The Shape of Thoughts
Have you ever sat down cross legged, eyes closed, hands on your lap, and experienced the beautiful sensation of thinking? Oh how joyful it is, the pleasure of thinking. Tell me, what is this feeling of having thoughts? Have you ever been without thoughts? How do some thoughts bring joy and some anger, some are contemplative and some are mere figments of your imagination; what kind of thought is it that runs at the back of your mind, giving you life, making you, you?
A proposal - food for thought- that’s all I have for you today. Hear me out.
The shape of your thoughts. The conscious mind, for some reason, isn’t capable of chasing more than one parallel thoughts at once. Multitasking: a process of just switching between two or more tasks successively, very quickly. It isn’t parallel. I’m not getting into the part where one breathes, looks around and talks at the same time - they’re all a part of your background processes that do not require your attention. Yes, attention is the right word for it. So my point here was, your attention is linear, single-laned - your attention is sequential.
But what about thoughts? At the cellular level in your brain, what happens when you think? A whole ton of neurons fire off in different directions, finding previous links, forming, breaking connections, creating and modifying patterns. It all happens simultaneously, doesn’t it? But everytime we try to chase a thought, it becomes linear. You only ever speak sequentially. You write sequentially. You read from one direction to the other. You speak one syllable after the other. So you can consciously only interpret sequentially, though your mind works non-linearly. I’ve been thinking about it a little, and my personal observation says that the best way to describe a mind would be perhaps, something like a tree (not the biological being, I meant… the data structure).
Do you see it? Nodes branching into many other nodes, forever - or for as long as you continue to live: for all purposes, infinitely. Nodes ordered by time, by category, by feeling, by triggers, a complicated, marvellous beauty.
And yet, our mind can conciously only comprehend linearity. Imagine compressing this multi-dimensional structure into a 2 dimensional line, for the sake of compreshension. In computer science terms, think inorder, preorder, postorder. But the order in this case, can be absolutely anything. Anything that can make sense to you and me, wrapped up in the restricting linearity of time.
Consider any linear traversal. Past, present, future. Compressed in that order, particularly. Ever heard of the theory that every moment in time exists at once, but we only percieve it as sequential, one after the other? Perhaps it is all because of this. A simple matter of evolution. So time is linear, simply because we cannot percieve, cannot think any more beyond this point.
Atleast, that’s how it remains for now, innit?