Sacred Sunday | Where Do Your Thoughts Come From?

We live in a time where many people don’t arrive at their thoughts.

They recognize them.

They see a headline and feel something shift.They scroll and sense where they’re expected to stand.They absorb the tone of the day before they’ve had a chance to notice their own.

Opinion comes first.

Thinking follows — if it comes at all.

Imagine, for a moment, that this stopped.

No news cycle.

No social feeds.

No steady stream explaining what matters, what’s dangerous, who’s wrong, or how you should feel about it.

Not as a statement. Not as a practice. Just .… nothing.

What would happen?

The first thing wouldn’t be calm.

It would be confusion.

A low-level unease.

A pause where certainty usually sits.

This is where most people reach for their phones again.

We like to believe the outside world informs us. But more often, it orients us.

It tells us:

• what deserves attention

• what requires a reaction

• where to place ourselves in relation to it

  
  

When that orientation disappears, something uncomfortable becomes visible:

Many people don’t know what they think until they see it reflected back to them.

Without constant input, thought slows down.

Not because people lack intelligence —but because real thinking doesn’t arrive fully formed.

It begins as a partial question.

A mild tension.

A noticing that hasn’t found language yet.

We’ve learned to mistake that moment for emptiness.

It isn’t.

It’s the beginning of thought before it solidifies.

There’s a cost to always looking outward.

Not a moral one. A practical one.

When meaning is constantly supplied, perception weakens.

You stop trusting what you notice.

You wait for agreement before allowing a thought to take shape.

Over time, the outside world doesn’t just influence opinion —it quietly replaces the process by which opinion is formed.

So if people truly stopped looking outward — where else could they look?

Not inward in the way we’re often told.

Not toward answers or reassurance.

They would have to look at what remains when nothing is being suggested.

At what they notice without instruction.

At what questions linger when no one rushes in to settle them.

This is uncomfortable. And unfamiliar.

Which may be why it’s avoided.

We tend to assume that without constant input, people would become uninformed or detached.

But there’s another possibility:

They might remember that thinking isn’t something you receive.

It’s something you enter.

Slowly.

Unsteadily.

Without guarantees.

If you stopped looking outward to know what to think, where would your thoughts have to come from?

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