There Is No One Form of Thinking or Thought

There is no one form of thinking or thought.

Some thoughts are like rehearsing something—repeating the same thought in your mind until you have learned from it.

Some thinking is about combining multiple thoughts to create something new.

Some thinking is more mechanical, like mathematics.

Some thinking is "background" thinking, like how Magnus Carlsen is always thinking about chess positions in the back of his mind.

Some thinking is more like fast-paced, fragmented thought. These thoughts are often shorter and faster.

I enjoy the latter two forms of thinking because they're faster and closer to intuition.

The goal of life (for me at least, but perhaps for others as well) is to understand life itself. Therefore, a logical place to start is with our own thoughts. If we don't understand how we think and how thoughts work, what do we really know?

It's beautiful: life exploring itself and trying to understand itself.

If you want to start this journey too, I have some tips. I've played this game for a long time and simply love it.

Tip 1: You can manually "squeeze" electricity through your brain. It's like grabbing your brain inside your skull and squeezing electricity through it. I mean this literally, not metaphorically.

Tip 2: Write down your thoughts. Some thoughts are short, and some are longer. It helps to write them down because it's possible that you start every thought with the wrong sequence. For instance, you might begin every thought with, "I have to make my parents proud," and only then start the actual thought. That puts unnecessary pressure on yourself. If you identify these patterns, you can begin your thoughts and actions from a different starting point.

Tip 3: You can feel thoughts. Just as you can feel your knee from the inside, you can feel thoughts from the inside of your head. Not every thought occupies the same place in your mind.

Tip 4: You can experiment with the duration of every thought. If you take long thoughts and short thoughts, and you put yourself in the middle, you can let them "count down" to a specific moment so that they all collapse at the same time. This is difficult on a technical level.

Tip 5: Another useful dimension to add is the thoughts that you think about most often. Let's say you have five big thoughts that keep coming back throughout the day. You can write them down or verbalize them so that you find the common ground between them. You'll discover that many things that seem bad (like worrying) are actually good—for example, because they show that you're a responsible person.

Tip 6: This journey never ends.