yes, i entirely consider complex tools in active use part of the self. cognition includes all of its functions when i'm using it. but yeah i know language is just a tool, only one that's usually with me, sort of like my cell phone and glasses
i kinda disagree. my "car" only actually functions as a car when my self extends to include it. in such cases the mechanisms inside it and the nerves in my body form a single system that now is capable of not just what my body can do, but also driving. any other time, it's a large piece of metal
i do not exaggerate when i say that, for me in trance, when external direction stops, reality ceases to be stable (which i don't mind); i am talking about a state where the self is not there to put consensus reality before the procession of images that pass through my senses and align them.
admittedly it might be a semantic difference at this point that i consider any interaction with that sensory stream, even if it isn't "me" doing it, to be "thinking"
this part bsky.app/profile/osak... is not actually my issue (well, not always). i'm under no illusions that the linguistically-mediated mind is all of the mind. language is only a tool for interfacing with consensus reality, and with the parts of me i want to be accessible to it
it's impossible to fully deprive the senses, and noticing at all is a type of thinking. thoughts don't have to come from the self at all if consciousness can be occupied by the nonself. as for me, i know what that's like well enough
hypnosis, to me, is mostly like dissociation, it's unawareness and disconnection from the world and self, only where i still maintain a specific external anchor. lucid internal thoughts can disappear because they're substituted with external ones
of course i can remain in trance in absence of external input (and might even feel it as a "silence" of self-directed thought if that's been suggested to me) but it becomes phantasmagoric or outright hallucinatory, which is not an absence of thought in my view
symbolic manipulation isn't only linguistic. if as in the video i stay deliberately aware of how i feel, even if there's no internal narration, the feeling i'm aware of is a symbol. if it can be referred to at all, it's dynamic, practically good enough to hold in my hand