We’ve been taught to treat thinking as a kind of manufacturing—as though the mind were a workshop and thoughts were products assembled inside it. But thinking is not manufacturing. It’s a relational process—no different in principle from seeing, hearing, tasting, or smelling.
When you see a tree, you never believe your eyes have created it. You recognize that vision is a relationship between you and what already exists. The same with hearing—a sound occurs, and your hearing relates you to it. The sound doesn’t come from you. It comes to you.
Thinking is exactly the same. A thought is not made; it’s met. It’s not manufactured; it’s encountered. A thought is like a sound within the mental realm—something you experience, not something you create. But because thoughts are not tangible like trees, colors, or sounds, we’ve mistaken their invisibility for ownership. We assume that if we can’t see or touch them, they must originate from us.
They don’t. Thoughts are phenomena of relationship, not of invention. They belong to the same domain that ideas do—the domain of the unknowable future, where pure potential resides. Ideas are the preconditions of everything that happens or exists. They are like low-pressure systems that make the weather of the mind possible. The storms are real, but the conditions that allow them never cross into the physical.
So when you think, you are not manufacturing the content of your thought. You are perceiving it. You are hearing the sound of an idea entering the field of your awareness. The thought isn’t yours any more than the sound of thunder is the sky’s property. You are simply present to it, related to it, in the eternal now.
Carl Jung said, “People don’t have ideas—ideas have people.” He meant that thinking is participatory, not proprietary. Thoughts find you. They use your nervous system, your memories, your language, to take on a momentary shape in time. But they are not born there.
To see this clearly changes everything. You stop taking credit for your thoughts the way you would never take credit for the wind. You start to notice that thinking, like seeing, is a bridge—a way of relating yourself to what is, to what’s trying to be known.
Thinking is hearing in the language of mind. Thoughts are sounds from beyond the visible, and you are the one listening.