Is it possible to have a thought and observe it simultaneously?

@LostInParadise: “but I can’t imagine that I can think of something and at the exact same time observe myself thinking.”

I’m not sure I have every experienced this either. But there have been times when the lag between a thought arising and becoming aware of the fact that the thought just appeared can be minimized. When my mind is still and there are moment when I can observe thoughts arise almost as soon as they do.

If we sit and observe sounds from the “outside” world, we will gradually become aware of more and more sounds. The sounds hasn’t just appeared – it’s that we’re aware of it. When we are busy and our attention is on other things, we just don’t notice it. To me, this seems to be the same with our thoughts. They appear just as other sensations do. But the tricky thing about these thoughts is that we get trapped in them and can only identify them for what they are if we are able to step out of them.

You say that you “eventually become aware of it and be able to recall what I had been thinking about”. What if the time between the beginning of thought and awareness that it is a thought were to shrink? At what point would it be real-time or real-time enough?

@LostInParadise: “There is not one of me thinking and another of me observing me thinking.”

This raises the whole question of consciousness and the concept of the self, which I will admit I am actively struggling with.

But when “you” see a thought (or recognize that you were engaged in though), you’re also likely able to recognize that you are now currently thinking about how you witnessed your mind lost in thought. And there are emotions/thoughts that arise around that, and again about this. And this.

@LostInParadise: “Is there really something to this idea of being observer and observed at the same time, or is it just a matter of reducing the time between having a thought and then becoming of aware of it?”

I suspect that what people mean by observing a thought as it arises is that when we are the most attentive, it’s possible to limit that time between thought arising and observation of that happening to such a degree as to provide some sense of relief. I suspect it is different for everyone.

I’ve experienced it, but not in a meditative state, but under super extreme stress. I had two streams of thought going, and they were watching each other. It was bizarre. It’s only happen once.

I am very much a novice with meditation, so I have not experienced this. But I do have some understanding of the brain and mind, and it does seem possible. The self, and the observing “Cartesian Theatre” construct that most of us work under, is just a construct. It is not the only way for the mind to be structured, although it is by far the most common. If you can dissociate the conscious portion of the mind into two streams, or blur the lines between the conscious mind and the unconscious processes from which it arises, then I’m sure this effect would be possible.

I think that the answer depends on what is meant by thought. If thought resides wholly within the domain of the frontal lobes, then it is possible that one could be conscious of the thought as it arose. However, If thoughts also arise within the subconscious, they would not be observable the moment they occurred. You, the observer, are the last to know some of what has been going on within your subconscious including sensory and motor functions.

@Bill1939 , I would not even know where to begin to keep track of subconscious thoughts. Have you ever had the experience of being aware of a conscious thought at the exact moment that it arose?

This has to do with the way thought is integrally related to ego. I’m using “ego” here to mean the narrative of self, the “I” that is assumed to be at the receiving end of experience. That narrative is itself the result of a thought process, and most thought features this character in the role of narrator. The sense of “me” is right there embedded in the fabric of thought, and it is thought that sustains the sense of “me”. That self seems like a constant presence, because whenever thought arises the sense of self is right there as an element of the syntax of thought (which is the illusion that led Descartes to his cogito).

But experience is not necessarily mediated by thought. Yes, thought does process experience after the fact, and in doing so it writes in this self character as the receiver of the experience. That thought about the experience tells a story of how I experienced such-and-such, and that’s the way the whole thing gets archived in memory. But that’s not the nature of experience as it happens. At the moment experience unfolds, before it’s run through the thought process, there is no division between a supposed “me” and the object of my experience. There’s just the experience. Strictly speaking, there is not yet an I who experienced it, nor a thing that was experienced.

Many forms of meditation direct the attention to this moment of experience as it unfolds. Still, the attentive absorption is rarely so complete that the brain doesn’t continue its habitual processing of the experience into thought form. Now, here’s the important point as far as your question is concerned: the arising of these thoughts is just as much an aspect of the moment-by-moment unfolding of experience as anything else. The narrative that they contain, however, has nothing to do this experience.

A good analogy to this might be the scrolling feed that the news networks roll across the bottom of their newscasts. You could legitimately say that this scrolling text is part of the newscast, and that those words racing by are just as much a part of the experience of watching CNN as the images on the rest of the screen. But those words are often about something quite different than the rest, and if the attention gets absorbed in the content of the scroll, it will end up on a different track. It’s certainly possible to be aware of the scrolling by of the text without getting caught up in its contents.

Thoughts are like the scrolling text. They’re pretty much always streaming by. Sometimes—often, even—it’s worthwhile to engage them with the attention. But it’s also worth understanding that thought represents a reality remade according to the ground rules of thought itself.

