cannot exist because it has no anti-particles that it needs not to exist even better.
-- just thoughts

neurocomp2003

would you like someone to keep sticking electrodes in your brain for days or years or even keep you in a MRI machine? Its normally considered unethical...unless your willing to volunteer, then you can head over to your nearest psych lab/neuroimaging center and offer your services...physicists have it easy cuz their medium aren't considered individual organisms. Imagine if it was unethical to examine a particle for fear of the so called butterfly effect...boy would we get nowhere in science =].

loseyourname

Cognitive psychologists study thought, just as fervently as particle physicists study particles.

James R

You might also want to do a web search for "meme" or "memetics".

Canute

I feel that memes, memetics and psychology are not relevant here. Genep is talking about thoughts as directly observed, not thoughts as conceptualised by a third party and worked into theories.

genep- it still seems wrong to me to characterise the background to thoughts as an "utter void". It seems to suggest that there is nothing underlying or giving rise to thoughts. This seems to imply nihilism. Or is this not what you mean?

genep

If they did then they would be telling us the VERY obvious:
1: there is no such thing as thinking.
2: the mind is what it thinks it thinks, like the universe and everything in it.
3: physics has not come up with anything that was not known to sages around the Indus River who studied thoughts, the Supreme Science, over 5000 years ago.
4: there is absolutely no difference between physics' compounds and our sleep-dreams because both are just a collection of thoughts.
5: the exact same thoughts that make up our sleep-dreams make up the mortal-dream called life.

-- just thoughts

LeonhardEuler

Actually, the mind probably doesn't always think it is awake because it probably doesn't always think (for example durring sleep while not dreaming, after death, or before birth).

As for your point in general, I think your idea that "the same thoughts the mind works with in its sleep dreams are the exact same thoughts it works with when it thinks it wakes up in the morning for its life" is possible, but far from obvious or proven. It is true that the only thing we can observe directly is our own thoughts, but to say that the thoughts of sleep are the same as the thoughts of being awake is not really justified.

It is still plausible there is a world that exists independent of my perception of it. If I were to die, it is still possible that you would continue to exist, even though I would not percieve you anymore. However, it seems most probable that this is not the case for people I meet in my dreams: once I stop thinking about them, they are gone forever. This is the possible distinction between waking thought and sleep dreams : in one case the mind percieves objects that exist independant of its perception, while in the other case the objects do not have such an existance.

genep

utter-VOID; If you try to understand it with thoughts it is a brick wall.
ONLY TO THE MIND is it an UTTER-VOID. But only because the mind is the nothings called thoughts and this UTTER_VOID is the EVERYTHING that the nothings called thoughts can never be.

The only way to try and explain it is the context of non-duality, Advaita, that has come down to us from the study of thoughts, Supreme Science. Or you can learn about it from the rare individuals who explode with JOY, Kundalini, that literally pickles their mind, like Buddha.

It happened to me: after this explosion of unfathomable JOY there is absolutely NO DOUBT that this life is an illusion, maya. Now, thoughts come and hands write for this maya, JOY that I AM.

IN over 50 years of VERY obsessive intellectual seeking there is only one absolute I have found: the limits of spirituality – of all religions – is the ABSOLUTE SAME: the unfathomable JOY of thoughtless-silence.

This void is UTTER because it is like an ocean of unfathomable JOY in which the universe is not even an imaginary drop. IN THIS VOID there is absolutely no thoughts – it is like the quantum-gaps which the thoughts called particles can never enter.
This utter-VOID (of all thoughts) is this JOY that is so unimaginably intense that it makes literally everything else utterly meaningless. It is a universe-vanishing JOY.
IN other words: this utter-Void is the Reality of dreamless-sleep.
We are ALL this SAME Reality of dreamless-sleep but our mind wake-up in the morning to think otherwise.
With (its) death the mind does not have to wake-up to think it thinks otherwise.
-- just thoughts

sneez

1: there is no such thing as thinking.
2: the mind is what it thinks it thinks, like the universe and everything in it.
3: physics has not come up with anything that was not known to sages around the Indus River who studied thoughts, the Supreme Science, over 5000 years ago.
4: there is absolutely no difference between physics' compounds and our sleep-dreams because both are just a collection of thoughts.
5: the exact same thoughts that make up our sleep-dreams make up the mortal-dream called life.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
1: what faculty did u use to make this claim ? (if you could eleaborate appart from your 1st post how thinking does not exists)

How some minds are superior to another ones in therms of IQ, ethics etc.

3: what sages are you refering to, can you back this statement up?

