Why do we complete the sentences in our mind?

All of us have a constant, non-stop running dialog going on in our heads. We're constantly talking to ourselves, explaining to ourselves what we're experiencing, reliving past experiences, engaged in imaginary or prior conversations. Sometimes, we're just telling ourselves the same old story over again.

As I look carefully at the way thoughts occur in my mind, I can see that very complex ideas and concepts can appear in my mind all at once, but then I break them down and draw them out by telling them to myself in linear, grammatical ("subject, verb, object") fashion. And while I'm doing this, new ideas aren't coming into my head, or if they are I'm not aware of them because I'm too busy reliving the thought that I'm parsing out and repeating over and over.

But since I never surprise myself at the end of the sentence ("gosh, I didn't think that I was going to say that!"), why do I do this? Why can't I just think "I know where this is going," and just drop the sentence or even word in mid syllable?

Actually, I do this sometimes in zazen as a technique to stop associative thought. Just as I'm aware that I'm talking to myself in my mind, I'll cut off the sentence and listen to the silence that follows.

Kathleen Callon said, "Sometimes something strange happens when I let go of preoccupied or conscious thought, and it usually happens when I am doing routine physical activity. It probably happens with most of us... We leave our thoughts only to have an epiphany or a vision then come to us. A realization pops into our consciousness and though we think we know the thought comes from within ourselves, we also get the uncomfortable feeling that we may have just received a timely and almost celestine message. This feeling is analogous to our confused reaction when we are thinking of someone we have not spoken to in a long while and we know, as the phone rings and as we then pick it up, that the lost friend or relative we had been thinking of is on the other end of the line."

When we stop this associative thinking, our minds are open and receptive, both to great insights, inspiration, creativity, intuition, and other, stranger stuff. Ask any artist or musician how they came up with an idea and they almost inevitably say, "I don't know. It just came to me."

My argument is that we're all constantly generating creative and intuitive thoughts, whether we think of ourselves as creative or intuitive or not, but many of us don't allow these thoughts to raise to the surface because we're strangling the life out of them by trying to articulate them into "language" in our minds, and not giving them room to live and breathe. But sometimes, when we're doing some "mindless" menial task, or basking on the sun, or otherwise not engaging the intellect, poof!, one of those realizations manages to pop through, and suddenly:

"If I paint the bedroom blue it would match the lampshades and make it appear cooler in the summer."

"My friend's trying to express her frustration with herself, but lacks the insight and vocabulary to articulate it."

"I could write a poem based on rhyming color schemes, using 'door hinge' to rhyme with 'orange.'"

The only difference between artists and ordinary people is the ability to be receptive to these intuitive thoughts.

There's probably a lot of other information floating around in front of us, some of which is tapped in to by psychics and clairvoyants, who have simply found a way to tap into this information by allowing themselves to be receptive. Hence, the "spooky action."