In the beginning was the word

Yesterday I had a long conversation about the origin of thought. Which comes first, the words or the thoughts. There are of course very different forms of thinking. Visual, musical, analytical, synthetic, performative thinking etc... There is thinking on the level of intuition, there is thinking in memory, there is vision and intuition. There are so many types of thinking. What is thinking? Who thinks while thinking? How is it different from consciousness?

Much within my consciousness is not thinking; it is sensory perception, contemplation, daydreaming, and there are unconscious and subconscious processes. Strictly speaking, all of this is not thinking. Thinking is reflecting, it is contemplation of the world, it is an attempt to understand and grasp the world. It is largely analytical. When I perceive something sensorially, something is simply given to me within my consciousness. When I think about what I see, I give names to things, I identify characteristics, I describe actions. This is my way of understanding the world. Describing the world in the form of a thought-out text allows me to see deeper connections: functions, causes, principles…

But where does a thought come from? How does it arise? There is intertextual thinking, meaning I read or listen and react to text with text, connecting many texts... that's rather academic. There is also thinking through active listening and communication. People who listen to each other and think together explore an idea collaboratively. This listening and communicative thinking is exciting. Someone says something, another person understands something, hopefully, that largely aligns, because it will never be identical. Now there are many dialogues here that proceed in a relatively standardized way. Platitudes are exchanged, or standard positions are compared, as in a game of chess... but there is also the philosophical dialogue, the act of questioning together. The question, for example: What is thinking? How does one answer this question? How does one think about it?

Sensations and impressions

I recently read Deleuze's essay on David Hume read. Hume says that everything begins with 'sensation' or 'impression'. When I feel something and then name it, this is the beginning of thinking. I can perceive objects, abstract properties, postulate causality, make statements, establish facts. But how can I record sensations and impressions? How can matter have a memory? How can my consciousness have images? These are Henri Bergson's questions.

What is the relationship between the outside world and the images of consciousness that are then structured into thoughts in language? Doesn't language have to be designed a priori as possible in order to express itself? Chomsky says that our brains, and perhaps also those of animals, have a general capacity for language baked into them. The Bible begins with: In the beginning was the word. Something similar can be found in the Vedas and Upanishads. In the Vedas, however, it is not just language that was there in the beginning, but a whole system of knowledge that encompasses different levels of consciousness and understands the human being as a microcosm. Everything that I can think can also exist and everything that exists can also be thought. We will probably need many more generations as a species. But a correspondence is postulated between the world and consciousness. They are one, nondual.

Deleuzian thought revolves around how thoughts emerge from a plane of immanence. How these thoughts connect and link into complex systems. He calls these, for example, abstract machines, diagrams, rhizomes, plateaus, etc. This is how words, thoughts, things, structures, power, art, the unconscious, and the abstract, etc., can connect. The world expresses itself in this way; within it, there is life (A Life). This is also the fundamental principle of the Upanishads: Brahman expresses itself through the creation of the world. Existence must also involve process and change. Only then does this reality exist.

As far as we know, humans have thus far created the most complex and wildest level of reality within thought. If one takes all the different languages, cultures, religions, and forms of society together, it becomes clear that something is being expressed here, something is manifesting. This is it. This is that.

Origin of thought

The origin of thinking is therefore only on one level in perception. In spiritual practice, inner contemplation and habitual practice (meditation and yoga) are the key to an original way of thinking that frees itself from stimulus-response patterns. The scriptures and teachings, the rituals and exercises serve a self-formation that allows us to look beyond the surface of sensual certainty. The thinking that becomes possible here goes further than the mere recognition of causal connections. It also goes further than rational reflection on problems of ethics, aesthetics and cognition. The rational mind has succeeded in ushering in the Anthropocene, a terraforming that is unique as far as we know. Nevertheless, existential questions remain untouched by this kind of thinking.

So the question of the origin of thought remains. Did the word come first? The word stands for language, which can capture many things. If we understand language as a symbolic system that can also be understood visually, musically or performatively, we could say that thought itself is always language. However, this only covers a small part of our existence. Our consciousness is broader, our physical existence, our life force (prana) our intellect (buddhi), memory (manas), our identity (ahankara) our spirituality (satchitananda), all this goes beyond thinking. Thinking can reflect and describe it, but it is not thinking itself.

I keep asking myself what it looked like at the beginning of thought. Many thousands of years ago ... I remember how we once wanted to bury a cat. Our (living) cat was irritated by the cardboard box. When the box with the carcass was gone, our cat performed a very elaborate ritual. We had never seen this before, even though he is an older cat and we have lived together for a very long time. It was clear that our cat was reacting to the death of a fellow cat. There are many stories from the animal kingdom, the elephant graveyards are perhaps the best known. It seems to me that there is a consciousness here that remembers others.

Thinking is rooted in experience, language, insight. It is often an experience of the world that lies beyond empiricism. This is where everyone's true creativity lies. Thinking is also always an act of creation.