Who is the thinker of thoughts? I was driving to pick my kids up and had I borrowed my wife’s vehicle. I was pressed for time and didn’t look in the back before I left. As I was driving, I began to wonder whether or not the back was clean. I was on a hill and a car was approaching from the opposite direction. And I made the distinction tha this was neither the time nor the place. The car safely passed and while still climbing the hill, I quickly looked back to find the seats clean. What a relief. What… what a relief that the seats were clean or that I didn’t die?
So how is it that I could both control the impulse generated from the thought and simultaneously not control it while controlling the thought? Well, look back to my previous paragraph. How many times did I say “I?” How many times did I reference myself? So then where was the deflection? My kids. Something bigger than me, no better reason to look back away from oncoming traffic halfway up the top of a hill. But it wasn’t about my kids because they weren’t even there. I checked, remember?
The seats were empty and clean; the calm before the storm. But I was by my lonesome in this car. The thoughts may come out as spontaneous and they do quite often but it’s our focused attention upon them, and the subsequent chain of thoughts that follow which leads to distractions, distracted minds, outbursts, and impulsive behavior. I began thinking about the thought, and it still didn’t focus me on driving. So then when I thought that I had command of the thought, it was still neither the time nor the place, and once again my ego, which was trying to rationalize the whole affair to notice that we were still traversing up a fucking hill by that I mean the Royal We, because again it was just little ol’ me in the car.