4: Thoughts do not arrise in the brain spontaniously. To think one needs certain quantity and some quality of information. Thinking starts during interaction with external objects. There is no learning without thinking. (appart from imitating and memorizing, but not new information is created though this process).

5: Could you ellaborate further how you support this conclusion?

thanx sneez

genep

When the mind slows down in meditation there is a time when the mind is a thought “AA” which means “there is no thoughts.” The next thing that happens is that there is a memory of a thought like – mem-ZZ.

THERE IS AN UTTER-VOID between the thought AA and the mem-ZZ – the mind then fills in the gap with “there must have been a (virtual) thought “ZZ” in this VOID because I have this thought mem-ZZ.”
ONCE YOU OBSERVE THIS AND FIGURE IT OUT THE laughter might just kill you.
If we try to figure out what is happening with the mind: the mind is actually working with memories of thoughts and not the thoughts themselves. But memories are thoughts.
The simple answer to the VOID that created the thought “ZZ” is: the mind could not be aware of the ZZ thought because it was the ZZ thought so the best it can do is assume the ZZ thought existed because there is a mem-ZZ thought. And thus the non-duality cliche: the mind is what it thinks it is.

The mind works like a movie. A movie is made up of pictures that when running appear to be continuous. The mind works the same way. The continuity of thoughts is an illusion. And the VOID-between thoughts is proof BECAUSE when the mind slows down:
1: there is no way the next thought can be predicted any more than we can predict when sub-atomic particles are going to appear out of nothing. And if one-thought cannot be predicted then nor can all the others that appear to be connected.
2: this VOID is such that there can be no connections between the one thought and the next. This becomes every OBVIOUS when the mind slows down. IN other words, the connection between thoughts is pure illusion. i.e. thinking is an illusion.

These “observations” are so mind-blowing that I find it comical that few people, if any, use mediation to make these rather obvious mind-blowing observations.
There is nothing subtle about this VOID. It might take a long time to figure out what is happening – but that is only because it is so mind-boggling that it is difficult to put it all into its obvious and super-simple perspective.
What helped me is the movie-analogy. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the movie is a perfect-analogy, after all – both are pure fiction.
-=-
As far as justifying that sleep-dreams and being-awake have the same thoughts.
If they are different then why doesn’t the mind know the difference?
My sleep-dreams are routinely more real than when I am awake. So much so that I have to think I’m awake when I’m sleep-dreaming, and yet when I get up in the morning I would be a fool to think that life is anything else but a dream; after all my sleep dreams are never as surreal as what is going on in the world with its suicide-bombers etc.

But physics tells us the exact same story: molecules and their atoms are utterly different but physics tells us that they are all the same: just neutrons. The universe is made up of nothing but neutrons; think neutron stars. So too the thoughts of sleep-dream, atoms, might appear totally different to our awake thoughts, molecules, but just like in physics they have to be the same, thoughts -- the differences are illusion.
-- just thoughts
[Edited by Nereid: fixed mismatched tags]

genep

Dearest sneez -- it all comes from the study of thoughts, the Supreme Science, that was originally practiced 5000 years ago by sages around the Indus River. They gave us the non-duality of the Unified Field, Atman.

There are absolutely no authorities with this Supreme Science.
WHEN the mind slows down in meditation anyone can make observations. YOU DON”T need authorities on this study because it is very simple: if you cannot observe what is happening when the mind slows down then it is utter BS.
So fundamentally there is no BS in this Supreme Science because everyone is their own judge and jury. The joke is that they all agree.
I can tell you about the universal observations but every intellect on earth will claim I am insane. And I can tell you that you would also be insane if you believed me -- until you observe for yourself. And then it might just blow your mind – like it did mine.

What the sages discovered about this Supreme Science five-thousand years ago: when the mind slows down ALL minds work exactly the same. And thus they all agreed: the mind is what it thinks it thinks.

To echo a modern analogy: when the movie slows down they all work the same, so too with minds.
-- just thoughts

loseyourname

Oh, you mean people studying their own thoughts, not thoughts in general.

1. What am I doing when I formulate thoughts? Whatever it is, why should it be wrong to call it 'thinking?'

2. How does the mind 'think' if there is no such thing as 'thinking?'

3. Sages in the Indus valley could quantitatively predict the behavior of subatomic systems? Could they build a space shuttle and fly it into orbit? Could they build the computer you are typing on?

4. There is no such thing as a "physics compound," so what on earth do you mean by this?

5. The exact same thoughts? Why are the rules of each world so different from one another then? Heck, I don't even know that there any 'rules' in the dream world. I do know that I cannot fly or spontaneously shift my bodily position halfway around the world without moving and that people don't spontaneously morph into other people in the living world (all things that have occured in my dream world).

