Could Everyone’s Thoughts Originate From the Same Source?

Collective mind, vibrations, and string theory

Defeat accepted.

My sleuthhound efforts to figure out the scientific nature and origin of thoughts have fallen flat on its face.

The field of neuroscience sure has acquired a winning vitae over the years boasting of technologies that show,

• which brain structure relates to which function,
• track the progress of thought in the brain to show how the prefrontal cortex coordinates complex interactions among various regions to convert perception into action, and
• investigate intricate neuron circuitry that is involved in decision-making.

But try asking the same experts —

• how information is encoded in the brain,
• how physical activities like electrical impulses and chemical signals in the neurons lead to mental activities like thoughts and emotions, or
• ask the most elusive question of all — what is the biological purpose of consciousness,

— and suddenly a fog will roll in, viewpoints get muddled, and explanations will turn messy.

When consciousness refuses to conform to the rigid boundaries of science, science is equally uncomfortable giving clear answers about the nature and origin of thoughts.

But if we were to take a step sideways and enter the iffy realm, that magical place where spirituality, philosophy, and mysticism all hold a fair stake, we will notice the fog starting to lift and some interesting theories open up.

The collective mind

According to Eckhart Tolle, there is such a thing as a collective mind.

Many thoughts are not our thoughts really, but they arise in the collective mind as energy fields or energetic entities — like little bubbles floating around.

If the little bubble thought form discovers any resonance with anything inside us, for example, any form of negativity, then a thought form in the collective mind with an even heavier form of negativity will get attracted to our vibration and take hold in our mind.

Thought is a sense

According to Teal Swan, the self-made author and speaker in the field of metaphysics, thought is like a sense.

If mysticism could have a face, I think it would be that of Teal Swan’s, the charismatic and eloquent personality who swims in the deep end of mysticism. Throw any sort of esoteric quandary at Swan and she would tackle it like a boss, but whether she is neo-spiritual or cult material is anybody’s guess.

I normally don’t rely on her teachings, even though some of her talks are just outlandishly brilliant, for the simple reason that I find something disturbing about her. But when dedicated sleuthing fails to yield potent results, one has no choice but to be lenient with the pickings, so here’s me biting dust.

According to Teal Swan, thought is just an observational response to an external stimulus just like every other sense that we have.

We could in fact think of thought as the actual sixth sense. We could think of intuition being any faculty of sense having the capacity to perceive something that exists beyond the physical dimension.

We can observe a thought the same way we can perceive a smell coming from something. But because our thinking, that is inspired by some sort of stimulus from somewhere, takes place in our own minds, we perceive the thoughts to be our own.

This would be similar to perceiving ourselves to be the creator of every sound that we hear in the world.

We are not our thoughts any more than we are our hearing or our sight. They are simply capacities that we have.

The law of attraction

Lastly, I have to include the most intriguing Abraham-Hicks, the biggest proponent of the law of attraction.

If you don’t know who this person is, let me just say that this entity is as kooky as kooky could get in the spiritual realm, but only in the most kickass manner.

If Eckhart Tolle is a gentle breeze then Abraham Hicks is a force of nature.

But I call this person ‘kooky’ because for one, ‘Abraham’ is not a person but, to quote, “a group consciousness from the non-physical dimension”. Abraham imparts the infinite intelligence of the source through Esther Hicks, the inspirational speaker and new-age author.

If this intro got you curious, either google for further clarity or take my word on it and read on, because who cares who said it or in what capacity they said it as long as what was said is mind-opening, yeah?

According to Abraham Hicks, we live in a universe that is vibrationally oriented.

Everything that we see is an interpretation of vibration. So the things that we are calling form, the stuff of our physical world, is our interpretation through our physical senses.

We are not the thinker of our thoughts, but we are the achiever of the frequency that allows us to receive and translate the vibration into a thought.

Not thought, but the thinker

Other awakened spiritualists like Mooji, Adyashanti, Burt Harding, and teachers who have passed on like Ramana Maharshi or Swami Chinmayananda don’t dwell too much on the idea of thought itself.

They rather encourage us to inquire as to who the thinker behind that thought is instead of twisting ourselves to figure out thought.

So in conclusion, the gist of applicable info about a thought that can be gathered from the non-scientific realm is this —

• the action potentials generated in our neurons are not self-generated thoughts, but rather potential potentials from an information field somewhere out there
• thought is an external vibration
• we are simply energetic beings that tune into these signals in order to paint our reality.

The majority of the scientific community wouldn’t want to touch this kind of an outlandish interpretation with a ten-foot pole. In fact, this is precisely the kind of psychobabble that is ripe for slaughter in scientific forums. No true-blue scientist would want to be caught contemplating consciousness in terms of vibrations and frequencies.

But interestingly, there is one area of science, an area that was actively pursued by Einstein and Hawking that seems to support, if not in so many words, the same vibratory concept proposed by the mystics.

All of the universe in one equation

Physicists are a curious lot who dare to foray into the far, eerie, and dark reaches of the cosmos to learn how the universe works armed with nothing but their brains, equations, and a whiteboard. They take it as their God-bestowed honor and duty to explain everything about the universe within physical laws established by humans.

