Most often we are not.
Sorry this is a complex subject - A good question, that keeps coming up - and that I hope you will investigate
I’ll just say that everything is changed by observation - and also that the thought observed probably arose complete before appraisal.
Appraise as in coherency. We know the problem is not thought, per se, but incoherent thought.
If there is a problem with thought - its our relationship with thought, our dependance on thought.
Coherent with what? The External bank of Knowledge, our Internal standards? To what end? Who decides?
Yep…who indeed? That’s the question.
Coherent with itself. Thinking that doesn’t include necessary information, includes false information, is contradictory or inaccurate, and goes uncorrected.
You refer to thought as “conditioned” as if all thought is incoherent. Thought is conditioned in that it is a process learned from experience, but it isn’t a problem when it is coherent. For instance, psychological thought is incoherent because it regards a fictional entity (the self) as real.
I can’t see the relation between conditioning and coherency - how did you make the leap? I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything of the sort, sorry. Coherence is something that is valued in logic for example.
But why are we discussing this? For example, if someone had the most accurate and coherent thought ever, what would we have gained?
That someone’s thought process would be free of psychological thought. That someone would be selfless, not egocentric.
Einstein when thinking up his theories of relativity; or Newton when he had his insights about gravity - are these examples of what you are talking about? I agree that these were free from emotional confusion. They are examples of selfless, non egocentric, thought processes.
I wouldn’t use them as examples because I don’t know if they had the insight that there is no actual self.
My guess is if they had had that insight, they would have mentioned it.