Thought as an Event in the Universe

We have come a long way from the illusion of complete control to the realization that we are co-authors, prisoners of language and time. But even in this complex picture, a fundamental assumption remains: there is a certain “I” that observes, struggles, accepts, or returns to the present. Contemporary neurophilosophy and cutting-edge interpretations of physics call into question even this last bastion of our identity.
What if the “I” is not an essence, but merely a useful illusion created by the brain? Neurobiologists such as Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris argue that our sense of ourselves as a single, continuous author of our thoughts is a post-factum interpretation. The brain is a decentralized system consisting of many competing modules. The thought “I want tea” is not born in some central “command center.” Rather, it is a winning coalition of neural ensembles that, having broken through to the forefront of consciousness, is labeled with the convenient tag “my desire.” Consciousness in this model is not so much a director as a press secretary who comes out to the public and announces a decision already made behind the scenes, passing it off as his own. A thought occurs, and the brain retroactively constructs a story that “I” thought it. In this light, the question of “owner” becomes meaningless: how can you be the owner of something that you only attribute to yourself?
This idea echoes some interpretations of quantum mechanics. At the subatomic level, the world exists not as definite objects, but as a cloud of probabilities that “collapses” into a specific state only at the moment of observation. If our consciousness and brain ultimately obey the same laws, what is a thought before we “think” it? Perhaps it is just one of countless potentials in the quantum field of our mind. And the act of “thinking” is not creation, but merely the fixation, the “measurement” of one of these probabilities. Who or what makes this choice? Is it an act of our will, or is it a fundamental randomness built into the fabric of reality itself? Once again, we encounter a boundary where our intuitive understanding of causality and authorship dissolves.
It is at this boundary, where all concepts collapse, that philosophy converges with mystical experience. In all spiritual traditions, there is the concept of “ego dissolution” or “union with the Absolute.” This is a state in which the duality of “I” and “thought,” ‘observer’ and “observed” disappears. In such moments, a person experiences themselves not as a separate mind generating thoughts, but as the field of consciousness itself, in which thought arises as a local event, just as a wave arises in the ocean.
A wave is not something separate from the ocean; it is the ocean itself in motion. Similarly, a thought is not something that belongs to “me”; it is the universe thinking itself through the local structure we call the “brain.” In this experience, there is neither master nor slave. There is only a single, holistic process. “My” thoughts are no more “mine” than the beating of “my” heart or the rotation of ‘my’ planet. These are events that occur in the broader context of existence, in which “I” participate but do not control.
Thus, our path to answering the original question turns into a ladder of ascent and subsequent dissolution:
1. First, we are naive **masters**, confident in our omnipotence.
2. Then we are perplexed **navigators**, struggling with the elements.
3. After that, we are humble **co-authors**, working with what is given.
4. Next, we are awakened **observers**, not identifying with the flow.
5. And finally, we come to realize ourselves as **the flow itself**, as an integral part of existence, in which thought is just one form of its eternal dance.
Is a person the master of their thoughts? No. But they can reach a state in which this question loses all meaning. Because the one who could be the master and the thing they could possess merge into an incomprehensible unity called Life. True freedom is not power over thought, but liberation from the very idea of power.

With gratitude and silence,
Zohar Leo Palffy de Erdod
“Between Thoughts”