The quantity of conscious thought

I am inclined to wonder how many thoughts and feelings pass through my attention centre in a day? And how many of these lead to action? The questions are simple but answering them involves being organized, self disciplined and systematic. A method is presented below:

1. Commit to sit for at least 5 minutes (I use the countdown tool on my mobile phone).
2. Keep count of the number of conscious thoughts and feelings that enter the attention centre. (I use a tally system).
3. Do this several times and include different times of day.
4. Note how many of the thoughts and feelings lead to action.
5. Calculate the average number of thoughts and feelings in five minutes.
6. Multiply by 12 to get the hourly number.
7. Multiply by 16 to get the number of thoughts and feelings in the waking hours of a day.    

My recent average was 60 in five minutes and none that I was aware of led to action. That gives 720 per hour and 11,520 per waking day. And, by multiplying up that is 4,205,000 per year and 294,350,000 per 70 year lifetime.

Remember that these were conscious thoughts and feelings – and thus the tip of an iceberg. The unconscious is churning out thoughts and feelings all the time – even when I am sleeping. Only a very limited number of these get transferred across to consciousness.

By way of having a number let us say that only one in a hundred of the unconscious thoughts and feelings get transferred. That comes out at 294,350,000,000 (two hundred and ninety five billion) thoughts and feelings in a lifetime. This can be rounded to 300 billion.

This line of thought was included in my June 2011 compilation called “Muse flows in the Zone”. The two results are in the same order of magnitude. Chap 5 was called “Many Passing Thoughts” (14 Feb 2008) and Chapter 6 was about “How to Capture Passing Thoughts” (17 Aug 2007).

These days I am inclined to the view that the unconscious is massively more important and busy than was previously thought. The conscious and especially the self conscious aspects of the mindbrain are evolutionary newcomers. Even so they have played a key role in transforming planetary resources into human biomass. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen?

In the meantime I continue with mindfulness practice and with awakening the equanimous and non judgemental witness to whatever thoughts and feelings the unconscious chooses to transfer to the conscious.