The aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts. ~ James Allen

How often does a thought pass through your consciousness? Once a second? Every two seconds? Let’s say the latter for the sake of argument. During a waking day of 16 hours, that allows for about 28,800 thoughts per day. In the course of a year, that expands to around 10,500,000 thoughts.

With an average lifetime in the West of about 75 years, that allows for just under 800,000,000 thoughts in the course of a lifetime. Of those, how many — at least among me after puberty — involve a sex fantasy? 50,000,000? 100,000,000? Or more? Then there are the thoughts about planning your next meal, or next party, or poker night. Football games or other spectator sports? How about rehearsing the lecture you want to give to your boss, your ex-squeeze, your mother?

Doesn’t leave too many thoughts for anything uplifting, does it? So after a lifetime of nearly a billion thoughts — if we are what we think — we probably aren’t very much.

What about the world? Current population of 6,000,000,000 allows for 63,000,000,000,000,000 thoughts created by the entire human race in the course of a year. With all that thinking going on, shouldn’t every mathematical problem get solved, every social conflict resolved, even the common cold cured? The answer is clearly “No”.

Now, a reasonable estimate of all the humans who have every lived is about 100,000,000. Assuming an average lifespan of 35 years, that means in the course of history there may be around 3,150,000,000,000,000 thoughts that have ever been thought. It’s amazing how few of those are of any value. Even assuming every thought recorded in the books of the Library of Congress is of value, that is an extremely small percentage.

This is something we need to think about.