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How do you think new thoughts? It's a practical question. We all say we want to be creative, that our world needs new ideas. But when was the last time you had a really, truly, new thought?
When was your whole mind refreshed and stunned, by the shape and rustling of a thought that you had definitely not thought before? How was that? When was the last time your wild and sane four-dimensional antenna-brain encountered, incredibly, a thought that was completely orthagonal to every thought it had ever encountered before?
If it was really new, this thought probably somehow dismantled your usual habits of thinking, while also opening up a wide new expanse along which more ideas started to gather. When did this happen most recently in your mind? And more importantly, how will you create the conditions for it to happen again, soon?
We are all much more closed-minded than we think, because we haven't committed to systematic processes to make-new our thinking. We like to think we're creative but most of our creativity is nothing more than shuffling and reshuffling the same old, outdated, worn-out concepts and conventions. Usually we take some material we know, fit it into old patterns that we remember from some other place and time, and call it "creative." That's not what I mean by new — at best, it's novel. It's easy to get stuck in familiar and crusty loops, it's easy to convince yourself that what you're doing is new because it's a nifty, cozy, convenient rearrangement of good old stuff. And it's very hard to notice that there's nothing new about that at all. To create space to think new thoughts requires, first and foremost, the willingness to actually open your mind.
"I'm open-minded!" you say. "I think new thoughts all the time!" How marvelous that is. Feel free to skip the rest, wonderous open-minded person. If I ever meet you I will be excited for our interaction because I'm pretty sure you'll blow my mind by your presence, the quality of your listening, and the effects you have on my thoughts. I would love to meet more people like you.
If you, on the other hand, like me, struggle with accessing actually new thoughts, I would like to share some perspective and practices that have helped me do so.
What is it like to think new thoughts?
At the California Academy of Sciences I saw a seahorse that blew my mind. It was so, so tiny; it was practically transparent; its body was more intricate than a three-dimensional Persian rug, covered in filigree encrustations. When was the last time you saw an animal you'd never, ever in your life seen before? Thinking a new thought is kind of like that.
How do you know your thought is new? A rule of thumb: if you're talking a lot, it's probably not. New thoughts pop into being out of a more quiet atmosphere. If you've been listening a lot — to your inner space, listening really carefully to the world and what others are saying and doing and to silent things like plants and candlelight — you just might crystallize a brand new thought.
Maybe you are sitting there thinking and working and brainstorming and ideating, looking for new thoughts. Here's the thing. If on some deep, deep deep level all your efforts are energized by a fear of some kind, even a tiny fear, you are probably not going to have actually new thoughts. Are you worried about the kids? your reputation? your safety? It's pretty normal to cover up a deep-seated fear with a lot of words.
In fact, fears and their entailments often mask themselves beautifully by wrapping themselves in a thick package of reasonable-sounding words. Why do you think people talk so much? They are rehashing, justifying, trying to come to terms with their fears. Talking probably won't help too much though. A really new thought feels completely different than all of that. It lifts you completely out of fear-space. But it takes some preparation to get there. Here are some things that have helped me, gradually, make way for murmurations of quiet, translucent, crowned sea-royalty of my mind.
Three practices that make way for new thoughts
You can't force new thoughts to be thunk by you. If you've forced them, they probably aren't new! But you can create a world in which they, like those exotic sea-creatures, might like to live. A world that is home for the new probably has the TV turned off most of the time, has relatively few mirrors, and good social media hygiene. Beyond that, I've found the following to help coax these thinks into appearing.
Divination
An ancient widsom practice, divination is the act of asking "the Universe" something, and using a chance operation in a structured and committed way to derive an answer. This process involves, first, forming a serious, honest question: a question that you really don't know the answer to, a question for which you're really open-minded, open-hearted, open to be changed. Carrying out the chance operation provides a way to focus your attention and energy in a gesture of open-minded inquiry. Once you receive the answer, which is always shocking, always familiar, always cryptic, there is a process of integrating this strange new creature into your world — a process which can last days or months.
My divination practice involves the I Ching. I am always stunned by the perfection and utter newness of the guidance it provides.
Rituals
I believe that creating, refining, and honoring rituals creates the conditions for the new, too. In one sense it might seem counterintuitive to imagine that doing the exact same thing, the exact same way, over and over and over again, would lead to new thoughts. But it does!
Because of the order, the repetition, the simplicity, and the aesthetics of a ritual, your inner space is cleared and opened, and you begin to notice finer and finer details with each iteration. Eventually, and practically unbidden, new thoughts in the shape of groundbreaking words, phrases, or images pop into your mind as you dwell in your ritual space: over a cup of coffee, during a morning walk, on the empty page of your journal, as you practice.
Randomness
I've also found that being systematically random is a wonderful way to come in contact with newness. I'm part of many communities — at work, as a tango dancer, as part of my changemaking network — and in each of these I participate in random-matching programs that pair me up with a fellow community member for a conversation.
I always make time for these conversations even though I have a packed life with lots of commitments and projects — for me, talking with someone I didn't choose has a way of leading straight to the new. These conversations have been infinitely generative and, when I engage with them with real spaciousness and curiosity, they tend to bring me into contact with surpising new ways of putting my world together. Wow, you're doing that? You're into that-thing-I-never-heard-of-but-which-sounds-so-rad? I've discovered extraordinary films, surprising thinkers, and other resources that would have never in a million years gotten my attention from these systematically random converations with people I share values and community with.
There are many, many more ways of accessing the truly new — from plant medicine to labyrinths. I believe that any authentic spiritual path is a guidebook to thinking new thoughts all the time. (Other less fun ways to think newly are crises and illnesses.) In the absence of authentic spiritual communities, and assuming we want to avoid the less fun methods, we need to work harder. Here are some ways to do that:
Honest research. As a professional researcher, I believe that it is actually quite hard, subtle work to find new thoughts in research; it's easy to replicate your own mental models instead. The next time you're researching something, how could you do it with more humility?
Deep listening. How often have you experienced being "really" listened to? Probably most people you know feel listened to about as often as you do — which is rarely. Consider upskilling your listening using Otto Scharmer's framework.
Learning from children. Many adults are continuously using their interactions with children to impose ideas on them, get them to do things, and accrue social status among other adults. If you can find it in your heart to humbly and non-patronizingly simply observe and listen to young children, you will very likely think many many thoughts you never thought before.
Developing relationships. Persisting to develop understanding in a relationship that challenges you is so easy to avoid, with all the comfortable distractions in our world. But leaning into those frictions and accessing a sense of your partner's reality helps new thoughts come.
Persisting in an art. Persisting to develop skill in a pursuit you find difficult, as part of a community or practice, will almost certainly engender new thoughts. For most people this is hard because, again, there are so many comfortable distractions — and it's hard to find healthy communities.
My little niece, who is two, is new. She has the most charming habit of gently taking my hand and saying, authoritatively yet questioningly, in her tiny perfect voice, "Maybe we could..." When I follow her, we go on miniature adventures — moonlit romps, kitchen mischief, water odysseys. Her gesture of possibility is the enactment of neurons making tingly and wonderous new connections. She is the new: every moment of every day.
As you get addicted to the new, the next path will come into being. Accept the tiniest invitations that feel completely different. It's easy to download the same old ick all the time and regurgitate it in different patterns. But what the world needs now is for you to think new thoughts — mindblowing, regal, lacelike, drenched in the bright bold colors of your soul. I hope you feel ready to build a context where that will happen for you, and to gift all of us with the new thoughts that only you can think.