Found Your Thoughts Yet?
Or, more properly, have you found the source of your thoughts yet? Again, the question is not the source for the content of your thoughts, which is the culture you grew up in. The question is, how do thoughts get into your head? Where do they come from?
Maybe you have an answer that makes sense to you. If so, please let us know what it is. I have no idea.
One of the more puzzling and controversial ideas in Buddhism is not self. The Buddha refused to answer a direct question on this topic. A useful discussion is here. (The source at that link is an excellent place to look for concrete, specific, well informed answers about any question pertaining to Buddhism. Go there.)
Buddhists mostly believe in rebirth. If there is no self, what gets reborn? Someone asked Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan master, that once and he replied, “Your neuroses.” He liked to use “neurosis” as a shorthand explanation for the human condition. A “neurosis” is a very minor instance of mental illness — something that is clearly nonsensical and somewhat dysfunctional, but not incapacitating. We all have them.
Recurring to our distinction between mind in the sense of “monkey mind” and consciousness as the seat and source of everything, we might say that mind is the locus of neuroses, and consciousness is where we end up when we eliminate our neuroses. We can…
