In any given day, we have SO many thoughts.
So why do certain thoughts grab a spot and settle in...so deeply? Some even cause rumination — cycling over and over them in our minds.
How do thoughts embed themselves in the library of our brains anyway?
And, when this happens, what is it that does the embedding part?
Two things seem noticeable about which ones stick. For one, personal experience is often glue-like for something to attach to our consciousness. It is what we associate with certain kinds of thoughts that contributes to its stickiness.
The experience-set we are working with is set in motion early in childhood. It is how we learn and understand things. Those things can be positive or negative, but either way they form the base from which our subsequent thought-patterns emanate. When I was a child, I developed all kinds of perspectives on what I thought things looked like (including what they were supposed to look like). Among other things, I formed impressions about family, marriage, friendship, church, society, money, success, the world, our existence, and God. I developed thoughts (even expectations) about them, without even realizing it, that carried over into my adult life.
Often, as adults, our earlier experience-set is either affirmed or put into conflict by additional experiences. Our thoughts, once again, evolve and continue to take shape from our surroundings and circumstances (especially our painful ones). Whether by continuance or adjustment (sometimes significantly), our experience forms the fabric against which our thought-patterns lay. It deeply sinks the thought-poles of ideas that makes sense to us.
There is another dynamic, too, that has an adhesive quality to it — the mood or energy that is often connected to a pattern of thoughts. It doesn’t take very much of this “mood" about certain thoughts or ideas for that energy to actually become even more significant than the thoughts themselves. Fear, for example, is like this and is often used to tap into an idea; it rides below the surface and energizes the thoughts we have on the surface. Thoughts, in this context, can often become like lightning-rods for our fears.
We have to know that this kind of thing is going on because it is often the energy behind certain thoughts that is what is most important about them. More often than we realize, there are significantly influencing forces prevailing on the thoughts that circulate around us. And, these forces are part of what embed them deep within us. Social-media has done nothing if not confirm this dynamic. In fact, it appeals to it...because it works. It is often selling the energy even more than it is the ideas. If this or that idea falls out of popular favor, we'll just change to the new thing. This is easily done because it runs on the same energy.
Though not completely new in concept, this kind of energy often harnesses our thoughts towards what is wrong with things (using fear again) — we often become near experts at finding flaws with things. And, so, our challenge (and opportunity) is to consider, not only how our thoughts form and are sustained, but also how we can change the dynamic of the thoughts we so actively maintain. It is much harder, for example, to work at discovering what we can do rather than simply pointing out what we can't (or shouldn't) do. Doing this requires that we understand and then reposition how what embeds itself, in our thinking, needs to change.
This could not only affect how we think, but what we think...which might position us to actually do something constructive for the world.