These number-crunchers and deep space-gazers slogged for years and came up with two absolute theories to explain our world —

• The General Theory of Relativity that explains large-scale phenomena like gravity
• Quantum Mechanics that explains the universe on small scale like subatomic particles.

Both of these theories are experimentally solid and accurate in their own realms. But they don’t go hand in hand.

General relativity presents an elegant and orderly universe bound by the smooth fabric of spacetime. Quantum mechanics is chaotic and unpredictable with its, “I could be here, I could be there, but until you actually look at me, I wouldn’t decide where!”.

This probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics being in conflict with the reliable general relativity may drive physicists up the wall, but it is never really a problem in the real world.

This is because almost everything in our universe governed by the laws of physics uses only one or the other theory to explain its workings — except for the two hulking phenomenons in our universe, the big bang and black holes that incorporate both contradicting theories in their works.

“In the central depths of a black hole an enormous mass is crushed to a minuscule size. At the moment of the big bang the whole of the universe erupted from a microscopic nugget whose size makes a grain of sand look colossal. These are realms that are tiny and yet incredibly massive, therefore requiring that both quantum mechanics and general relativity simultaneously be brought to bear.” —

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

So in their usual, headstrong ways, the physicists strongly believed that there has to be one elegant and mathematically-consistent higher theory that can explain what was before the big bang, what is inside a black hole, and fill all the gaps in between to tie everything together beautifully.

Why physicists want to fix the universe of its chaos and contradictions is truly beyond me, but like I said, physicists are a curious lot.

So their persistence pushed them back to their whiteboards to find the one grandiose Theory of Everything.

Einstein was one of the first enthusiasts to propose the possible existence of such a theory that would bring all of the fundamental forces and particles in nature together. Even though this did not happen in his time, in the subsequent decades, after numerous physicists’ relentless efforts, one theory emerged as a promising candidate to resolve the search — String Theory.

Vibes of the universe

Up until not so long ago, atoms, the greek term for indivisible, were considered to be the fundamental particle of all matter.

Upon smashing these atoms together, physicists figured out that atoms are after all very much divisible and the misnomer fundamental had to be passed over to protons and neutrons.

Thanks to quantum theory, they subsequently realized that protons and neutrons further contained quarks, which then became the new fundamental and suddenly the standard model of elementary particles looked like a messy array of bosons, fermions, charges, spins, flavors, and masses.

To put everything in place came along string theory, the magical unifier of quantum gravity

String theory boldly asserted that —

• Deep inside every zero-dimensional fundamental particle is one-dimensional, string-like energy structures that vibrate in different frequencies to give rise to different particles. In other words, all particles of matter are fundamentally different vibrations of the same string. The string vibrating at a certain frequency will give rise to electrons and the same string vibrating at another frequency will give rise to photons. Strings are the bottom line fundamental of all fundamental particles, which means that strings are not made up of anything but they are what make up other things.
• Our universe has 11 dimensions in total out of which we can only observe the three spatial ones and one for the time while the rest of the dimensions are tucked away from our perception within the tiny oscillating strings. It is all about the scale, just like how a three-dimensional car at the far horizon appears as a dot or a cylindrical overhead electrical wire appears as a thin line from a distance. As these tiny extra dimensions are infinitesimally small, they are simply ‘compactified’ and curled within our observable dimensions.
• The shape of these extra dimensions determines the vibrational patterns of the strings which in turn determine the physical laws of our universe. It turns out there are an innumerable number of shapes allowed by the mathematics of string theory, which leads the theoretical physicists to claim that these innumerable shapes would give rise to innumerable universes, or rather multiverse, in the neighborhood of 10 to the power 500 universes, each with its own physical laws.

Issues with string theory

Any theory that can explain the universe at an extremely small distance and high energy cannot be experimentally tested because of the enormity of the cosmos and the limitations of modern equipment. This makes string theory untestable.

Also, string theory is a speculative theory that hinges precariously on many hypotheses, which in the way of explaining the first speculation ends up throwing five different speculations in the mix.

But string theory also stands tall on the robust mathematical framework that conversely makes it promising, profound, and hard to ignore.

Are thoughts and consciousness a clue to something bigger?

Our brain is known to suppress and manipulate our perception of reality to enable smooth functioning. Over the period of evolution the brain became a master storyteller that weaved million different stimuli coming in through our senses into one seamless panorama that we call reality. But in the process, the brain imposed limitations on what it takes into account and what it leaves out.

The brain shows us the world through three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, which is a highly diluted version of the whole reality out there and nobody can tell what is being missed.

If so, then what if the 11 dimensions proposed by string theory are very much real and built into our existing reality, but our hitler brain wouldn’t process more than four because it doesn’t serve our species’ evolutionary purpose?

What if the observable universe is a four-dimensional subspace of the 11-dimensional superspace that holds access to a bigger, all-encompassing consciousness.

What if the only way to touch those other dimensions is to surpass the brain of its tyranny, which is precisely what some enlightened people do when they quiet their minds and bliss out in the Absolute Silence?

Testable or untestable, cosmic unifier or a scientific dead-end, in light of what string theory hypothesizes, is it possible that different thoughts are simply different vibrations of the one energy structure that we call consciousness?

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”

Nikola Telsa

“If you are plotted anywhere near me on the spiritual graph or if you find my journey relatable, please follow me for more rants, raves, and reflections.”