What's in your head?

Dis-identifying ourselves from ‘our own’ thoughts.

We usually identify with a lot of things, most of all with our own thoughts. Except that, which we call ‘our thoughts’ (ideas, knowledge, beliefs) is nothing more than the information that we have accumulated over our lifetime. If you talk about communism you most certainly have been born after Carl Marx. Had you been born before him, you would not have spoken of the hammer and sickle, you would have talked about something else. Even the fact that you are able to create new ideas by mixing different data is an equally great illusion. We basically repeat things that we have heard or read somewhere, and those that we claim to be original combinations of ideas, have already been expressed by who knows how many others before us. We are part of an ocean of thoughts. We read something and then expect to pass it off as ours; we appropriate it. And, from that moment on, we really think that the thought belongs to us, we identify ourselves with an idea or with a particular (actually, we judge it as particular) version of that idea.

I'm sure this has happened to you. You tell someone something, and, just a few months later, you hear from this same person the same thing that you had previously told them. It is as if this person has had a new thought they must urgently share with you. This is more common than we might think, and we must not let it upset us - this is inherent to how the human mind works.

K. G. Jung called this phenomenon cryptomnesia and, in his book, Psychology Of Occult Phenomena, he reports a famous and very clear case of this phenomenon:

Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra At the time when Zarathustra was staying on the blessed islands, a ship anchored close to the island on which the smoking mountain stands; and his crew went ashore to hunt for rabbits. And, towards noon, when they had once again gathered all together, the captain and his men suddenly saw a man coming towards them through the air, and a voice distinctly said: «It is time! This is the moment!» But when the figure came closer - and passed by them flying swiftly like a shadow in the direction of the volcano - they were greatly amazed to realize that it was Zarathustra [...] . «Look here», said the old helmsman, «here is Zarathustra as he goes to hell!»

Kerner The Seeress of Prevorst The four captains and a trader, Mr. Bell, went ashore on the Island of Stromboli, to shoot rabbits. At three, while making the crew’s attendance, before returning on board, they saw, with indescribable amazement, two men who were quickly flying through the air towards them. One was dressed in black, the other in grey. The two darted around them and, with great terror, they went down in between the blazing flames in the crater of the terrible volcano, Stromboli. In these two men they recognized some friends from London.

I do not think there is any doubt about the fact that one of them has ‘copied’ the other. Now, the curious thing is that Kerner wrote these lines about fifty years before Nietzsche wrote the famous, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. So, it is a case of unconscious plagiarism, since, as Jung pointed out, Nietzsche had read Kerner during his adolescence, but if he had wanted to copy him voluntarily, he would have at least left out the unimportant detail about hunting rabbits.

Original ideas are rare, and they are the result of a creative process that has its roots in the substrate of existing knowledge. Know that even Copernicus, though he was a bearer of a revolutionary idea that predicted that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round, simply retrieved a very ancient theory. About eighteen centuries before, in fact, a Greek astronomer, Aristarchus of Samos, had introduced the same idea, but no one was able to believe him. So, was Copernicus an imposter? Of course not! The Polish astronomer has made his own contribution, especially by providing the theory with a credible mathematical framework and ensuring that the knowledge of mankind would proceed in its evolution. Afterwards, someone corrected his errors (the Sun, for example, is not a fixed star) and pursued the topic further. Anyway, at best, each of us is a contributor, not an originator. If you have had some original insights in your life ... good, but keep in mind that you are pursuing something that has certainly begun a long time ago and that most of the thoughts you have in your head do not actually belong to you. The vast amounts of what we say, consists of thoughts that have been recycled and chewed over countless times by countless people. But best of all, there is nothing wrong with this, on the contrary. Try to look at this from another point of view: you are continuing a great tradition of thought (scientific, philosophical, or any other kind), “a link in a chain” that goes on and keeps alive the work of many people who came before you. Do you not feel better? Do you not feel you are in great company? Do you not feel that you are accompanied by a terrific force that sustains you?

Taken from the book "Flying with your feet on the ground - Finding the meaning of life in our daily gestures"