Thinking and identity

[Magical Realist]

How much of our identity rests on the illusion of us thinking our own private thoughts? Of ourselves conjuring contemplations of an original and creative nature? We are not near so original as we think. How depressing it would be if we could track how many of our thoughts are repeated over the period of a week. We keep returning to the same propositions of a shared language--neither adding nor detracting from the sense of its importance in the scheme of things. How MUCH of our thoughts expresses anything real about ourselves? How much is going thru the same rigamarole about this and that simply a compensation for our immediately felt sense of being nothing? We are not our thoughts. We are our awareness of our thoughts. I will entertain the abstractions that fulfill my immediate needs. I will toss my tokens of agreed-upon value into the wishing well of what I long to become. It is an illusion of being unique and real. In reality, we are all random language machines coming up with the same thoughts and ideas over and over again.

“We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
― Alan W. Watts

[elte]

Sometimes thoughts can be of things about which the thinker lacks knowledge of presently existing language terms. A result is that the progress of civilization gets slowed down. For example, a person could end up figuratively reinventing the wheel.