Thinking is not intelligence. A better way to look at it is that intelligence does the thinking, it’s not the thinking itself. Although that’s still a shallow way of looking at it because that would be insinuating that you yourself, me myself, does the thinking.
Thinking is way less reliable than that.
What is Thinking?
If you sit and watch what goes on in your mind, just sit silently with a sense of curiosity, and watch what’s going on you’ll notice that it’s always out of control. It’s not like you are doing it.
It’s more like a river flowing by, with very useful (and useless) things in it.
You can have thoughts that are completely meaningless and don’t really have anything to do with you; they just come. Maybe you heard somebody say something and it’s repeating in your thoughts.
Happens all the time. If something gets repeated to you over and over again, your brain will tend to repeat it back. You’ll notice that when you chant a mantra and then it kind of sticks in your head. You’ll notice that definitely with jingles and songs. You are walking along and a song will just come up, right? It’s just going in your head; you’re not really doing it on your own.
It’s a very, very useful thing to have thoughts happening within our field of consciousness. You are the one that’s alive, and that needs these thoughts for various different things.
You need it all. There are so many different perceptions that you need just as much as thoughts. You need sight, you need to be able to hear things, you need to touch, you need to taste; this is just all part of being alive. And you need other people; a human being is not an individual thing. We are so deeply interconnected with each other. Thoughts intwine us because they travel from one person to another.
So, maybe that’s the best way to think about thoughts: they all come from someplace else, some language, somebody said something, you’ve read something. Many things come into your field of consciousness and gets translated into thoughts. But the thoughts themselves are this interconnected wave, an interconnected net between you and everyone you’ve ever known, and everything you’ve ever seen and done.
They are a tool of consciousness. Less than intelligence on their own.
In each of us, as a living human being, is the one experiencing this.