What is Thinking?

Awareness is like a field of potentiality.
You might imagine it like a thick fog, and whatever we can see in that fog is within our field of vision.
In the case of a very unevolved state of consciousness/awareness, the potential for certain thoughts to occur within the field is very limited; limited to the point where the odds of something happening are quite predictable. Black or white.
In being so predictable, one may believe that he’s decided that the thoughts were chosen or created by himself.

When an intention manifests, one becomes aligned with the pursuit of that intention, and so does his field of awareness.
We can imagine a bowling lane.
There’s a pursuit; a desire to knock over the pins. This desire pulls our attention/alignment in the direction of that pursuit.
So the thoughts which arise in the field relate to the alignment of the field.
When the potentiality is limited, and the thoughts are related to the intention, people still think that they are ‘thinking’. They believe that what happens to the bowling pins is the direct consequence of their intention.
Narrow awareness, specific intention, and low potentiality contribute to the idea that all which appears is very linear(i.e. I roll the ball, the pins fall over).

As the field of awareness expands, so does potentiality increase exponentially, dealing with ever greater numbers of variables.
Less predictability means that identification with the self as the source of the thoughts is less plausible.
One might still claim authorship of some of them, and attribute the rest to the influence of external factors. He still believes himself to be ‘thinking’, only there’s the notion that his thoughts are affected by things beyond his scope of awareness also.
The thoughts are still governed by his alignment, though the scope of his field of awareness expands further than the scope of his attention/focus(similar to a person’s peripheral vision). There’s a consideration for factors outside the narrow focus of the core intention.

Factors which exist outside the scope of the overall intention may have appeal, which can lead to a realignment of the immediate intention, unlike in the case of a narrow awareness, where one is concerned only with getting that which is in his immediate attention.
The person still believes that he’s doing the thinking, since the thoughts that arise in consciousness are still related to the ever changing alignment. He believes that he’s picking the directions that are most ‘good’(eventhough one cannot change what he thinks is good, against his own good judgement!).

With ever greater expansion of awareness, many possibilities begin to appear favourable, so the overall intention/alignment is forced into expansion as well.
The overall intent becomes ‘service to the greater good’ as there’s a recognition that the individual doesn’t ‘decide’ what is best/what is good, but rather, that there’s an overall goodness which prevails in the field completely of its own.
This letting go of the will to ‘decide’ what is good, is the beginning of disidentification from thought. The individual becomes aware that he is not the sum of his thoughts.
There still appears to be ‘thinking’ though, since the thoughts which arise in awareness at least appear to relate to eachother, even if not to the intention of the individual.

When consciousness keeps expanding even further, to the point where ‘all that exists’ is something comprehensible, ‘thinking’ ceases. The timelessness of thought and awareness is witnessed as having been totally complete, always and forever.

Further yet, it’s realized that thought only ever made up 2% of the entire field of awareness, and that the rest of it was always just silent essence.

In terms of ‘potentiality’, just for the sake of clarification, it refers to the possibilities that may appear within a field of awareness, and the odds of that possibility coming into manifestation right ‘now’(Though it also refers to future possibility, it is not limited exclusively to future happenings. It is very much a quality of the ‘now’ as well).

The odds of a tree sprouting from your forehead in the instant that you’re reading this are pretty low, while the odds that you’ll continue the act of breathing are fairly high.

Awareness can expand across a threshold where even potentiality ceases to exist too, where the scope of one’s awareness is inclusive of Allness as being simultaneously manifest and unmanifest, since, for something to be manifest, there must also exist the potential for it to manifest.
Like data on a computer, just because the files are not being accessed at this moment, does not make the data any less existent. All of the past, present and future are registered in the timeless totality of consciousness.
…and it’s not so much that the future exists right now, as it is that all of the potentiality of the future exists right now.
For example, the death of the physical body might be immanent, but there are different files on the computer(potentialities) which dictate the means of that physical death.
We arrive at those different potentialities according to our alignment.

One of the most effective ways to potentiate the expansion of one’s consciousness beyond the limitations of thought, is to practice devotional surrender…which is essentially nothing more than alignment with divinity at whatever the cost.

In Peace,

-Rob

Addendum:
Since it seems to come up whenever people are ‘thinking’ about thinking, some thoughts on drugs and altered mental states:

Keeping with the fog metaphor, it would appear as though the effect of drugs, is that they temporarily dissolve the clouds so that the sun can shine through; so that the individual can experience some of the qualities of higher consciousness, without acually expanding his awareness.

Physiologically, the conditions of altered perception and presence of the drug are always concurrent…which is to say that the drug use and altered state are connected, yes, but that there’s no hard evidence to say that one causes the other. They’re simultaneous.(sometimes the mental condition can occur with a placebo, sometimes the presence of the drug has no apparent effect on perception…so one could theoretically lean one way more than the other, but it doesn’t appear conclusively governed by either the mind or the chemicals).

I wouldn’t know where to even start investigating this in order to find the bridge between consciousness and the body…and how exactly the drugs temporarily dissolve the fog of awareness…but such an effect seems to be why the altered states occur.