My Structures Of Thought Series has been around for decades (first published in 1994). Just recently I decided to collect and publish it all in an organized manner. You will find a fascinating range of material here, from relationships, to prosperity; mind power to atonement; breaking with the past to new ways of asking questions!

First, what do I mean by a Thought Structure? What it says: a structure, shape, construct or machine erected in our thought system (the mind, for simplicity sake at this stage).
It comes as a great shock to people, sometimes, to realize there are real structures in the mind; scaffolding, matrices, planks and ladders, on which to erect thoughts and lay out ideas!

You are representing reality in a compact symbolic form and you are more able to understand it in a way that you can’t do in the real world. So you can reduce experiences which last hours to some short time frame and objects as a big as a planet or universe can be represented by something much smaller. You need symbols like that to reduce things.

A very simple thought structure would be a list: a collection of items (not sequential), gathered under a theme, such as:

• Things to do
• Things to remember
• Things to buy

A simply question-and-answer sequence is a kind of thought structure: concept out, concept in. The generic energy flow would be outflow and inflow, matched.

Here’s A List Of Thought Structures

There are probably many more but this suffices to show you what I mean when I say, “Thought Structures are real but nobody is writing about them. Why?”

Here are some obvious and some not-so-obvious thought structures:

1. Words (failed words and thought holes)
2. Beliefs
3. Decisions
4. A list
5. A scale (an ordered list)
6. Thread (associations (memory works this way), sequence or chain, mind mapping
7. Nodes (interactions, where threads interlace, part of a network)
8. Root (where all the trouble started, the origin point)

So a Thought Structure can be very simple or hugely complex. Of course, the ones we are interested in are the ones with practical applications.

It’s a construction, a series of integrated concepts. There are 4 key types of Thought Structure:

1. A scale (changing hierarchical values)
2. A sequence (a series of steps and the order in which they ought to be considered)
3. A formula (action steps to take to achieve a particular outcome, not necessarily hierarchical or sequential)
4. Any other series which integrates and can be broken into associated parts, but not necessarily sequential or hierarchical

Scales are mostly based on infinity-valued logic. In this model, change takes place in small increments, from one extreme of the spectrum to the opposite. Implicit in this model, by the way, is the fact that absolutes are not obtainable. So there are no actual “ends” of the spectrum. It’s an open, not closed structure. However far you travel in a particular direction, you can always go a little bit further.

So for example, considering good-bad: however good something is, it could always be better and no matter how bad (evil, wicked, dysfunctional etc.), things could always be worse.

It’s quite a kindly view of reality and experience It’s one which I explore to a great depth in my piece called Infinity-Valued Logic.

A sequence is not a gradation concept, like infinity-valued logic. Nor is it just action steps; it’s an ordered list. It is a series of concepts or states, each one of which depends on another that comes before it.

Typically, in a series like this, there is a start and finish to the sequence. This can be hierarchical but does not lend itself to the gradation idea, because each “step” is discreet and may not be readily identified with the one before or after it.