Who Put That Thought There: How Much of Your Mind Is Actually Yours?

“The moment I closed my eyes, my mind opened its own.”

A statement from the physical pillar that I had noted down in my field notes. I thought it was a discovery, but I would later find out it was actually a warning about inherited beliefs and what I thought was mine.

Four weeks in the physical pillar of RUIA made me realize that I was an observer of my own body. Being in a perpetual cycle of observing my body instead of inhabiting it. The mental pillar had a colder gift waiting for me at the end of four weeks.

A strange possibility that I had been inhabiting beliefs and thoughts I had never examined. That I was living for years inside sentences I did not write. My whole life laid out in front of me, thoughts and ideas, expectations and dislikes, and I never once thought to question where they came from.

If you have sat with ‘Intrusive Thoughts: The Tongue of Thought, you already have the discipline this pillar revolves around- the pause between thinker and the thought. Like the difference between the weather and the sky that holds it. Keep that discipline alive. You’ll need it as you traverse the treacherous terrains of your mental sphere. You will need it when the question ‘What is this thought?’ changes to ‘Whose is this thought, and how did it learn to speak my language so effortlessly?’ This isn’t another essay on watching and observing your thoughts, but something much deeper, hidden, dimmed- provenance.

“A thought occuring or originating inside of you is not evidence that the thought originated with you.”

Sit with that for one full breath before your mind starts building its defense. It will want to. It is proud of its opinions the way a bird is proud of a nest it never questions building the same way its mother did.

A thought dressed as insight is an inherited property. It can feel like you, wear your syntax, arrive in your own inner voice – and still be a guest who moved in so long ago you’ve started paying its rent.

The Parliament Inside Your Skull

Open the door to the crowd in there. Not haunted but governed. A parliament of voices that took their seats before you could even think about voting on the matter. Unopposed ever since.

Your mom repeated a sentence so many times it stopped sounding like her and started sounding like something you would say. A whole worldview you absorbed in a fluorescent classroom- filed under fact, though you never arrived at that conclusion yourself before accepting it. You inherited morals from the culture you were born in. Fears that subtly renamed themselves “common sense” and have been deciding your choices and actions without hiccups. Or maybe the aesthetic preferences and tastes you copied from someone you admired so much that you forgot that it was, simply put, copied.

And there is the opinion you have repeated so many times, in so many rooms, that repetition did what repetition does to a stone in a river. Wore it smooth, wore it round, until it looks less like an argument you once believed and more like a fact about your personality.

None of them arrived with a note explaining themselves. They rarely do. Inheritance prefers to stay quiet like that; it prefers people to mistake it for identity.

What You Won’t Find Here

Here is what most posts would tell you. “Strip away the borrowed layers, and beneath all the culture dump, the classroom hypnosis, the subtlety, you will find a gleaming, pure, authentic thought, self, identity waiting for you. Patiently. To be rescued. The real you- uncontaminated.

I would love to hand you that ending. It’s tidy. Easy to photograph. Easy to understand and basically self-flattery dressed as spiritual excavation.

One devil’s advocate question for you: If you deleted every belief you ever picked up from another person, what would actually be left?

Human beings are not mined; we are woven. Almost nothing you know now arrived without a hand passing it to you first. Language, the very medium itself, is borrowed. Even your rebellion against your mother’s sentence is, inherently, still a response to her sentence. It still has her fingerprints even if it’s inside out.

This is precisely the idea Ubuntu philosophy names with more grace than I can: a person is a person through other persons. Selfhood, in that lineage, was never meant to be solitary contraband smuggled in from before your birth. It is relational at the root – built in contact, not despite it.

So the honest question was never which of my beliefs came from somewhere else. Nearly all of them did. The honest, harder, far more RUIA question is this:

What inherited beliefs have survived conscious examination and become genuinely chosen convictions – and which are simply still running on the authority of never having been questioned?

That distinction is the entire gateway. Not purge. Audit.

Mystics Sat With This Exact Vertigo

Three centuries before witness-consciousness had a hashtag, a Punjabi mystic sat with this exact vertigo and wrote Bulleya, ki jaana main kaun – Bulleya, who knows who I am. What follows is not a triumphant discovery of the authentic self underneath. It’s a long, patient refusal of every label offered to him — not a believer in the mosque, not a rebel against it, not made of water, not made of fire, not this camp, not that one -verse after verse of not this, not that, until identity has been stripped of every borrowed garment it was ever handed. He doesn’t arrive at a tidy answer. He arrives at a wide-open question, standing in his own bare posture, and calls that enough.

If Bulleh Shah could spend a poem’s worth of breath un-choosing what he’d been told to be without collapsing, you can survive one blog post doing the same over coffee. And once you’ve done the un-choosing- once you can see the parliament for what it is instead of mistaking it for a monarchy of one- Faiz, the revolutionary Pakistani poet, gives you the next instruction, blunt as a bell: speak, for your lips are free. Not- stay silent until you’ve achieved purity. Speak now, with the mixed inheritance still in your mouth, because waiting for an uncontaminated voice means never speaking at all.

The Unconscious Keeps The Receipts

Depth psychology talks about the same parliament, just in different, more analytical language. Jung spent an entire career insisting that whatever stays unexamined lives in the deeper layers of our mind, translated to inherited beliefs. It runs the show from backstage and hands us the bill under the name of fate. Not glamorous. Not mystical.

But it is the same fire Bulleh Shah, Faiz, and Jung dance around. The parts of you that were never audited are the parts most likely to be steering. Awareness isn’t the destination. It’s the moment you finally ask to see the receipts.

For now, only this. Sit with the question the way Bulleh Shah sat with his, the way Faiz waited for the locks to start opening on their own before he told anyone to speak.

If I removed every belief I learned to belong, what would remain?

Don’t answer it today. Let it sit in the room with the rest of the parliament and watch how nervous certain members suddenly become.

Your Mental Awareness Practice: Open The Parliament

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