Scientifically, when packets of light energy called photons stimulate the retina of the eyes, a chain of events takes place. Billions of neurons carrying electric signals pass on information from one to another, which the mind later decodes and presents through thoughts. When the mind responds to any stimulus, such as images from the optic nerve or sounds from the auditory nerve, it establishes a perception that we experience as thought. It is unknown where all the information originates and how the mind experiences it. This topic is deeply philosophical, holds all the answers, and is unrelated to AI or computer science coding that you will read and judge, which agrees that intuitiveness, instinctiveness, and intelligence are not its domain.

No one has a fixed opinion on what makes up a thought or its creation. Thought is a mental process that enables us to comprehend the world based on past information, projecting that into the future. You need to still the thoughts in silence to be in the now.

Spiritualism claims thoughts emerge after any information arises spontaneously from a straightforward, absolute source of aware energy, forming ideas, images, opinions, and beliefs. Originating from an ocean of pristine awareness in and around our environment, thoughts arise like bubbles, independent of each other but dependent on memory and intellect from past awareness.

Philosophically, when the mind is alert, you become aware; if you are attentive, you become conscious. If you are not, the mind goes into auto-mode and subconsciously passes on information via intellectual thoughts. Many articles and books expound on thoughts, yet the mystery makes it more intriguing. In our case, the supremacy of material thoughts overshadows complete subservience to the realm of spirituality.

A thought may be independent, bizarre, exclusive, or inclusive of external influence. Thought is energy expressed by language, a mental activity formed in words, images, notions, and feelings of the past and future. It represents, interprets, and subconsciously navigates your body and mind into separatism or the oneness you belong to. In short, thoughts represent and expand your observable, existential, and experiential relationships with the inner and outer worlds through your uniqueness and intelligence in consciousness.

The way you uniquely think, via consciousness, determines the quality of your mind. The sensory organs perceive and transfer information to the brain, where ideas develop and you feel. Only then do you begin to think and infer, deriving information from past knowledge and projecting it into the future. When combined with action, thoughts create that material realm for your thinking identity, which spans from probability to actuality, interpreting physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual experiences.

From your thoughts, you perceive, conceive, and conceptualise consciousness, soul, God, or, for that matter, the personal world and the Universe. First, the mind creates all conceptual thoughts before becoming beliefs and faith in one’s reality. The culmination of your overall thoughts constructs an identity of its own, which we call an ego. It provides a sense of physical identity and a thinking mind comprising the lower or subconscious.

The exciting part is that the mind needs to feel first before it can think; only after feeling can the mind react from memory and intellect to begin thinking. Feeling here refers to being aware, conscious, or experiencing a sensation. Second, the thinking self, a mental process we’ve named, is not you; it’s conscious only when you are awake. However, even during sleep, other parts of you continue to exist; thinking stops, but the hair continues to grow, the heart continues to beat, breathing continues, and so forth. The actual self of who you are is the spirit, which can check and guide your body through your soul, which is also yours as a part of the mind. The soul remains in pure consciousness and proacts spontaneously, telepathically providing intuitive knowledge. By the time the conscious mind absorbs and assimilates this innovative knowledge, the present shifts the same into the past, from which thoughts about the same originate.

A thought is one finite form of energy, limited to time, space, and cause, allowing us to experience, express, relate to, and establish all objects Mother Nature provides. However, there is also a ‘sovereign’ energy by which you can observe your thoughts. You will never say, ‘I am thoughts’—the ‘I’ is separate from thoughts. Therefore, humans have this unique ability to observe and become aware of their thoughts. Since the duration of observation occurs before any thinking, it happens spontaneously with thoughtless thoughts. We are a composite unit of body, mind, and soul, superimposed on a broad substratum of spiritual being.

Thinking depends entirely on the past and future, and the process involves relative thinking in opposites of this and that to determine and choose. Only after you relate heat to cold can you decide what it is. It means that, while thinking, it is necessary to separate the absoluteness of any energy into two to determine its outcome for your material living. Life is the totality of your sum experiences living in duality, exhibiting the quantum of that individual nature of ‘what’ you are through your thoughts.

I reiterate that while watching from the soul through the presence of your aware energy, you are in a state of thoughtless thoughts, absolute, spontaneous, choiceless, and non-separated by any relative thinking. Spiritualism considers this initial stage, this observing state of your mind, to be at par with the absolute supreme ability of energy of ‘who you are—That art Thou,’ referring to that state as the individual soul or ‘The Witnessing Self.’ This aware energy is before thoughts and beyond cognition. The rest is all a web of cause and effect, bound by time and space. Existence, in turn, is a play of life with its series of experiences, represented by thoughts, which we consider as consciousness comprising the superconscious via the soul and conscious, subconscious thoughts via the mind.

Therefore, we comprise three selves into one composite unit: the Spiritual self as the individual spirit. The Witnessing self is the soul, and the Physical self is the nexus of body and brain.

At any moment, while the observation process is unfolding, the observer observing the observed remains the same in its absoluteness. Thoughts of awareness arising during this moment are pure, choiceless, unquestioning, and without discrimination, revealing the union between the subject and its object in absolute observation. During this moment, there is no separation of energy by the mind into its duality; it is simply the primordial aware energy (subject) observing through the mind the inner or outer (object), all three connected as one. Intuitiveness, distinctiveness, and intelligence in personal creativity are the best examples of the mind’s flawless assimilation.

Therefore, during the observation process, only this being-ness is present in a state of observing. There is no individual presence, only waves of aware energy known as the spiritual self. There is no thinking; the mind is alert and instantaneous in the present moment and still.

