Finding First Thoughts
- emmanuel
- Jun 8, 2023
- 2 min read
Learn how to access your uncensored thoughts for your writing
How well do you know your mind? I’m sure you’re thinking, “It’s my mind, so I know it well.
But what if I told you that you may have had a thought before that one? You probably did, it was just filtered out before your conscious mind was even able to detect it. The first thought you had could have been anything- it may have had nothing to do with the question at all, but you don’t know. You can’t. You, just as I, have been trained to filter out the ‘first thoughts’ of the mind, as author Natalie Goldberg¹ refers to them. First thoughts are our initial reactions to experiences, and learning to access them is an invaluable skill, especially for writers.
Researcher Daniel Bar-Tel defines self-censorship of information as “intentionally and voluntarily withholding information from others”.² When it comes to first thoughts, however, our mind censors itself automatically. As we grow up, we are taught right from wrong, acceptable from unacceptable. We internalize these lessons, turning them into subconscious reactions, such as reflexively clenching your bottom when you have to pass gas in public, or ignoring your minds’ initial response to an experience.
While writing without knowledge of the first thoughts is not necessarily withholding information intentionally, it is still withheld nonetheless. If it’s not withheld, it’s modified — our Ego softens it, shapes it, molds it into something our logical mind believes is more appealing, more acceptable, and better suited to be sent out into society. This is not how we have truly experienced or gained knowledge of whatever it is we’re writing about, and therefore it is not authentic and true. That’s why we need to retrain our brains, giving
ourselves the choice to censor or not.
Read full article ...
Comments