Thoughts are stored like a can of worms?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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My father really enjoyed fishing. As a child/teenager I was introduced to this activity. A memory that popped into consciousness today was the image of a can of worms. The worms inside the can were all intermingled … crawling and weaving among each other … forming a single mass. Attempting to grab the end of any individual worm and pull it away from the “mass” of worms often ended up tearing the worm in two.

The memory of the above image raised a couple of questions:

  1. Is the repository of our individual thoughts a ‘mass’ of intermingled individual thoughts … such that trying to separate an individual thought and examine it carefully is most difficult … perhaps impossible?

  2. Is the confusion/misunderstanding that so often arises when we try to share an individual thought a result of … the thought can only be fully understood when digested with all of the other thoughts in our personal repository of thoughts?

  3. Do our individual thoughts get torn in two when we attempt to separate them in order to share one of them with others?

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I suppose I should have cited an example.

How many thoughts … in my personal memory … are associated/connected with the ‘umbrella like’ thought of knowing/not knowing God?

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More emerging thoughts …

What happens when you throw a worm back into the can? Does the worm wiggle its way back into the mass? Nope. It usually squirms around on top of the mass … for a while anyway.

Is this a decent metaphor for a new thought(one that doesn’t fit an individual’s existing thoughts, patterns and so on) that arrives in the mind of an individual one day?

For me … seems to fit with notion of a beginners’ mind … where individuals are asked to set aside all existing thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and so on as preparation/conditioning for "something’.

Perhaps it’s also analogous to the notion of “first empty one’s mind” before one can transcend human reality. ??