What are high thoughts and low thoughts?

The following is an excerpt from a samvaad (dialogue) session with Acharya Prashant.

Question (Q): What are high thoughts and low thoughts?

Acharya Prashant (AP): Let’s see. Think that you are speaking in the Russian language or in the Spanish language. Is it possible to think so?

Listener 1 (L1): No.

AP: It is not; because to think, there must be some relation of the thought with your past.

Now write down a law: All thoughts come from the past.

We often say that we have a new thought. But actually, there is no new idea or new thought because every thought is fundamentally grounded in the past. It is coming from the past; there is nothing new in that. Every thought comes from past experiences and we know that past experiences are limited. All our thoughts come from those past experiences.

We can say that the past is like a room, like the one in which you are sitting. This room is full of all our past experiences. Whatever we have learned, hear, and seen is in this room. This entire thing is in our mind and all our future expectations are coming from these past experiences. We think that these are the new imaginations of our future. But these are nothing but the same old past experiences which come in seemingly new forms…