In high school, my best friend was convinced she had an issue with her mind because she had these reoccurring thoughts that she had no control over. She would have scary thoughts or ideas. Sometimes they were just different in nature but her issues with her thoughts were became so out-of-control that she diagnosed her with a type of OCD and acquired medication to stop the crowding thoughts.
Since I had known my best friend for a while, I felt like there was something wrong with the idea that she self-medicated herself because of ideas she was having. They were never too serious but just things that would come and go and sometimes surprise her. Have you ever had a thought go through your head that surprised you? Maybe you were at a store and you thought "This would be so easy to steal" or you thought "I could just drive this car into a tree". While the most of us would never commit these acts of theft and suicide, the mere thought that we had the ability to frightened us. These thoughts are called invasive thoughts and they are part of human nature.
When Gleick talks about the nature of thoughts, he acknowledges their lack of origin. Perhaps that's why invasive thoughts are so jarring. No one knows where they come from and to think that thoughts of theft could go through are head makes it seem as though our thoughts can control our character. I don't think my best friend ever knew that invasive thoughts were natural and that they really had no precedence over who we are or who we may become.
I remember once that, while cleaning my fish bowl, I looked at my beta Fiero and just thought, "He's so tiny. It would be so easy to just squeeze him." It's a horrible thought and of course I didn't squeeze my fish to death because I loved him, but the idea originated from the thought that his body was small and my body was big. I was the one in control of Fiero's life and I didn't even realize it. I think it's through these invasive thoughts that we can easily see into human nature. It isn't that we are bad but that we recognize that we can do bad. It all depends on what we do with the ideas our thoughts create.
I really never understood what invasive thoughts were until the theory was put forth to me in the book. It's nice to understand that I am not alone in my odd and sometimes frightening thoughts. I agree that analyzing these thoughts are helpful in trying to understand human nature. We can recognize our unkind and misguided, invasive thoughts and reiterate that a thought is not representative of the action we will actually take in life. It is scary to realize that somethings life is in your hands, that you have control over it, like you with your fish. I think it really just determines your character whether you feel the harmful power in your supremacy or whether you feel that it is your job to nurture those things that you may have power over.
ReplyDeleteI always have thoughts run through my head that make little or no sense at all, and at times I am very scared by the things that I will have run through my mind. Once I thought that perhaps the idea of a nuclear war would be hilarious just to see how everyone around the world would react to such a thing. I think that these sort of thoughts are what make us who we are.
ReplyDeleteIt takes a lot of practice to make the invasive thoughts go away, but they will always be there. I utilize these things for my writing from time to time, and I find that when you write these thoughts down on paper it makes them easier to cope with.