The Thought Forge 🔨

LIFE ON URTH - Episode 109

I Am, Therefore I Am

Thoughts are at the center of the human experience.

“I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum) is René Descartes’ famous conclusion to the mystery of existence. While it isn’t very useful without context (you could as well say “I am, therefore I am”), it is one of the most popular philosophical quotes. It sticks because we all know how important thoughts are.

Thoughts are interpretations of the world, of other people, and most importantly of yourself. A tale, a voice narrating your experience, like David Attenborough giving a heartbreaking backstory to a fox mum. How easily are we manipulated into wishing a gruesome death to an innocent rabbit? If I had David Attenborough’s voice narrating my experience, I’d definetely never be bored.

Thoughts are so important because their interpretations have a big impact on your world. Take these two examples:

I suck at math and will certainly fail the exam tomorrow.
Math is difficult, but I’ll give it my best shot.

It’s easy to see the difference between these two interpretations. A difference not just in feeling, but in resulting behavior! Through our actions, our thoughts impact the world.

It takes effort to reliably escape the grip of thoughts and their constant interpretative blabbering, even for just a moment. Consciously practicing mindfulness is difficult and unintuitive at first, which is why many people remain shackled to their inner voices.

What Mindfulness Reveals

When starting to pay closer attention to experience, thoughts can be wrongly seen as intruders. We can observe how they just appear, all by themselves. No chooser, no choice. They build up under the surface until they’re suddenly illuminated as bright banners of inner language across the mental sky. When we remain unidentified with a thought, it quickly changes and fades back into that space beyond the horizon of experience.

When I first learned to meditate, I developed a certain mistrust and even anger at my own thoughts. How dare they just appear in my mind and undermine my self-worth? I didn't want any of that!

Of course, this turned out to be just another thought to cease identifying with.

I like to think (lol) that it’s my own voice I hear in my head. Of course, it was never just my voice. It’s shaped by eons of evolution and by a lifetime of experiences. But it’s not an intruder or even something foreign. It’s quite similar to all the other aspects of experience, like vision or hearing - just a different shape made from the same stuff, from the same substance that underlies all of experience. It’s what I call consciousness.

There is more than the individual consciousness I have access to. But my consciousness, this bright circumstance, is the only thing I can ever be in touch with. It’s like my private screen for experience, where everything runs, and of which everything is made.

Why is the inner world private?

That isn’t even a question to ponder if you’re a nihilist and believe consciousness is a worthless side product of brain activity. In that case, I don’t know what to tell you. Go for a walk in a forest, look at the night sky, and come back when you can admit that life isn’t meaningless.

But if you’re actually interested in the mind and practice curiosity towards the entirety of mental events, this question becomes a beautiful mystery: If everything is connected, why don’t you feel my toe when I stub it at the corner of my bed?

This is a weird feature of life: my inner experiences, including my thoughts, are completely private. And thank god that the discussions I have with myself aren’t broadcast for everyone to hear!

You might believe that you are shaped by the conversations you have with other people, by your interactions with them, by your relationships, by discussions and disagreements, and by the love between. Of course, all these things do shape you. But the most impactful relationship is the one you have with yourself. You two hang out 24/7, after all!

There’s an endless dialogue between your inner voices. Even though they might mostly “sound” like the same voice, they represent different parts of your mental architecture. You play and inhabit many roles in your life, and their voices can disagree, even fight and suppress one another.

When was the last time you were hangry? Snickers landed a hit with their “You’re not you when you’re hungry!” campaign because it’s so relatable. You really feel and act differently when you’re hungry.

You also think differently when you’re hungry. It’s like a spirit of hunger has possessed you, taking control of your mental space and actions. Even though it’s slightly different for each of us to be possessed by such spirits, there are also commonalities. Those are the mechanisms of the mind that I am most interested in and that, as a species, we’ve been fascinated by for a long time. The characters in our oldest and most popular stories can be viewed as such shared spirits.

Don’t waste your life, tho

Cognitive behavioral therapy offers a specific, modern way of thinking about these spirits. It has fascinated me since the first day I worked in this field, and I love it because it’s so elegant and powerful: the cognitive behavioral triangle.

It suggests that our whole being in the world consists of only three parts:

Feelings (emotions and sensations)
Thoughts (cognitions)
Actions (behavior)

Feelings include emotions as well as bodily sensations because they’re not really separate. You feel your emotions in your body, just like temperature, pressure, or pain. We tend to confuse our thoughts about emotions with actually feeling them. This is a big danger to mental health and something I wish I had been taught in school.

Lastly, there’s your behavior. Usually, this is the part that matters most. It’s a common misunderstanding, and often a secret hope, that if only you learn and understand enough about yourself, it would be sufficient for lasting change and improvement. But it isn’t. Real change is change in behavior; everything else is just preparation. Please don’t waste your life (and time in therapy :p) preparing!

The idea of the triangle is that these three parts influence and regulate each other, mostly in recurring patterns - reacting to similar situations in similar ways. Even a simple example can neatly illustrate the dynamics between thoughts, actions, and behavior:

I see a traffic light turn red right in front of me. (Sensations)
I think, “Shit, I’m already late for my appointment.” (Thoughts)
I feel stressed, anxious, and ashamed. (Emotions)
I keep checking the time every five seconds and drive very close to the next car. (Actions)
I think, “I’m going to come up with an excuse.” (Thoughts)

Here is a useful exercise: analyze a difficult situation by sketching out each of the triangle's three parts separately.
Where did you notice change first?
How did that influence the other two areas?

Summary: What’s a thought?

Thoughts are mental events, often including inner language. They’re a series of symbols, adding up to bigger, more complex symbols. Fundamentally, they’re not different from other perceptions. They all appear in consciousness.

All inner language is thought, but technically not all thoughts are inner language. Phenomena like fantasies, memories, sorrows, worries, and other imaginations are all adjacent (or probably even precursors) to thought. They’re made of the same substance and serve the same function: Consciousness, interacting with the brain to predict and navigate the world.

As a human, I can’t escape my capacity to represent events conceptually. Thinking is built into me, and our civilization rests on it. But it also keeps me up at night, fuels insecurities, and produces guilt. If I don’t pay attention, I automatically circle the same topics with my inner voices, helplessly, to no end.

Your brain is a thought factory by design. It’s biased towards mistakes and inadequacies because that’s what helped you survive in the jungle. I say “you,” not “your ancestors,” because you’re the tip of an ongoing process spanning eons.

Consider this: All your ancestors reproduced successfully, an unbroken chain going back to a single cell fighting the cosmic entropy. Your thoughts are an inheritance of all that, shaped into their particular form by your learning experience.

As self-stabilizing patterns in time and space, organisms continuously create borders in a previously undivided environment. With our ability to think, humans have pushed this to an extreme. Thoughts allow us to slice up the world into tiny conceptual slices, like a scalpel. This incredible utility, however, is easily matched by the danger of confusing your thoughts with reality.

Thoughts are symbols — they’re maps, not the territory.

In my recent project The Realm, I tried to compress all this into a mythological narrative: Check out The Thought Forge.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself” -Rumi

🎧 Song of the Week: Raio, sophie sôfree - Cuñaq

Now I’d love to hear from you!

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Was there an idea you found particularly intriguing?
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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

Can’t wait until next week’s edition? Check out my essays.