Meditation: "Where Do Thoughts Come From?"

Yesterday I had a wonderful but mystifying experience – one I’ve had countless times before. I spent several frustrating hours trying to organize some ideas for the upcoming weeks of school, all for naught, when suddenly, around 3:00, marvelous thoughts started coming to me. As I sat at the computer listening to some quiet Mozart music, I found that I couldn’t write the ideas down fast enough. They flowed in like water from a faucet that had suddenly been turned on. Not long afterward, when I had finished making some very exciting plans for my classes, I pondered what had happened. I asked myself these bewildering questions: Where did those thoughts come from? Who exactly made them, and how? Of course, the easy answer is: They came from me because I made them. That’s the simplistic response I would have given any time in the past forty years. But not anymore. It’s too facile, too superficial. It ignores the utter mystery of the experience – the fact that I was dumbfounded and stymied for several hours, and then the ideas suddenly began appearing, as though “out of nowhere”. If this person called “I” couldn’t make the thoughts in the morning, how did the ideas abruptly start occurring in the afternoon? And who is this “I”, anyway? Isn’t it just another thought? Is there really a separate physical entity called “I” which somehow manufactures thoughts, or is there just the flow of thoughts, of which “I” is simply one of innumerable others? This mystery reminds me, as it often does, of Jesus’ statement about the wind. He told the apostles that the “spirit” is like the wind. It comes “out of nowhere” and blows where it wants to, and no one can tell where it came from, how it started, or where it is going. I guess all I can say is that a fresh wind of wonderful thoughts about teaching suddenly blew through my apartment yesterday, and my students should be the beneficiaries next week.