Thinking About Thinking

Written on February 19, 2024

I always try to convince people to think more deeply about their own minds. Try to get into your own head for a certain period of time and check what exactly is going on there. Where do your thoughts come from? Where do those internal images that can form in your own head come from?

I discovered that it's best to check this just before you go to sleep, or just after you wake up. This period is called hypnagogia. In short, hypnagogia is the transitional state from wakefulness to sleep and vice versa.

Through my own studies I have found that there are three ways of thinking. These are thinking through talking to yourself in your head, thinking through images that appear in your head and thinking through feeling. I've sorted these three ways of thinking based on the power of the thoughts they can form.

The first, thinking through talking to yourself, is the weakest. This is where the least interesting thoughts can be formed because you are stuck with the language you speak. Language was developed and exists for the purpose of trading and explaining earthly things. To explain the spiritual, this way of thinking is undeveloped and almost useless.

This is why philosophical texts are often considered difficult, because language must be stretched to its limits to enable the description of the spiritual in spoken and written form.

The second, thinking through images, is stronger than the first. The disadvantage of thinking this way is that you are still stuck to what you have seen or experienced and are therefore permanently stuck to the earthly.

The third, thinking through feeling, is by far the strongest. Thinking through feeling is separate from everything earthly and it is completely separate from language. This is why the feeling of gnosis can never be properly described. No matter how many people have tried to write and talk about this, this state of your mind can only be felt and never described to others. The only way of persuasion is to let people feel this feeling themselves.

Thinking in terms of feeling — without images and language — may be a skill that you need to develop or train as you would with a muscle, but once developed, this skill is indispensable. I would even dare to say that the only way to truly think about the spiritual is possible only in this way.