The Nature Of Thought - Part 1
The Nature Of Thought - Part 1
That which is one becomes two.
Table Of Contents For This Article Series
As explained in the introduction to this article series, our purpose here is to try to better understand the nature of thought, and how the properties of this information management medium influence the human experience. Let’s begin with a basic bottom line description of how thought works:
SUMMARY: Thought operates by dividing the single unified reality in to conceptual parts.
Let’s flesh this claim out with further explanation of the key phrases in that sentence above, “single unified reality” and “conceptual parts”.
The Single Unified Reality
In our everyday life we normally experience reality as being a collection of separate things. This is a useful enough way to think about the world, but it’s not fully accurate.
For an easy example, consider our bodies. It’s useful to label various sections of our bodies with words like “heart” and “liver” and “lungs” and “brain”. Conceptually, such divisions make sense, and are obviously useful to doctors. But in the real world, our body is functionally better described as a single unified entity. The heart, liver, lungs and brain operate as a unit, and are dependent upon each other for their existence.
And the dependency doesn’t end there. Our bodies also require air, water, and food from the environment around us. So while it’s useful to draw a conceptual line between “me” and “the environment”, functionally such a boundary doesn’t really exist. When does a glass of water that you drink become “you”? When does the next breath you take become “you”?
In the environment beyond our bodies it’s useful to create words like “tree”, “soil”, “air”, and “sunlight”, and it’s normal for us to think of these phenomena as different separate things. But functionally, in the real world, the entire environment operates more like a single unit, much as our own bodies do.
In fact, all of reality at every scale is unified by the single unbroken field we call space.
Ok, but what does this have to do with thought?
The Conceptual Parts
The fundamental function of thought is to break the single unified reality up in to conceptual parts.
The noun is the easiest example of this. Our minds create the noun “tree”, which generates an instinctual impression that “tree” is a unique distinct phenomena separate from other phenomena. As we’ve seen, this impression of division created by nouns isn’t wrong exactly, but it’s not really correct either.
What’s happening with nouns is that thought is imposing a pattern of conceptual division on a reality that functionally is not really divided, but intertwined, interdependent, and most intimately united at every scale by the phenomena of space.
The Distorting Influence Of Thought
What the above discussion hopes to share is that when we observe the world around us, and within us, we’re getting a somewhat distorted picture. On one hand we’re seeing reality as it really is, but on the other hand our view is distorted by the patterns of conceptual division which thought layers on top of reality.
If you will, imagine you were born wearing pint tinted sunglasses that you wore every minute of your entire life. Everywhere you looked, reality would appear to be colored pink. You’d be seeing reality with your eyes, but your view would be distorted by the instrument through which you were looking.
Now imagine that every human being was born wearing pink tinted sunglasses, and always had been. In this case, the group consensus of humanity would assume that reality is pink colored, because anybody could see that for themselves. The “pinkness” of reality would be taken to be such an obvious given that it wouldn’t occur to most of us to ever question it.
What would be easy to miss is that the “pinkness” we would be observing would not actually a property of reality itself, but would be instead a property of the instrument through which we were observing reality.
This is what’s happening in our relationship with thought too. We’re all viewing all of reality through the lens of thought, whose purpose is to divide, and so we see division everywhere we look.
Ok I Guess, But So What?
The discussion so far has been pretty nerdy and abstract, so let’s keep moving forward towards a more concrete examination of how thought’s division operations affect our lives as human beings.
Again, the bottom line of this page is simply this…
SUMMARY: Thought operates by dividing the single unified reality in to conceptual parts.