If you pay attention to the process of thinking, you’ll see that your thoughts simply appear in consciousness..

In fact, you can observe that you no more decide the next thing you think than you decide the next thing I say—I mean, what are you going to think next? You don’t know. Yet your thoughts determine what you want, and intend, and do next. Your thoughts determine your goals, and whether or not you believe you’ve met them. They determine what you say to other people, and what you don’t say. In fact, thoughts determine almost everything that makes you human.

Now most people feel that they are the thinker of their thoughts, and therefore their author—and this is one way of describing the feeling of self. Subjectively speaking, as a matter of experience, there is no thinker to be found in the mind, apart from thoughts themselves. There’s no subject in the middle of experience. Everything (including thoughts, and intentions, and counter-thoughts, and counter-intentions) is arising all on its own, and the feeling that there’s a thinker in addition to the flow of thought is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you’re thinking—it’s the feeling of being identified with a train of thought that’s passing through consciousness, in this moment.

But if you pay attention to how thoughts arise, you’ll see that they simply appear, quite literally out of nowhere. And you’re not free to choose them before they appear; that would require that you think them before you think them.

So here’s the question:

If you can’t control your next thought, if you can’t decide what it will be before it arises, and if you can’t prevent it from arising, where is your freedom of will?

— Sam Harris, Waking Up, Part 2 — Thoughts Without a Thinker

https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/82D7DC

A little provocation of some more thoughts that you can’t control, from Sam Harris. We’ll come back to this a little later.

Deeper, The 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 Hole

There are many 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 holes. 𝚃𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙾𝙽𝙴 𝙸𝚂 𝙼𝙸𝙽𝙴. Which did you choose? Or do you feel that your 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 hole chose you?

Whichever 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 hole you find yourself in, you’re 𝙽𝙾𝚃 𝙰𝙻𝙾𝙽𝙴. We’re all in these holes together.

One way to look at it: 𝙻𝙸𝙵𝙴 is one deep 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 hole. You can choose to digress amongst or just deliberate the many branches you come across while digging your 𝙻𝙸𝙵𝙴. You can diverge into different directions at any moment in your tunneling, or you can combine your digging with that of another and collaborate on a tunnel together.

While you’re digging away, do you find your thoughts tend to center around your own digging or do you consider the digging of others and their 𝚁𝙰𝙱𝙱𝙸𝚃 holes? Do you ever consider where your thoughts reach more of a central mass? Do you ponder this daily?

Think Deeper

While we think we’ve covered the subject of independent thought more than enough here in our short time publishing these essays—we feel that we have another function to bring to the table, and that function is a two-pronged mindfulness approach.

Humans have traditionally depicted thought as bubbles in our myriads of cultural imagery. Is this depiction inspired by the ephemeral qualities inherent of each? Perhaps, though, what if it could be symbolic of more?

What if we took the depiction one step further, and defined each bubble into channels or buckets through which to monitor and adjust one’s equity of thoughts?

Pod, Population, and Planet

𝙿𝙾𝙳 includes yourself and any of the immediately dependent lifeforms within your circle: your partner, roommate, family, or your dog(s).

𝙿𝙾𝙿𝚄𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 is your community or tribe, or your actual network. In the general spirit of web3, a lot of your effort and thoughts should run through this channel. If you find your thoughts and efforts in this bubble more than the others, you could potentially be doing great work in whatever space you are involved. If you’re noticing you don’t have many thoughts in this bubble, perhaps you need to rethink your web3 or even worldly approach. We should all ponder how to help our populations as much as our lives afford for such things, should we not?

𝙿𝙻𝙰𝙽𝙴𝚃, self-explanatory and arguably thee most important bubble. Your thoughts should drift to or through this channel as often as possible—or at the very least (and for extra credit): your concerns / mindfulness for the 𝙿𝙻𝙰𝙽𝙴𝚃 bubble should be funneled alongside the thoughts that land in the adjacent bubbles.

Generally most human thought stagnate within the 𝙿𝙾𝙳 bubble. This isn’t inherently bad, though if that bubble contains the majority sum of the human’s thoughts and remains the majority across time, perhaps that human isn’t doing well, mentally or culturally. It’s certainly acceptable to have days where the majority of your thoughts and efforts go to your 𝙿𝙾𝙳—and one shouldn’t be ashamed of this or shamed by others for this. Efforts and thoughts definitely need to focus on and sustain the 𝙿𝙾𝙳, but in this essay, we are talking about the equity of one’s thoughts, and to attempt to steer the equity as much as possible.

If you spend time thinking about yourself and your 𝙿𝙾𝙳, that’s great, but consider the amount of time and the bubble that your thoughts and efforts are developing under.

Consider dedicating equitable time whenever possible amongst the 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 defined thought bubbles—even if that time is spread over the course of a week, or month. You can even try to segment your schedules for the day or week by these areas of focus.

With 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺, the bubbles are typically illustrated in the sizes in the graphic above, this is deliberate. The size of the bubbles in the 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 graphic are meant to symbolize the communitarian service and the platform that the 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 thesis is attempting to prove and establish. The middle bubble of 𝙿𝙾𝙿𝚄𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 is of great significance to 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 as the movement is meant to be cultural and communal(first and foremost)—with the end goal of 𝙿𝙻𝙰𝙽𝙴𝚃-wide distribution, the middle bubble of 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 is illustrated with the largest caliber and focus. More concern is required for our community and the established culture within. If the thoughts and efforts within the 𝙿𝙾𝙿𝚄𝙻𝙰𝚃𝙸𝙾𝙽 bubble are insufficient, our planetary movement will fail to prove itself valuable and it will fail to gain traction, and 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 may never get to correct the timeline corruption.

