By- Praharsh Mishra
“A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks he becomes.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.”
-Lord Buddha
Whether you consider the sayings of Mahatma Gandhi or Lord Buddha both have emphasised the word “Thought”. So what is thought? Thought is nothing but the end result of thinking. Thought is not an idea or opinion. Thought develops spiritually and ideas gets created mentally. As thoughts develop spiritually so they are neither created nor destroyed. But ideas are created, developed, engineered. Ideas are formed from thoughts.
Scientifically, neurons release brain chemicals called neurotransmitters, which generates the electrical signals in the neighbouring neurons. These electrical signals propagate like a wave to a thousand of neurons, which leads to thought formation. One theory also explains that thoughts are created when neurons fire.It is an activity that resides in brain.
Sensory data comes from eyes and ears, fingers and funny bone, and the mind turns these signals into disembodied representations that it manipulates in what we call thinking and the end result is the thought.
When we experience something from outside of our body that experience becomes our knowledge which is stored as memories in our brain. And the brain is where thoughts resides. Spiritually, thoughts develop from prerna (here, generation point of inspiration) and prerna develops from the soul which is immortal. More the soul gets purified more the good thoughts develop. For example: Every night you light a lamp and after a day or two there is a bit blackish colour on the glass of the lamp. And as the day passes the blackish colour of the glass also increases. But if you clean the glass everyday the light of the lamp will be the same as it was in the starting. The same thing is with your soul. You need to purify your soul through meditation, pranayama etc.
Why is it so that a person gets good thought and becomes successful while the other person gets bad thought, commits crime and gets arrested? The answer is very simple. It is because the soul of the successful person is much purified than the person who went to the jail. Meditation, pranayama are just the means of purifying a person’s soul.
The best example of the most purified soul in this world is a child who is just born and as he starts becoming egoist, telling lies, committing crimes, betraying someone, cheating someone, his soul starts getting impure.
What if there were no thoughts for sometime? This is the condition of the zero state or the thoughtless state which most of the great saints and even some people experiences when they are in a very deep meditation. Thoughts are really necessary because this is what makes human a human and animal an animal. Apart from achieving the zero state through meditation, they also claim to experience no thoughts during trauma, depersonalization or other dissociative disorders.
All you can get from this blog is that you must put efforts for purifying your soul through meditation, pranayama, yogic kriyas so that your end result of thinking i.e. thoughts are goodand you light up everyday the same. Your thoughts become things. Thoughts have energy. Your past thoughts created your current life and your current thoughts will create your future life as what you think the most will appear in your life.