Do We Create Our Own Thoughts and Feelings?

Teilhard de Chardin described what he called a noosphere, a belt of mental energy that encompasses the earth, and which moves vibrations that can be perceived at the mental level and converted into thoughts and thought-forms. This is similar to the biosphere at the level of the life-energy and the ionosphere that protects the planet through absorption and reflection of solar radiation.

In our normal ego-status, we tend to attach to ourselves the thoughts and ideas and exertions of will-power that we express. We take 'ownership' of them and say that they are 'my thoughts', 'my ideas', 'my will'. If we look more closely at the situation, however, we can see that we did not manufacture these things from raw materials or building blocks of thought, but actually received them from the mental atmosphere, internalized them and then re-broadcast them out, while overlooking or forgetting the source from whence they came originally.

We sometimes wonder how a similar idea, or invention, can develop in multiple places around the world at virtually the same time, without active connection between the individuals involved. Once we see that these ideas are available, and can be received by anyone with the receptivity and preparation to work with them, in some cases based on the spirit of the times that prepares the mind to address certain ideas that previously it was not prepared to entertain, we can easily understand the facts involved.

Similarly, there is a vital atmosphere that communicates emotions and feelings which we can receive and express, without necessarily understanding that they have come from outside, vibrated within us, awakened a corresponding vibration, which we then express as our own feeling or emotion.

The common thread here leads to a new understanding, once we remove the ego attachment from the center of these phenomena. We recognise then that we are receiving and transmitting stations, not original sources of thoughts, ideas, emotions or feelings.

A disciple asks: "But then what is mental and vital will?"

The Mother answers: "That is an expression of something which is not personal. ... If you analyze carefully, you see, for instance, that all that you think has been thought by others, that these are things which circulate and pass through you, but you have not produced this thought, you are not the originator of this thought. All your reactions come from atavism, from those who gave you birth and from the environment in which you have lived, from all the impressions which have accumulated in you and constituted something which seems to you yourself, yet which is not produced by you, but merely felt and experienced; you become aware of it in passing, but it is not you who created it, not you who gave it birth."

"It could be said that these are like sounds -- any kind of sounds: words, music, anything -- recorded by an instrument, then reproduced by another instrument which plays them back like a gramophone, for instance. You wouldn't say that the gramophone has created the sound you hear, would you? That would never occur to you. But as you are under the illusion of your separate personality, these thoughts which cross your mind and find expression, these feelings which pass through your vital and find expression, you think, have come from you; but nothing comes from you. Where is the 'you' which can create all that?"

"You must go deep, deep within, and find the eternal essence of your being to know the creative reality in yourself. And once you have found that, you will realise that it is one single thing, the same in all others, and so where is your separate personality? Nothing's left any longer."

"Yes, these are recording and reproducing instruments, and there are always what might be called distortions -- they may be distortions for the better, they may be distortions for the worse, they may be fairly great changes; the inner combinations are such that things are not reproduced exactly as they passed from one to the other because the instrument is very complex. But it is one and the same thing which is moved by a conscious will, quite independent of all personal wills."

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch.8 Life — A Mass of Vibrations, pp. 180-181