Stuart Wilde Q&A: Are Our Thoughts Our Own?

Q: In your books, Stuart, you ask us how we know that our thoughts are ours. What do you mean by that, and if our thoughts aren't ours, whose are they?

A: We presume that our thoughts are ours because no one has ever challenged the idea. Modern technology can scan the brain and watch it working, but it can't scan thoughts. You can stimulate the brain and ask the patient what they are feeling, or what reaction that stimulation caused, but you can't know exactly what a mind is thinking. Nor can you be certain that the electrical impulses you are observing are a result of that person's particular consciousness or some incoming thought from elsewhere.

I know this idea sounds bizarre and most neurologists would say it's crazy. I'm not saying the neurologists are wrong. It's just that they are looking at consciousness and the brain in an external, logical way rather than from a multidimensional view of mind and consciousness beyond the 3-D rotation, where thoughts flow back and forth instantly and automatically.

Now, this question would need 50 pages to really explain it properly, but here is the gist of it.

There is no space in consciousness, no distance. There are levels of perception layered by oscillation like strata of a cake, but it's all the same cake. Every bit of the global mind is technically able to be aware of every other bit, and how much you are aware of is limited by individual development. But it's all there. The consciousness we are normally aware of, the thing we call our "mind", is trained by, and a product of, its social situation — its location in the 3-D state. So ideas coming in from others don't seem strange because they are coming in from minds that are likewise programmed. So it's hard for an individual to realise that there are thoughts coming into their mind that are not their own.

If an incoming thought is totally out in left field, like it expresses a totally unknown idea or technology, then you might be able to say that it's not your own thought, for you would know that you didn't know those facts or that you weren't familiar with those ideas. But ideas that flood in are from ordinary people with the same ideas and motivations as yourself. So it's very hard sometimes to figure out what your ideas and impulses are, and what comes from other individuals or even from the collective mind of humankind.

It is natural to presume that the thoughts that come into your mind are automatically your thoughts. However, I believe we're all interconnected and that a fairly substantial percentage of your ideas — especially those that relate to people, places, and social situations outside your immediate life, or ideas of an inspirational nature — come into your mind from somewhere else.

Rupert Sheldrake talks a lot about morphic resonance. He maintains that we are all interconnected, so that when one person learns a task, it automatically becomes easier for other people to learn the same task. Evidence of this occurred after Roger Bannister managed to run a four-minute mile. For thousands of years, people tried to accomplish this feat, but as soon as Roger Bannister did it, a barrier was torn down and a dozen did exactly the same as Bannister shortly thereafter. Sheldrake says, for example, that through morphic resonance, people doing the crossword puzzle in the evening find it easier to do than the people who did it in the morning when the paper first came out, because there had already been an impact on that particular morphic field — the answers had been deduced by others.

What I've said in my books is, because one can project thoughts into people's minds and because one can move one's subtle body into the force field or physical body of another person, we cannot categorically say that all the thoughts we have are ours. In the extreme case of mass hysteria or collective hallucinations, for example, you can see how ideas jump so rapidly that instantaneously a group of people can act completely irrationally. Fear can also jump from one person to the next. If the person next to you is scared, it makes you feel uncomfortable and insecure. You can test this for yourself by getting on any airline flight that has a lot of first-time flyers, or vacationers who are not used to flying often. The fear you feel as you walk through the plane is intense, and it jumps back and forth between the passengers, affecting all of them. Yet in the coach section, it's more intense than, say, in first class, where there's usually a sense of tranquility. This is because there are fewer seats and they're spaced farther apart. The ease you feel in first class has nothing to do with the fact that they're going to serve you caviar and champagne once the aircraft takes off — it's all to do with the fact that there is less psychic pollution in first class.