Flavours of Thought Introduction

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Unlike electromagnetic radiation, they don't permeate in our three space and one time dimensions and they are not restricted by the speed of light. This is why their nature is not yet fully understood or appreciated.

They are the stuff of higher dimensions — 5th, 7th and 9th to be precise. That said, when you work outside our normal dimensional realm, precision as we understand it takes on a different nature.

The flavours used in the book don't relate so much to those that we taste like sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, sourness and savoriness (or umami).

The world of thought is much more aligned to the world of sub-atomic particles and quanta, as this is the level upon and at which thoughts operate.

You cannot have a thought and think about it at the same time in the same way that you can't measure both a particle's position and momentum. That is, of course, only from our current space-time perspective.

The flavours we discuss here are oddly strangely analogous to the flavours ascribed by quantum physicists to exotic, fundamental particles known as quarks. Quarks are thought to be the building blocks of protons and neutrons which, in turn, are the building blocks of atoms and all matter.

The word quark was coined by James Joyce in Finnegan's Wake — "Three quarks for Muster Mark" — and hijacked by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann.

Gell-Mann, and others, further postulated that quarks come in a number of flavours types (or colours) called up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom.

Some plagiaristic fun can be had, as well as significant illumination, by further hijacking Gell-Mann's flavours and applying them to the weird and wonderful world of thoughts.

Our thoughts too can be segregated into flavour types, whether this is by coincidence or design. Note that I do not suggest there is anything more than a literary correlation.

Thoughts which are Ethereal Whispers can be associated with Strangeness and are packed with guidance.

The Murmurings of our Unconscious mind are almost Charming these 'strange' thoughts into existence and into our awareness.

Our conscious mind gives it all a sense of Direction and gives us the illusion that we are really 'driving the bus'.

Like the directions of the compass, our conscious thoughts can come and go in at least four directions.

They can uplift us or get us down. They can come from the top of our heads or we can bottom them out.

The up, down, top and bottom 'quarks of our mindfulness' can twist a thought on a sixpence and send it off in an entirely new direction.

These flavours are embedded in the very fabric of our DNA. We are made from them and they drive everything we do.

The world around us reflects them back to us too depending on what and how we are thinking.

Naturally in other languages, their semantic meaning will shift somewhat. This is what leads to amazing variety and cultural richness from living on this planet at this particular time.

In pre-history, before we got 'the word', we didn't possess this internal 'chatter-ability'. We were aware of our environment and our gut and heart-felt feelings but not yet of abstracts. The ego had not formed — nor the Illusion.

There are indeed many, many more flavours. In fact, there are as many as there are words in the dictionary and a few more again. What is remarkable is how few ingredients we need to concoct gastronomic delights.

I discovered that our thoughts divide neatly into the three groups that I labelled Strangeness, Charm and Direction; each with seven flavours each.

In total, this gives us 21 different flavour ingredients for the recipes that I then concocted in the book. I am sure there are more and many other ways to divide and describe them and I encourage readers to think of some more of their own.

It's a bit mind boggling but just these 21 thought flavours can be combined into an amazing 51,090,942,171,709,440,000 possible recipes.

Now that's a lot of thinking in anyone's book. •

Renaissance Man and Imagineer Tom Evans is the author of four books and counting about creativity. More »

9/22/11