This awareness extends, and if the mind is attentive or focused, it makes the mind conscious to think with clarity, experience, choose, and infer. The process of life during this stage, from ‘being’ to ‘becoming,’ is started, where the mind separates this absolute energy into dual opposites to think, discriminate, and decide via the intellect to become what you are through an individual level of consciousness.

The mind begins to function based on what it feels and believes. Using thoughts, you choose between two dual factors: expand on this through the intellect, understand through intelligence, and act to experience what you desire. Although past knowledge informs your thoughts, the manifestation of those thoughts is rooted in the future. Desire is the fuel for the mind. Being is to exist, and becoming is to desire.

Thoughts imprison your spirit in memory unless you come out of it spontaneously, alert, and aware of thoughtless or choiceless thoughts by sheer observation of your environment. Come out of that cage, savour a higher state of consciousness, and the quality of your life will improve. You need not prove to others who you are—you will effortlessly evolve. Your transformation will reveal how alert, observant, aware, conscious, and awake you are.

Thoughts are an automatic consequence of transmission from different sections of your mind. They react either emotionally, driven by subconscious desires purely in self-interest, or influenced by the degree of consciousness they have experientially. In the subconscious state, thoughts depend on memory, past knowledge, and the time it takes for their experience to occur in the mind, functioning in auto-mode. These subconscious thoughts cannot stop independently unless the mind becomes conscious of them. Hence, they chatter recklessly, randomly, and repeatedly, projecting into the future based on past information. Fear is a shining example; it is only a movement of thought expressed in words, which relate to past experiences, making you anxious about the future.

However, spiritually, you can stay ahead of thoughts by watching and witnessing your mind. Witnessing or observing your thinking self is the best way to enhance your consciousness. I repeat, the observer (the individual soul) at any given moment, through observation (the spirit) observing (from the mind) any sensation, idea, or image (observed), remains one. You spontaneously grasp that object, and only after that do you analyse, judge, and choose through personal thoughts, relying on your past knowledge linked to future desires.

In this case, action from your mind is occurring in the present moment through the presence of sheer awareness. Your mind becomes dynamic and still, undistracted by thoughts, and is not wasting any time or energy brooding on the past or future. It becomes mindful of that existential now, moving from one moment to the next, irrespective of the passage of time. This spontaneous activity by the mind is more spiritual and less material.

Material thoughts, on the other hand, arise and revolve around an aura of physical identity and its attachments. They reinforce the ‘I-thought’ of ‘me and mine’ and succeed by inducing a deep separation between you and your existence. Whether you consider yourself spiritual or worldly, if you overwhelm your mind with your name and identity, you will remain an egoistic self, immersed in selfishness, living with a separated selfhood from all others. A pseudo-independent identity of a ‘thinking self’ will emerge and persist. In contrast, in the actual nature of our reality, we are all one, part of a complete whole in unity and continuity in absoluteness. There is no subject-object duality in a spiritual state of mind; the experiencer and the experience originate from the same ingredient.

I repeat that thoughts that move subconsciously are in the lower consciousness. They emerge desirably out of reasoning and intellect, which are more effective for the material world. Emotions, reasoning, and logic each have their respective thoughts, which emerge from past knowledge extracted from memory subconsciously. Therefore, the mind does not require intuitiveness or conscious awareness for most of its functioning. It is happy being in auto-mode, carrying out its job while extracting information from the subconscious part of the mind.

This stage of lower conscious thinking continues, and you remain in a state of relativities, experiencing happiness and sadness, positive and negative, good and bad, etc., within your ‘me and mine’ according to your circumstances and convenience. It continues until you become aware of and conscious of the present moment and respond proactively in a non-dual manner.

Energy simply responds in oneness, whether it is positive or negative. How the mind proacts or reacts to any stimuli depends on the presence of your state of awareness. Either you permit your life to be dictated by your circumstances, emotions, and unquestioning beliefs in a compulsive reactive approach, or respond proactively, fully conscious of every moment, beyond likes and dislikes, with the presence of that inner awareness of who (spirit) you are. This absolute state of the mind is beyond all polarities in duality.

Existence exists without your psychological or cognitive mind trying to persuade you based on your likes and dislikes. You must consciously explore and create your destiny by responding to every situation, alert and observant, with complete awareness from one moment to the next.

One of the fundamental characteristics of any form of energy is to flow in entropy, so it is with thoughts. However, humans possess the power of awareness to counter and check this reckless disorder, becoming aware and conscious of their thoughts, which they can operate and regulate. Our high levels of awareness and consciousness make us human. Unlike a computer or other living creatures, humans are more aware and conscious of both the outside world and their inner selves. Therefore, the critical factor to keep in mind is the degree of mindful awareness, which is solely responsible for the movement of our combined thoughts in the past, present, and future; these need to align for the overall welfare of our being.

Most of your thinking operates in an automatic, subconscious mode. For this reason, there is so much inner chaos and confusion in our random thought processes. Neuroscientists declare that over 98% of thoughts function from the subconscious section. The soul is that instrument that oversees your subconscious thoughts into a proper design via awareness, provided you have the knowledge and the will to do so, and that too, by constantly witnessing your mind, which we refer to as the awakening of the soul.

Therefore, we cannot consider all thoughts, conscious or subconscious, as merely electrochemical neural interactions within the brain. There is also the presence of a certain intensity of aware energy that determines, through free will, the course of its direction.

Since the state of consciousness differs in every individual, no one can measure the quantum of this output. Therefore, despite what scientists say, we should not attempt to provide a common denominator or percentage of conscious and subconscious operations within any individual mind.

NAMASTE