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The quantum of thought

In an earlier post (If this then that – why life is the way it is!) I began to explain how I’d come to find out about the three principles and the journey of discovery I’ve had so far. On a recent Liberate your Thinking retreat in Weymouth with very lovely Caroline Brewer, Liz Scott and Stu Newberry I found myself talking about the quantum nature of thought and Liz challenged me to find a way of explaining what I meant as it was pretty garbled at the time.

Thought comes and thought goes; in our personal mind some thoughts can become ‘sticky’, as if they have little spider legs that attach themselves to the web of ‘reality’ we’re creating for ourselves. What I’d failed to understand before the last retreat I attended though was that the feelings we have may not necessarily be related to the thoughts we think we were having!

If I understand it correctly the average person living in a thought based reality might have a ‘process’ for the thought/feeling train a bit like this:

  1. Thought, thought, thought, thought, thought – thoughts come and thoughts go, and mostly we don’t pay too much attention to them as they drift through;
  2. Then we get a feeling – anger, sadness, happiness, joy, contentment, frustration,  – whatever is coming up in the moment;
  3. We ask ourselves something along the lines of ‘Why am I feeling like this?’;
  4. A thought pops into our head about the reason for the feeling which provides a neat little hook you can use to explain the feeling;
  5. In so doing we assume the thought we’ve just had is the one one that triggered the feeling!

But, that’s impossible, it can’t happen like that. And the reason it’s not possible is because thought comes before feeling – in fact our feelings are a great insight into our state of thought at any given moment. The feeling was triggered by a thought, or series of thoughts that happened before the one you cast about for to explain the feeling!

And here’s the quantum of thought bit ..

At it’s most basic, quantum theory suggests that all things/states are possible until the act of observation forces them to become formed. So here’s the thing – thought exists in multiple states until the point at which you (casting about for a reason for the feeling) become an observer of Thought and the thoughts passing through your head, at which point one solidifies into ‘so that’s why I’m feeling like this’!

Of course, there is much more to where I’m going with this than I’ve just explained and as soon as I have more clarity I’ll add another post.


If you are curious to know a bit more about the three principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, then it might be worth having a look at The Inside Out Revolution by Michael Neill. It was one of the first books I read that began to explain the three principles after my first retreat in the middle of last year. It introduced me to the concepts that are taking my mind by storm and radically changing the way I live, and love, my life.

Image courtesy: Geralt at

Linda Parkinson-Hardman


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