Thoughting vs. Thinking

Surely thought is the most powerful force in existence. You can use thought to achieve full aliveness or to effectuate your own death. You can use thought to create a new story or song or product. You can use thought to redirect the course of your life and the lives of others. Everything we create or experience is rooted in thought.

But thoughts are more numerous than the stars in the sky and by their sheer volume they often overwhelm us. They exist inside and outside us. For much of the time we are barely treading water in a non-stop torrent of thought that pollutes our stream of consciousness.

They are real and important, these thoughts. Yet they have only the power we bestow on them. From the thought-stream we pluck a particular thought that is utterly lacking in significance and using the light of our attention we give it life and power. Perhaps we turn that thought into an app that gets millions of downloads. Or perhaps we turn it into a delusion we use to create fear and separation and misery.

It is our thinking, our ability to bend thought into different thought, new thought, that determines the true value of thought and thus the quality of our life. Via thinking we are able to evaluate a thought as true or false, significant or meaningless, beautiful or hideous. Thought is nothing more than input data that is processed by our thinking to generate the output that becomes our experience of life.

Once we accept that, in and of themselves, thoughts have neither value nor significance, we can simply allow them to pass before us like cartoon characters on a movie screen. Thought becomes an endless source of entertainment. And what’s even better, we have the capacity to pluck a thought from the stream and reshape it, by the application of our thinking, into something beautiful.