Thought provoking question 1

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by BlackfoxNZ

When did we learn how to think?

Way before birth.

Playing music, etc. before birth seems to help.

[Starman]

Originally Posted by BlackfoxNZ

When did we learn how to think?

It is and assumption that people think. We do not see another person’s thoughts until they express them, yet we assume that all people think.
The adage “I think therefore I am,” is inaccurate; because our existence is not dependant on us thinking. I have no thoughts and I still am.

Having done quiet meditation for more than 40-years, and me being retired from the work-a-day world, there are times when I spend most of
my day in inner silence, with no thoughts whatsoever. Its’ nice to be able to occasionally turn it off.

People think in words and pictures, although pictures are commonly thought to be the domain of imagination. To think in words you have to know
a spoken language, so I do not think that babies think in spoken words until they learn a language, and then they associate that language with
pictures, or their imagination.

Thinking often encompasses memory and desire, past and future, and in this regard an unborn baby in their mother’s womb can have impulses
imprinted on them, from what their mother is doing or saying, and remember those impulses after they are born. This may be considered rudimentary
thinking. Keeping in mind that thought, or thinking, is developmental.

Some people have very rich thoughts, they are in color with all five senses incorporated in their thoughts, while other people have rather ill defined
black and white, or grayish fading, thoughts, with very little detailed contained in them.

We learn how to develop our thoughts and thinking process as we become more conscious of our thinking process. But there are some people
who are just born with creative thinking. There is much said about how beyond this physical world what we think is instantly manifested. So how
we think now is most likely not how we thought as kids, or how we’ll think in the afterlife. The bottom line, I don't know when thinking began.

[CelestialZero]

Do you remember learning how to speak either? An entire language databank, think you just learned it from your parents?

This might sound stupid but I remember being born,probably as it was a difficult birth for my mother but as regarding to talking,I knew what to say from the word go but I didn't know how to move my lips and tongue to make the sound.

[Lord_Viskey]

nothing about that is stupid to me - my first conscious experience of "self awareness" actually came a few more hours later than my birth - but as an infant in my crib, i was aware of my higher soul preparing to enter my physical body for the life i was about to live.... i wrote about this in my "on-line" book. The chapter is called : "The Hall Of Light".

[Rawnrr]

When the first single cell organisms came to life on the planet and felt the need for food....was it instinct or a primitive form of thought? There was no brain, so not a complex process as we would have today, but there was some movement.
Then when the cells decided to work together and become multicellular, was that a thought?
When animals decided to hunt in packs, to work together to survive, was there some movement of intelligence that could be seen as a thought?
When a baby decides it doesnt want the strained peas and throws them on the floor because it wants the apple sauce, that is a choice and therefore a thought..right?
drawing the line can be hard

[neil]

Originally Posted by Rawnrr

When the first single cell organisms came to life on the planet and felt the need for food....was it instinct or a primitive form of thought? There was no brain, so not a complex process as we would have today, but there was some movement.
Then when the cells decided to work together and become multicellular, was that a thought?
When animals decided to hunt in packs, to work together to survive, was there some movement of intelligence that could be seen as a thought?
When a baby decides it doesnt want the strained peas and throws them on the floor because it wants the apple sauce, that is a choice and therefore a thought..right?
drawing the line can be hard

The one & only spiritual universe that our planet resides within, has spiritual laws, woven into the invisible spiritual matter, that is in every space of the spiritual universe.

And those laws govern everything except for our thoughts & free will.
And it is said that those laws that are woven into the invisible matter of the spiritual universe are maintained, monitored & kept in motion by the loving creator, & are within & around all animals, mamals, insects, organisms, plant life etc the entire Earth.

And so maybe, there are laws in place & motion that
Give vital information to non sentient life forms on this planet.
The Heavenly Fathers intelligence & attributes can be found throughout the entire one & only spiritual universe of which we do reside in.
& just maybe, because of the Heavenly entity, all non sentient life on this planet knows how to be nourished.

The word was with God, God was the word..& maybe the intelligent word is working with all non sentient life.

[davidsun]

Originally Posted by neil

The word was with God, God was the word..& maybe the intelligent word is working with all non sentient life.