Take out something to draw on and attempt to draw your own personal three 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 thought bubbles adjusting the sizes in accordance to the frequency in which you have associated thoughts. Which bubble is the largest for you and *is it the bubble you naturally feel that you want to spend more time and effort within? If not, what steps will you take to shift and moderate the equity of the bubbles?

*As an experiment, try drawing the bubbles daily, according to your days thoughts and efforts. Are there any trends appearing over time?

You Are Not Your Ideas and Your Ideas Are Not You

Recall the introductory text of this essay, the quote from Sam Harris. Do you disagree with it? If so, why? If you understood the intro passage as it’s intended, this is the second prong of the 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺 mindfulness approach:

Our ideas do not belong to us, they come to us.

Imagine your mind as an FM antenna and it’s tuned to the frequency 87.3. All the signal being broadcast over that frequency are ideas being received by your antenna and it’s all you can think about, or rather, the only signals the pattern recognition system in your antenna can even parse or recognize.

Do you write off all other frequencies in existence simply because 87.3 is the only thing intelligible to you and your antenna? Or rather, do you attempt to improve and expand the reception from your antenna such that you can now tune into other adjacent frequencies—even if your antenna isn’t inherently proficient with them? Doing so would require you to expose your antenna to the noise of the other frequencies over time and allow for your pattern recognition to attempt to orient itself to the true signals being broadcast.

This is exposing your antenna to all the general frequencies of life, the collection of all human experience and knowledge, and ultimately: the 𝙰𝙺𝙰𝚂𝙷𝙸𝙲 𝚁𝙴𝙲𝙾𝚁𝙳.

If your thoughts are not your’s and are truly out of your control, your ideas arising in conjunction cannot be attributed to you either. You may have assembled your frequent thoughts and ideas into concepts or constructs and stored them as contents of your consciousness, but you didn’t choose those thoughts and ideas as they came to you.

What does this all mean? It means you are free. You don’t have to hold onto the half-baked or bad ideas you’ve acquired or come to believe as part of yourself or originating from yourself. You can relinquish these ideas back into the ether whence they came. You are also free to not hold onto the ideas that were passed onto you through culture and religion. The fact that an idea has persisted decades, centuries or more doesn’t mean it is inherently good. The better iteration of the idea may have just been overlooked when implementing the cultural and species wide firmware updates over all that time.

If someone you trust tells you that you have a bad idea: Oh well, let it go. Let the idea go, it’s not your’s, and take the sentiment at face value: it’s a comment on a bad idea—not on you. If you never hold true ownership or assume authorship of the idea, you can let the criticism fall directly on the idea and not on yourself. You may say, I thought the bad idea was good to begin with so that means I am a failure; this is simply not true. We all carry bad ideas in our heads until we are able to allow new information in to help us realize we need to update the model or the instance in our minds with new updated parameters, or better ideas. The quicker that you reject the concept that you yourself are authoring the ideas that arise in your mind, the quicker you are free to let criticism fall where it actually needs to: on the ideas themselves.

If someone tells you that you’ve brought them a good idea: you did well in surfacing a good idea to others—now keep going. Take that sentiment at face value, as well, you brought a good idea to light: it’s a comment on a good idea. It’s still not your idea, it’s an idea. A good idea that just so happened to come across the frequencies you are tuned to—and after comparing or relating it to your contents of consciousness, you recognized it as potentially valid or good, and passed it along accordingly. You held the right combination of ideas and thoughts in your mind in parallel to elicit a great idea; generally an expected output of containing a wide range of thoughts and ideas in the mind simultaneously and having the vision to assemble them into a useful and cohesive construct or model.

If you didn’t happen across the good idea first, or assemble it in your mind with the rest of the contents of your consciousness or experience and knowledge, someone else would have: the next person who was open to receiving it or who had the proper experience, knowledge, and idea frequencies dialed in would’ve found it in your stead.

You are not your good ideas just as you are not your bad ideas.

You are free to simply be a receiver of ideas from the ether.

Just as quickly as an intrusive thought or even a malformed idea enters one's mind; those who objectively recognize the origin of such things as coming from a permanent otherness are free to swiftly reject the pseudo-importance or false value that comes from one's entirely imagined authorship of thoughts.

And the quicker you shed the weight and volume of any inaccurate mental models or bad ideas that come across your spectrum, the better off you and the rest of culture and society will be in the long term.

Are there phrases that can act as a mental firmware reboot? A clearing of the mind's slate of attachment to the condition that is oneself for a brief moment to finally suspend the infinite loop?

—𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺, 2022

𝙿𝙾𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝟶𝟶𝟸: 𝙿𝚄𝙽𝙺: Mindware: 𝚃𝙷𝙵𝙰

This weeks poster, 𝙿𝙾𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝟶𝟶𝟸 is available as an open edition now on Zora. Available now through October 15th, 2022.

Just 0.01Ξ for those who follow @bias or @punk on Farcaster—click on the Presale mint option.