Two things:

1) You don't seem to be presenting these as 'just thoughts.' You seem to be presenting them as obvious gospel truth that the scientific world is idiotic for not acknowledging.

2) What is a thought if there is no such thing as thinking? Who or what creates the thought and how do they create thought without thinking (given that one definition of thinking would seem to be simply the creation of thoughts)?

hypnagogue

This thread is on thin ice. genep, you are not doing a very good job of making clear what you are trying to say, the logic behind your arguments is dubious and at times apparently self-contradictory, and some of your claims are even blatantly false. For starters: What is the relevant methodology that has been applied to the study of particles but not thoughts? In what ways are the thoughts of dreams similar to the thoughts of waking life, and how is this relevant to your argument?

I'll give you a chance to respond to these questions and the ones posed by loseyourname, but if you cannot do so in a clear and coherent fashion, then there will be no point in continuing this discussion.

Canute

Yes. We can know nothing about other people's thoughts other than what they report.

I think Hypnagogue has a point here. I agree entirely with genep, but I'm not sure, genep, that you can get away with just stating what is true rather than giving a reasoned argument. A statement that we can all know the truth about our thoughts is ultimately untestable by physics or reason alone. All you can say is that the truth about thoughts can be known and just leave it there as an affirmation. If people don't believe this, and don't believe that testing this assertion is worthwhile, there's little else one can say. If someone does test it, and verifies it, then there's will then be nothing more that they can say either except to affirm it.

Genep's view is what is known as the doctrine of dependent existence or relative phenomenalism. This is often discussed in relation to the idea that our phenomenal universe is an illusion, a collection of epihenomena emanating from an underlying phenomenon, which might be called true Reality or true Self. These epiphenomena, puffs of smoke from the whistle of the train, include not just what appear to us as corporeal phenomena but also what appear to us as mental phenomena. The claim of mystics and meditators like genep is that it is possible to know that these are only epiphenomena, not ultimately real, by direct experience of the one and only phenomenon that is truly real. Some philosophers call this 'non-intuitive immediate knowledge'.

This ultimate phenomenon might sometimes be called God, as Erwin Scroedinger calls it, but generally it is not, since the term is misleading given the current naive views of God outside mysticism. In truth this is 'something' nondual, thus not representable or conceivable, only knowable. In the mystical literature it may be called Godhead, Nirvana, Bliss, Emptiness, Allah, the Tao, Unicity, the peace that passeth all understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven and many other things. Sufi's have 99 names for it, all of which are not what it is.

How do planets move if there is no such thing as movement? How do human beings exist if there is no such thing as spacetime? It seems an absurd idea on the surface. But no meditator says these things do not exist. Rather they say they are mere appearances, which is a rather different thing.

Why would they bother? If you knew you were God would you waste your time building computers, unless it paid the rent?

To Genep dreams are dreams within dreams within dreams. When Neo woke up in the morning inside the Matrix was his world more real than his dreams? When he discovered the reality behind the appearance of reality, the alien battery-farm in which his brain really existed, was this new reality any more real that his old one? How could he know? (This was where the film became inconsistent with the doctrine from which it was derived).

I agree. These cannot be called 'just thoughts,' they are a very serious claim to knowledge. Genep is being overly modest. Mind you, it does seem a bit idiotic that the scientific community, with some notable exceptions, refuse to investigate the claims of mystics. It cannot be just a coincidence that they've all affirmed the same knowledge for five thousand years. To call it a coincidence seems to contravene the principle of parsimony.

I'd say it was innacurate to say that there is no such thing as thinking. It would be like saying that there's no such thing as a mirage. Clearly mirages exist in some way or other. But an analysis of mirages shows that they are not things, just mere appearances. This is what genep is saying thoughts are. (Pardon me genep for speaking on your behalf, thought you might like some support).

To illustrate genep's point about the early mystical writings, which are not widely read these days, here is an extract.

My mysterious cloud of appearances is hard to pass beyond; but those who in truth come to me go beyond the world of shadows.

Bhagavad Gita
Chap. 7

By 'shadows' here is meant all corporeal and mental phenomena. I.e., all the things that make up Plato's famous allegorical cave, including thoughts, and which together stand as a barrier to a knowledge of true reality, which lies not outside the cave but inside it, within each of the prisoners.

Hypnagogue, in case you come back, I agree with you that this sort of discussion is innapropriate here. Might it be possible to have a section where it is allowable to discuss religion, science, philosophy and mysticism all at once, and seriously, without always having to tread so warily?