What Thoughts Look Like

One question that keeps coming up is about what our thoughts look like when using thought-orb meditation. This article is relatively brief but its purpose is to give a better idea of the attributes of our thoughts and talk about the effective ways to manage them.

One of our most keen abilities is to create. In a very fundamental way, words are what we use to create. Words are essentially symbols--or, more specifically, groups of symbols. To illustrate this I will take an example from one of the most ancient a sacredly regarded languages, Hebrew. The first letter in the Hebrew alphabet (or more specifically, Alephbet) is the letter Aleph. In more modern, printed form, the letter looks something like this:

but in more ancient times, the aleph looked something more like this:

It's what's called a pictograph--in the case a representation of an ox. In fact, the Hebrew word aleph actually means ox. Seen in this form you can even catch its relation to our modern letter A. This gives a little more of a clue about how we are hardwired to represent our thoughts.

We could in turn use the letter A in between two other symbols -- C and R to create the symbol CAR. See how these lines and curves immediately conjured up the idea of a motor, wheels, and all the other sorts of things you think about with a car? This is the way our orbed thoughts can be compiled--as a sort of visual representation of the inner idea.

I would like to note, however, that letters, words and language are something we have developed over time for very conventional reasons like recording information in a tangible way by writing and physically delivering it over long distances or long periods of time. This does not mean it is the best way of transferring thoughts. Our minds are able to condense thoughts in a much more powerful way that can't be fully illustrated on this page.

Here's another example of how powerfully our mind is able to compress and compile thoughts. Lets go back to the word CAR. Allow that word to conjure up an image of an actual car. Now, what is this car a symbol of ? This can be a very subjective thing-- to a teenager a car may represent freedom and independence; to someone else it may represent travel and discovery, while to someone else is may stand for responsibility and obligation; some people would consider a car a symbol of fortune and success; a car can be a symbol of industry and technology in our society; undoubtedly what can act as a source of happiness for one person can bring anxiety and fear to someone else. This is the way thought orbs are form. It's not exactly as symbol as say an orbed thought of fortune and success would physically have an image of a car within it, but for purposes of this article, that's actually pretty close.