Thought, Its structure and Root

June 21, 2002

• A Thought is a movement of mental energy given form by words or feelings.
• There are millions of sense impacts on the mind.
• Each of them gets organised as a thin force and moves hectically.
• Mind takes two or more of them and relates them around a point of its own reference. A thought is born.
• The rightness or correctness of this thought is determined by the component strands and their correctness and the mental centre around which they are woven.
• If we sift them at this level they will lapse into sense energies and their correctness will be determined by the purity of those senses.
• The point around which a thought is organised is called ego or reason.
• Thoughts contain facts, opinions, sentiments, preferences, constructions, habits, ideas of the lower level, and their purity is determined by all these contributing factors.
• Thoughts are individual at the four levels of personality; they are also social. We can say they are collective making a distinction between the organised society and the unorganised mass of collectivity.
• Take one of the ideas we have accepted for a long time without any thought of our own such as

- One must be fair.

- There is a limit to any pursuit.

- I cannot give up an opportunity.

- He is lucky.

• Individual thought, collective thought, general superstition, incidental forces, ideas unthinkingly swallowed, well developed ideas of history ill received by the individual, etc. together make a complex murky fabric of complication in the name of our own thought.
• Patiently sift them out layer by layer, strand by strand. Do not stop anywhere. Persevere. If you have done a thorough JOB, you will be face to face with that shining faculty called thinking. It will be truly shining.
• It is this instrument that is logical and reasonable and can reach the Absolute straight like a flame.
• During this analysis, if you are ever successful, you will see the complex web of your own personality.
• It will be none other than the entrenched superstition of the enchanted masses.
• It is worth giving up. It is something like a mental infection that erodes into your life and personality.
• If you ever attempt it, you will make the momentous discovery of your saying to yourself, "Let it be whatever it is, don't disturb it."
• It is much more so with emotions and fully so with habits.
• That is what Sri Aurobindo calls Taste of Ignorance.
• The capacity to see the mud and murkiness of what we have been cherishing as ourselves is the silver living in our awakening.
• At least try to take up one OPINION as "In a hot country people of lazy and therefore I too am lazy."
• After a long and arduous examination, you would not have SEEN any one strand of this opinion objectively. There is no question of giving up that opinion, nor the laziness itself.
• Mother has seen millions of needles in the subtle plane trying to enter minds. They are opinions SHE says.
• Man never changes his opinion until the society changes it which means he has, after all, not changed.
• Let us try to get to the bottom of any simple opinion such as "My profession sticks to me" and uproot it altogether.
• Whether our perseverance or prayer does it successfully, when we meet with success we will feel like a slave freed, or a prisoner let out of jail.
• Human nature will put its stamp on the effort without fail sooner or later when it makes him go back to it under the guise of an altered opinion.
• Opinions are powerful. Thoughts are much more powerful.