how do i count my thoughts? how many do most folk have?

Surprisingly, perhaps, this is a question i rarely get. When it does arise, it often is from folk trying to find some avenue to continue their current state of continual thought.

As to the importance of thoughts as a metric, Ramana Maharshi said in "Talks With Ramana Maharshi":

Q. In the practice of meditation, are there any signs of the nature of subjective experience or otherwise, which will indicate the aspirant's progress towards Self-realization?

RM: The degree of freedom from unwanted thoughts and the degree of concentration on a single thought are the measure to gauge one's progress.

The questions may include "If you are 'in the moment', how can you remember the past to do the calculation?", "Does that include images?", "That's just impossible, no one can do that", "Are there any kinds of thoughts that aren't counted?", etc.

While Ramana Maharshi never felt it necessary, nor did his many questioners as far as we have a record, to discuss this in more detail, let me offer some techniques and clarifications.

There is no intent to preclude non-selfing/non-I thoughts, like how to get to the Interstate, how to solve a math problem or muse over the next line in writing a poem. That is why Ramana did add "unwanted". we need to be able to use secondary symbolic consciousness to frame problems and to communicate w/the primary consciousness and to receive solutions and answers.

It is worth noting that these "non-I thoughts" can be quickly followed with full fledged "I thoughts" or even streams of thoughts that are "unwanted" and problematic, like "I'm such a terrible poet, what's wrong with me?", etc?".

Watch your thoughts, as described in "Happiness Beyond Thought" and see how many are "I, me, my" and how many aren't. Virtually every time i do this exercise w/folk, in a talk or 1/1, it is almost all "I, me, my" - it is all about "you". Feel the energy of those thoughts and their content. They are the ones which cause stress, unhappiness, anger, desire, suffering, etc. Those are the "unwanted" thoughts.

It is true that if "you" are living in "now, now, now", w/o narrative, there is little ability, or interest, in conducting measurements on % thoughts. It can be sufficient to recognize that 10 minutes, or an hour, or even several hours have passed, with few/no thoughts. As Ramana said in "Talks...", "It is as difficult for a jnani to engage in thoughts as it is for an ajnani to be free from them".

If you do want to metricate it, as it is too hard for most folk to accurately measure % of time w/o thoughts w/o disrupting the process, count your thoughts. The National Science Foundation has found that the average folk has between 12,000 to 50,000 thoughts per day (depending on how "deep" a thinker they are). Taking a mid-point of 30,000/ 17 hr day, that's about 1800 thoughts/hour or 30 thoughts/minute. See how you do in a typical meditation session or just taking a walk.

If it's too many to count, that's your answer. If you can count them, that can be a useful process to gauge how you're doing. Don't get obsessive about it; the very act of obsessing about it will generate an "I/ego" full of pride and performance anxiety, and all that goes with it. The important thing is to realize that it is readily available, free, and is an accurate representation of "selfing/I-ing", particularly the problematic manifestation of it.