Thinking about Thinking and Thinking Pleasant Thoughts

The Game I just lost the Game.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_%28mind_game%29


The object of the Game of course, is not to think of the Game. Once you think about it, you have to say it out loud to at least one person, but you can say it to everyone around. There's anywhere between 30 second and 30 minutes where you can talk about the Game as much as you want, a "Grace period" in order to reset the Game, but this period changes from people to people.

One time I went to my philosophy of knowledge (epistemology) professor Dr. John Carroll. I told him about the Game, and he said, "Well, then I've been playing for a long time."

The funny part of this is that he wasn't joking in the least (contradiction much?).


I play another version of this, at least what I consider another version of this, as outlined by Eckart Tolle in his New Age-Spirituality (Eastern Philosophy?) book A New Earth.

Tolle recommends considering, "What will I think next?" as a way of getting a hold on the stream of consciousness.

So the way that I play this with myself is, "I wonder what I'm going to think of next." And then I wait. Then I have a thought that's really funny like, "This is a thought."

Another strange thing happened: I realized after playing Tolle's version of the Game, that a great deal of my thoughts are so reactionary to what is going on. The mind flow stream is influxed and injected with all sorts of stuff going on that is outside of the mindstream.

Another interesting thing that happens when you pay attention to your thoughts is you start to notice the evolution of thoughts within yourself. So a couple of weeks ago, if I were thinking about hamburgers, that might come up in conversation this week, seemingly "randomly." (I wrote a bit on the philosophy of entropy on this Blog a while back).