The idea that there is 'sentient' and 'motivated' and 'non-sentient' and 'unmotivated' (i.e. completely 'law'-governed) being is really a theory. An alternate theory (which I personally subscribe to) is that all being is 'sentient' and 'motivated' just in in a different ways. From my book, Godspeak 2000:

Everybody in existence is spiritually motivated by a mindfully discriminating intrinsic potency. This was termed ‘atman’ or ‘soul’ by sages of old, who recognized everyone and everything as an immediate expression of the universally present, intelligently creative essence which they understood to be the real meaning of ‘Brahman’ and ‘God’. But, because such words have been misappropriated by custom and their significance sometimes grossly distorted by misusage, I generally refer to it alternatively, as Intelligence, Creativity, Life Itself or the Life-Force. However labeled, it is the source ‘element’ from which all Being springs, the core I-Am-That-I-Am, That Which Is at root within each and everyone. (Though the full import of this cause of all causes may yet escape you, the following review and analysis of our catalog of scientific knowledge should at least make its fundamental character obvious.)

Even the simplest cases of what’s called gravitational attraction provide perfect illustration, if viewed without prejudice. Bodies of matter-energy must move themselves, for [there is] nothing [that] really pushes or pulls them one towards the other. And they must perceive both presence and relative location, else they could not attempt to move as they do, with an acceleration proportionate to the mass and proximity and in the direction of coexisting others.

Electromagnetic and nuclear interactions, where repulsion occurs as well, are additionally revealing. Ongoing scientific investigation has led us to understand the fact that sense perceptions are basically ‘gross’ acknowledgments, and that everything is fundamentally a wave-form and nothing is actually solid at core. So, besides there being no substantive means to constitutionally link those bodies which form conglomerates, there is no real ‘boundary’ that so‑called objects bump into when they apparently bounce off one another. The only inference this permits, if one has enough courage and faith in Life not to invent extrinsic agency as a false postulate, is that the movements that bodies make and the stations they take result from the impulses and choices of discerning, autogenic ‘interiors’.

The direction and purpose of such inherent power and intentionality can be deduced from the cumulation and trend of results which have so far occurred. Progressively, the creative essence of Being has conspired to form an array of what, because of our material orientation, we’ve called ‘sub-atomic particles’; these have interacted and engaged in such ways as to produce ‘electrons’, ‘protons’ and ‘neutrons’ which, in turn, have combined to create the various ‘atoms’ and ‘molecules’ we have become familiar with; and these, through more concerted effort, have coalesced into cellular and multi-cellular units, in stages, generating ever more complex aggregations of body, mind and spirit—the whole hierarchy and procession we know as Life.

In ascending sequence, with prior developments integrated and built upon, ‘bodies’ have become more coordinated, ‘spirits’ more potent, ‘minds’ more perceptive, resident Intelligence more designful and adept. Even what some call ‘simple’ single-celled organisms are architectural masters capable of cognizing, culling and compiling environmental ingredients so as to reproduce themselves and further their particular line of development. Each succeeding level of integration further demonstrates the aim of the impetus inherent within all being—that is, to seek and establish cooperative affiliation with suitable others in order to enhance creativity and increase the degree of intelligent actualization.

Another way of 'looking' at the same phenomenon is to 'see' that All That Is is the Mind-n-Spirit constellation which constitutes the Being-n-Doing of a One-n-Only Living Thang, a/k/a 'God'. All beings, whether or not they have 'brains', are sub-components - mini mind-n-spirit aspects of THAT.

The fact that many of them function in consistently similar ways and so appear to follow 'laws' does not change this FACT (that is, assuming it is a FACT - it is a THEORY, really!).

As stated in old-time (now) scriptures: “In HIM we live, and move, and have our being[-n-doing]” (Acts 17:28) and “I am the Seed of all being, …no creature moving or unmoving can live [animists regard all being as 'living'] without Me.” (The Bhagavad Gita, Ch 10).

[BigJohn]

Originally Posted by davidson

Even the simplest cases of what’s called gravitational attraction provide perfect illustration, if viewed without prejudice. Bodies of matter-energy must move themselves, for [there is] nothing [that] really pushes or pulls them one towards the other. And they must perceive both presence and relative location, else they could not attempt to move as they do, with an acceleration proportionate to the mass and proximity and in the direction of coexisting others.

Your view of gravitational attraction does not appear to be in agreement with basic science.

The attractive force that "pushes or pulls" objects toward one another is Gravity.

[davidsun]

Originally Posted by BigJohn

Your view of gravitational attraction does not appear to be in agreement with basic science.

