Yes, thoughts pop up on their own. The brain is a team made of a generator and a critic. They learn and work together. The generator is like a language model, it will make some contextual association or random jump. But then the critic allows to evaluate this fresh thought. Doing this multiple rounds before acting is necessary for reasoning.
When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being.
That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness.
Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.
When you meditate you let your generator run free and unrestricted or try to quiet it, while the critic should stop from interfering. By lacking its interference you just sit without an explicit goal. You're not achieving anything, you have no purpose. Just being.
That is nice to do sometimes, I think it's a very artistic perception, but insufficient for the requirements of life. In life you need to engage the critic, you need to construct your solutions. The meditation experience is like some kinds of music, sports and art, a nice thing to cultivate, but not the pinnacle of consciousness.
Consciousness has a really important job to do, it fights for its own existence, it creates consciousness. Nobody else is going to help it if it doesn't help itself.