Separating Chaos from Curiosity: Practical guide to Identify important thoughts among ordinary ones
We live in a world that keeps on bombarding us with data. Throughout the history, perhaps there was no time when humans were this occupied. We have fought wars, survived plague and pandemics but the data that was thrown at mind wasn’t this much. Currently, we are evolving in terms of what all data is present, and with so much data present to analyse the state of mind is pure chaos. There are too many desires, wants, fears, anxieties, and other emotions. The man today suffers from the problem of choice, we have so much that we can choose from that we suffer from the fear of missing out. Nobody wants to miss anything because there is continuous screaming of YOLO (you only live once). I am hopeful for the future, I hope we will also consider what data is important and what is not required. Perhaps there will be some relaxation for the mind of future humans and they won’t care about tons of notifications. But till that time arrives, let us examine what we can do now to select the important thoughts and ideas from the countless data that our mind processes during the entire day.
Step 1: Know the difference between an Idea, thought & emotion.
It all starts with a thought. Your mind continuously processes information and generates responses for each information it processes. These responses are thoughts. They become actions, feelings, or emotions depending on how much awareness you put into it, how much energy you dedicate to it.
There is a primary response that is triggered in the brain and it is thought. When you put a decent amount of awareness and energy into this thought, it becomes a feeling and then if you put some more energy into it, it becomes an emotion. Feelings and emotions are directly related to your behaviour and subtly control your entire life. Thoughts on the other hand simply keep flowing.
Thoughts that are processed by the mind for outcomes & possible results, probabilities of success & failure, effects on self and surroundings are Ideas. An idea is a thought that has been considered by the brain seriously. It is not flowing anymore but being considered by the brain for what outcomes it can possibly present.
Thoughts are chaos but Ideas are directional. They are important and the brain treats them as important.
When the brain is already doing its part of separately treating them, why do we need to put an effort on it? Because the thoughts keep on popping up every moment and they keep on distracting the brain. The brain processes each information as if it is worthy of a good outcome and then drops it when it doesn’t find the information that relevant. But in that process it keeps on getting distracted and thus loses the important idea it has found.
Step 2: Separate Ideas from Thoughts
Now, when you know the difference between thoughts and ideas, you should consider observing your thoughts. Keep on observing the thoughts and you will easily spot ideas among millions of thoughts. If you are not a believer of meditation and this doesn’t look good then you can also start taking notes of every time your brain picks up any thought where it sticks more than normal. Just write it down on a notepad.
You don’t have to stop your mind from pondering but only observe it, take note of what it thinks and you will be surprised new thoughts are very few. Majority of times it is endless cycle of same thoughts, responses for certain situations and nothing more.
Step 3: Evolve the identified Ideas
If you have taken note of all Ideas that your mind has generated. You can put your awareness on them and see how much the mind can contemplate on it. Try to complete it with the possible outcomes, what needs to be done, how it will affect you and the universe. Keep pondering over it again and again. It is easy when you have written it somewhere because you can visit it any number of times and multiple times during the day.
What is surprising is that when you force the mind to complete an Idea it generated, it drops them. Because it picked them unconsciously from the surroundings and now doesn’t know how to complete them or use them. It is true for a majority of identified ideas. But for some ideas that were developed by the mind by correlation, it can think beyond what was acquired and it can actually complete them. There is one more benefit of this exercise, the mind gets to evolve and starts completing even more ideas when you force it to.
Step 4: Spotting the pattern among Ideas
Once you have a handful of ideas where you have some plan of what can be done, how that can be done, and what it would result in for the universe and you? You can start looking at them all at once. Bingo, there it is. The hidden pattern of your own individuality, what you want to do, and where your inner self is directing you to go.
There is no destination but hints, paths that your mind wants to take. Changes that it wants to introduce in this universe. These are not random ideas that it has picked from its surroundings but its own creations. These are ideas that it created after sensing the environment and analyzing it. Also, you are not on level 1 and you already has identified some background for them.
There is no answer but only a path that you can adopt. Sometimes you would select one and after traveling some distance, you will notice it is not what you were looking for. It doesn’t suit the roadmap you created from those patterns and you will know you need to pick a different one. Eventually, you get on the path that is yours.
