What is thinking, after all!

I took the whole week off from work, for no single reason. I wanted to disengage myself from the routine office work and get my head refreshed with some fresh ideas and views. Sometime the thinking process gets into a rabbit hole as keep doing the same thing over and over. Also the group dynamics plays a greater role. The world suddenly shrunk to the same people, similar issues, identical responses and expected outcomes. I wanted to break this monotony and hence the break.

The first thing I started to do was what I’d do differently, when I’m out of the typical situation room. Well, in the office environment we all work with active sonar inbuilt within us. We always tend to be sending signals and tend to wait for the feedback loop. Once the response is established, the reactive response starts. The issues as against going towards solution will start going on to a request & response mode with no solution in sight. So I decided to first think, to start a nice topic for my brain to work on. 
After two hours of intense assessment and thinking, one scene flashed on my mind. Usually when I try to establish a new concept or directive I used to tell my son, to think about it.

“Hey it is as simple as that! Think about it!!” – I said to my son on an intense conversation on the importance of math. Apparently I used it many times, one day he got annoyed and protested.

“Why should be me all the time to think? I can’t” – My son replied.

 Now I got it, I decided that best to start thinking on ‘what exactly is thinking anyway?’

As a human being, we all are thought hat we are the only species who have the capability to think. I wanted to take this to my own life. When I was around ten years as old as my son now, I had the similar quest and my observations were very simple. Whenever I was told to think, I was thinking that an ever-expanding series of thoughts is all about thinking. If I’ve to choose between doing my home work or to go out and play, I was thinking the benefits of playing outside and the benefits lead to the pleasure and pleasure lead to the immense satisfaction and so on.

When I was in my high school and was around 16, I had a great friend and we used to consider ourselves a level above our peers. I used to read Osho and JK and my perspective of thinking changed. I started picturing thinking as a wild sea of conscious and subconscious thoughts. I’m sure the teen-age hormone and a general confusion between the right and the glamour must have impacted my thought process. As my friend was writing poetry with meaningless abstract words, I was able to understand and managed to write some myself.

When I finished my grad school, I was around my twenties and I hit with the reality. My close friend went in a different direction and my associations changed. I used have friends usually much older than me. I was playful at the same time was able to read some books on Upanishads and meditation. I was able to expand my observation of thinking as a veil between me and my own and true consciousness. Be it a friend or a profession or a choice to make, I felt my thoughts were coming in-between to sway my inner inclinations by invoking fear and anxiety.

The next few years were really turbulent and I was moving between jobs and travelling all over moving away from home and staying all by myself or with my cousins and friends. I leant a lot about the people, their attitudes and the behaviors that got recorded in my memory. This started affecting my view towards thinking. Whenever I’ve a situation to think about, I was able to zip through my memories of impressions and emotions and can make a meaningful approach. Suddenly it dawned on me, that the thought process is a series of steps to evaluate the choices before you and able to make one as a preferred based on the memory containers stored in our brain,

At the age of 26, I travelled outside the country. New place, new people and new events made me to revisit the old theory. I’ve no impression of the new world, but still I was able to make some good progress. I started to distinguish that there are three forms of thoughts: Observations (driven by perceptions), Connections (made by associations) and Conclusions (ends up as deductions). I was able to look and feel a job opportunity, was able to figure out the economic incentives and able to make a decision weather to accept it or play hardball with the offer. All these three types of connections were taking place more or less on the simultaneously on different levels both consciously and sub-consciously. I believed that this was a great model and will work all the times. Also I had a strong feeling that thinking on your own will be good, but will be ring fenced with your assumptions and emotions. I also believed a new thought only really thrive on a bit of input and repartee. I started subconsciously having friends that were instrumental in providing the bit of insight.

As I got older, as more you read and more you learn, a better picture evolves. The thought process t is like an Internet accessed through a PC or a mobile device. If the computer breaks down, it doesn’t mean the Internet is down! Reality is full of information and we can’t perceive it directly – and as in an Internet – we can only access it with the appropriate device. We can consider the body and brain as instruments and feel and receive sensory reality. Thinking is a method by which our instrument – body and brain – process the information we receive. The central processing takes care of the observations, connections and conclusions.

I can predict how I’ll be thinking in the future. I can see this very clearly – May be there are more methods of processing the reality than just our own – Java vs iOS as differing operating systems. And may be the end of the body and brain is not necessarily the end of consciousness – Karma takes over – as an upgrade to newer hardware, firmware & software.

Hmm…at least I’m thinking…and can answer my ten year old that I tried once.