I just saw a great talk about the neuro-physics of human eyes. One take-away was the remarkable difference between what we believe we are paying attention to, and the actual movements our eyes make.
One basic difference is that we tend to believe that our gaze is continuous, because our minds construct an illusion of continuous change of gaze. In fact, our eyes more often change their gaze by darting around in an extremely fast and discontinuous way, through extremely rapid saccade movements.
I wonder whether this generalizes. Perhaps our thoughts work the same way. Maybe our subjective experience of continuous thought is also a trick of perception.
Perhaps the reality, below our level of conscious perception, is that our thoughts actually proceed through a series of mental saccades, jumping in wildly and in divergent ways from moment to moment, with the illusion of continuous thought merely an illusory construct overlayed on top.
this meditator can confirm a kind of saccadian rhythm to thoughts. but it’s possible to develop other patterns. the interesting question becomes: what is a thought. it gets quite fuzzy…kind of like looking at the Milky Way.