To say that “I observe my thoughts go by like bubbles” is not accurate. That’s already a product of the interpretative spin applied by the thought process. In the actual experience this is attempting to describe, there is no aloof observer, nor anything that’s observed. This kind of wording has led you to think that there’s a “me” having a thought and another “me” off at a distance watching that happen, but that’s not how it is. That’s just another thought created by the compulsion to put a “me” at the root of experience.

@thorninmud , Let me see if I can get some clarification on what you said. If thoughts arise, like the CNN scroll, are you saying that it is possible to know that there are thoughts without knowing the contents of them? Do the thoughts just run past like something that I see only in peripheral vision?

@LostInParadise There’s a Japanese way of understanding this that comes pretty close to the actual feel of the experience. It posits a series of stages through which thoughts develop; these stages are called “nim”.

The initial arising of a thought is the first nim. This is more like a thought-potential than a thought. Like a seed, it has the potential to grow under the right conditions, but in this potential stage it is unformed. If this thought seed doesn’t find fertile ground for development, it just blows away. But if it finds somewhere to lodge and lingers a bit, it quickly takes on the elements of form; now it’s a thought about something. Subject and object are arising. This is the second nim. It’s less easily dislodged at this point, but it’s still relatively fragile. It won’t be long before it passes into the third nim, though, at which point it becomes entangled with the thicket of other such thoughts that have grown and interwoven to constitute a particular worldview, with a particular ego in its starring role.

The meditative ideal would be to provide so little purchase for arising thoughts that they never grow beyond the first nim. This is like spinning a radio dial across its band: there’s an awareness that some signal just went by, but it didn’t linger long enough for you to know what song was playing. In actual practice, though, a fair number of these seed-thoughts linger long enough to grow into second nim. This is like pausing at one of the stations on the radio dial long enough to recognize the song.With subject and object now in the picture, we will respond to these young thoughts according to our likes and dislikes. This response is what propels the thought on toward the third nim. This is like conjuring up all of the associations this song has for you and singing right along with it.

@LostInParadise “Have you ever had the experience of being aware of a conscious thought at the exact moment that it arose?”

I like your use of “nim” stages to explain the evolution of thought into consciousness. I thought that I consciously observed all of my thoughts as they arose. That’s likely because I have a hungry third nim that eagerly snatches seedlings and runs them through a logic mill.

@thorninmud , When you meditate, are you aware of thoughts in the first and second nim stages?

The only thoughts that I become aware of are the ones that have made it to the third nim. My awareness of the thought allows me to terminate it, though to be honest there are times that the thought is so compelling that I consciously permit it to continue.

@LostInParadise This is the hard part to grasp: when thought doesn’t develop to the point that subject and object emerge (second nim), then it can’t be said that I am aware of anything. It’s just undifferentiated awareness, and it doesn’t belong to anyone. Nothing is outside of it either, so as to be its object.

Second nim thoughts are simple recognitions: The glass just slipped from my hand.

Third nim thoughts take that recognition and weave it into your overarching narrative of self: That glass is from my mother-in-law’s heirloom crystal! She already thinks I’m worthless. This will just get added to the list of damning evidence…..etc, etc.

A couple of observations here: First, it is quite possible that even before the second-nim thought “The glass just slipped from my hand” developed, my hand will have already begun to try and catch the falling glass. The awareness preceded even the recognition of what had happened. I will remember the event as “the glass slipped from my hand”, but in the moment there was only awareness. Second, you can see here the qualitative difference between second and third nim thought, and you can see how easily one flows into the other. In meditation, second nim thought isn’t terribly disruptive, but third nim thought can be. It’s essential to get the feel for letting go of them before they reach that stage.

@thorninmud Are you saying that consciousness is therefore an illusion? o.O xx

@nebule Not exactly. I’ll try to clarify.

To consider consciousness as something that exists apart from the objects of consciousness is to turn consciousness into an illusory thing. You won’t ever find consciousness in isolation, stripped of phenomena. It’s inseparable from phenomena: no phenomena, no consciousness. So to think in terms of a rose and a consciousness that registers that rose is to have already taken a step beyond the actual experience, the step of positing a consciousness that’s separate from the rose.

The actual experience, in its raw form, isn’t broken up like that. It gets parsed into this “consciousness/object of consciousness” form to make it fit the way the brain stores information. That’s quite useful; we need to be able to store and think about information. That’s an important part of being human. But that doesn’t mean that there’s actually a “thing” out there (or in here) that can be called consciousness.

@thorninmud Hmmm interesting, I shall have to ponder this line of thought further