Thought Is Not What You Think It Is
It was once believed that the sun and the universe orbited around the earth. We still believe that our minds control our thoughts, and our society is based on this mistaken belief. The reality is that thought controls us. And I don’t say this lightly.
About five years ago my life was turned upside down by what is euphemistically called a mid-life crisis. At the time, I sought to figure it out, to understand what was happening. It turned out that many factors had converged to create my situation. It was a perfect storm — one from which I would ultimately emerge. In many ways, I wound up doing a 180. It’s as if I had pressed the reset button on my life.
Fortunately, I was at a point in my life when I had both the time and the resources to focus my attention on myself and my perception of reality. In my voracious search for answers, I came across the writings of J. Krishnamurti and those of his longtime collaborator, physicist Dr. David Bohm. At the time, their writings opened up my eyes to the possibility that reality was different than what we perceive.
In David Bohm’s book Thought as a System, he shined a light on thought in a way that few people had ever considered. Unfortunately, Dr. Bohm died in 1992, before he was able to further develop his theory. To my knowledge no one has continued his work. I find it amazing that such brilliant insight might have been lost to history.
A little over two years ago, I decided that I needed to see what I could do about it. I want to be very clear here. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a doctor. And I have no special training in this area. The only thing I have is an insatiable drive to move this work forward, a need to help bring this knowledge to the world.
I have finally mustered up the courage to make my progress public: I call it the Web Of Thought (WOT). It is both a macro and micro model of thought. How thought is transmitted between us, and how we receive, encode, process, and output thought. The goal is to build a Thought API that will empower applications to understand and help teach people about thought.
The importance of this Web Of Thought may not be immediately obvious. But it was the belief of both Krishnamurti and Bohm, and now mine, that human suffering on both a personal and societal level can only be addressed once we understand thought.
In future articles, I will layout the Web Of Thought model. I welcome any comments, questions and support.
