Trawling through old emails, thought lost, amongst the junk ads and messages from friends was the brief suggestion on what my thesis had to do.
In a nut… “The purpose of your thesis is to clearly document an original contribution to knowledge.”
Three weeks I have sat and thought amongst the general daily necessities. Twenty one days where all I have wanted is to find myself struck dumb with an original thought malformed and craving attention having suddenly been born in my mind.
It’s an interesting idea. The idea of Original Thoughts. Do we have Original Thoughts, or is it just the rearranging of information that we have heard before?
I consider the implications before I start some more serious thinking.
When we kick our mind into gear and the cogs start whirring aren’t we all just endlessly repeating what the Greeks said 2000 plus years ago?
Where did Darwin’s ideas on evolution come from? Come to think of it 2000 years ago where did Greeks get theirs from? There must be an original source. Right?
Perhaps the majority of ideas are only a recycled assembly of previously thought thoughts. Say… 99%. Just reused, recycled pre thought ideas, rearranged for different thinkers.
Now I am repeating my own thoughts.. I remember writing on a school exercise book. “You cannot say anything that hasn’t been said or read anything that hasn’t been read. You can only arrange it for different thinkers.” On reflection, I figure the latter part of that to be truer as I could probably speak in tongues right now with inferred meaning and although no one would have any inclination as to what I said I would have spoken original words.
But what about the Genii? Occasionally, a new one comes along armed with new idea’s. Are these people the original thinkers?
If that is true and it is genius that brings original thought into the world, were all the first people Genii? That would suggest that genius has nothing to do with being exceptionally smart. Unless the criterion for being a genius changes the more people that exist. Newer thoughts being harder to come by and all that.
Since ideas exist, and there was a time at which they didn’t (perhaps before even our first remotest thinking ancestors) all idea’s must have been formed as originals.
So if we admit that humans are capable of completely original idea’s, it does not seem so strange to admit that perhaps the universe is capable of bringing us into existence. If we can do it, surely the vastly more complex universe of ours is capable of it as well. (I must ask a full blown Christian who believes in free will and original ideas.)
So, in the hope that there are still original thoughts to think, I am guessing that I have to reach back through my conditioning, through all the bits of information my subconscious is still trying to assimilate and tap into the rawness of my cognitive skills. To think thoughts un-thought by a human mind. Or at least unrecorded as thought. I imagine that that any thought un-thunk is fair game to a potential genii. Which makes me suddenly ponder words from Richard Bach’s Illusions. “Learning is finding out what you already know.”
Now how does that leave any room for original thought? It feels so true. There have been many times when I have ‘realised’ things I thought I already knew. Can the moment of knowing be preceded way deeper than the moment of me understanding the thought? Perhaps all possibilities are contained in tangled strings of ideas built into our genetic code and our survival as a species depends on us unraveling and understanding as we spew thoughts like ticker tape out into the world to share and nurture others around us. To know being to grow.
So many spiritual beliefs state that the answers lye within us. Maybe I have just realised what that means.
That’s great but I would still like an original thought….