The attractive force that "pushes or pulls" objects toward one another is Gravity.

What YOU call BASIC science is completely MECHANISTIC. It totally rules 'out' ANIMISTIC concepts and principles. According to them 'action at a distance' is JUST a 'field' effect. And YOU are a randomly accumulated 'accident'

From my treatise should you be sincerely open to thinking about and genuinely considering such MATTERs further (instaed of just continuing to make glib remarks 'acting' like you know what you are talking about):

Every aspect of Life (i.e. of Being-n-Doing) is an emanation of Life’s omnipresent Essence (d/b/a Source) that, by virtue of Its Power, is endowed with (1) the capacity to be conscious to some degree, which consciousness, or presence of ‘mind’, enables ‘it’ to ex·peer·ience whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is therefore capable of perceiving (i.e.*registering) and so possibly responding to, and (2) the motive‧ation, or ‘spirit’, to ex·press ‘itself’ by way of causing, (generating, transmitting, propagating, etc.) whatever vibrations (occurrences, data-packets, etc.) ‘it’ is thereby motivated to ‘make’ in response thereto. In full‑zoom perspective, every nodal and multi-nodal feature in Life (including matter-energy) may be ‘seen’ to be a subsidiary soul, or gestalt of Life, which is facultatively imbued with ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ by, and consequently both experiences and expresses ‘itself’ in relationship to and with other nodes of Life ‘in’ the matrixial framework of, a (supranodal!) Soul, which is the Mind-n-Spirit constellation (which many regard and relate to as having personal attributes, though all personal attributes actually derive from It) of THAT which is All That Is.

Orthodox materialists (you maybe, BIGJOHN?) dismiss such idea as being no more than an example of wishful‑thinking because they believe that consciousness (i.e. ‘mind’), and motivation (i.e. intention, will, or ‘spirit’), are just epiphenomena which derive from the electro-chemical activity of molecular-chain linked ‘neural’ circuits, and that any differential discernment and directional movement must therefore simply be the result of innately unconscious and involitional matter-energy configurations (such as photons, atomic particles, molecules, DNA gene sequences and amalgams thereof) all just auto‑mechanistically responding to the influence of equally mindless and innately purposeless tempero-spatial (nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational) power-‘fields’. They therefore ‘see’ what we know as Life as being no more than the composite cause‑effect result of everything and everyone in the Universe just ‘acting out’ essentially soulless, theoretically completely mathematically delineable scripts. Embedded in the above-articulated soulfull☺ model of Life, however, is the possibility that, when and as the fantastically complex aggregation of associated beings which constitute the vehicular platform for one’s earthly experience and expression eventually disintegrates (in other words, when one’s body ‘dies’), the gestalt of one’s mind-n-spirit characterized soul-constellation may nevertheless continue to function as a disembodied psychospiritual entity which ‘lives on’ in the ‘bosom’ (idiomatically speaking☺) of the superordinate, eternally-ongoing because supraphysical (i.e. not temperospatial) Mind-n-Spirit composed Matrix of All That Is. This is the logic that gives rise to otherwise nonsensical scriptural exhortations such as “Labor not for the ‘meat’ which perisheth, but for that ‘meat’ which endureth unto everlasting life” (John 6:27), for instance.

Accounts of (so-called) ‘out of body’ and ‘near death’ experiences provide evidence that, though souls generally don’t wander away from the bodies they are ‘attached’ to (i.e. ‘associated’ with) while one is in a ‘normal’ waking state, they can, and in certain circumstances indeed do, operationally range well beyond the parameters of said bodies and therefore, arguably at least, aren’t just a function of said bodies’ beingnesses. Transcripts of hypnotic regression sessions wherein subjects coherently recall and report past-life and between-life experiences (those documented in Michael Newton, Ph.D.’s books, for example) also lend credence to the metaphysical proposition that personal psychospiritual gestalts, or vital aspects thereof, ‘survive’ the ‘death’ of one’s body and continue to live on in a non-physical realm and may ‘reincarnationally’ enter into partnership-associations with ‘new’ bodies from ‘there’ in order to programmatically execute their ‘innate’ Love and Joy maximization imperative and complete their maturational journey in said regard by way of so doing. For anyone wishing to investigate and contemplate the phenomenon of reincarnation further, the reports and commentary contained in Brian Weiss, M.D.’s various books are additionally corroborative and explanatory.