Many passing thoughts

George G Clark, 14 February 2008

Many thoughts pass through your mind each day. But how many, what kinds, and what good does it do to think about them?

How many thoughts do you have each day?

Dharma teachers toy with the figure of 65,000 thoughts per day. On average this would be 45 each minute or one every 1.3 seconds. It is a rough estimate which accepts that it is often difficult to tell when one thought stops and a next one begins.

If that seems excessive we can work it out for ourselves from the bottom up. If we allow for an average of one thought each minute during 16 waking hours there would be 960 of them. Note that some would be short and fleeting while others might hang around for several minutes.

So, either way, whether the figure is 1000 or 60,000, there are a lot of thoughts passing through your mind each day.  This begs the next question:

What kinds of thoughts do you have?

Different people will have different kinds of thoughts but it is perhaps useful to think in terms of categories.

Are they about people, events or ideas; are they rooted in the past, the present or the future; do the same thoughts keep repeating or do new ones turn up?

Are the thoughts about your work or your hobbies; are they about practical affairs or more abstract issues?

And, at a deeper level, are they rooted in personal experiences or on stories from the media; and can you tell if they are rooted in things happening inside your head, on things that are happening in 'the outside world', or on some mix of the two?

What good does it do to think about your thoughts?

If you make the time to sit still for a few minutes you will notice how busy your brain is. 'You' can take the position of 'witness' to the channel hopping movie show which is your mind. This will lead to many insights about your 'self'.

One of the main insights will be that 'you' are not in control of what goes on in your mind. As Blaise Pascal once noted, "The heart has its reasons that reason  knows nothing about".

Another insight will be that you do not have to act like a programmed robot all the time. You are free to choose how you think, speak and act. And the deep 'you' will choose wisely and with compassion. As Eckhart Tolle has noted, "The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realise that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence."

So it is good to notice what you notice. The ancient Greeks reckoned that, "The unexamined life is not worth living". So why not opt for a worthy life, think about thinking, and be mindful of your passing thoughts?