A Few Thoughts about Thinking

and a few words about nonduality

A few thoughts about thinking

Thinking is something the universe is doing in the form of human beings. Like everything else, it is an activity of the whole, inseparable from everything it apparently is not. Thinking has given humans great advantages and also significant disadvantages.

The bare activity itself—the pulsation of a thought—is amazingly ephemeral, impermanent, fleeting and without substance. A thought appears and instantly evaporates like an invisible and ungraspable little burst of invisible energy.  

But the content of thinking—the headlines it asserts, the stories it tells, the beliefs and ideas it promotes, the maps of reality it generates—these can seem very solid and real. They are sometimes functional and necessary, sometimes creative, sometimes relatively harmless, but very often, thinking—and believing what thought tells us—is the source of immense human suffering and confusion. The problematic type of thought (e.g., “I’m a hopeless failure” or “So-and-so is the devil and should be killed"), when believed, can cause enormous pain.

Because thoughts can be so powerful and so easily mistaken for objective reports on reality, being aware of them, being able to see them as thoughts, and being able to discern the difference between the pictures they paint and reality itself is a vital part of both spiritual awakening and good psychotherapy. It may sound obvious, but it can be very subtle, recognizing again and again that a map is never the territory it describes, that a concept is always an abstraction, and that “I’m a hopeless failure” is just a conditioned thought, not an objective report on reality. 

There are many relative truths that can be discovered through thinking, reasoning, logic and scientific exploration. These are wonderful human abilities. But what we might call the heart of things, the source of happiness or unconditional love cannot be found in this way. It is beyond the thinking mind, beyond reasoning and logic, beyond what science can discover. And because of this, there is a common misunderstanding in the spiritual world that the goal of meditation is to be thought-free, that awakening entails having a permanently and completely empty mind, devoid of all thinking, and that thinking is basically the enemy that must be vanquished.

I’ve never heard any teacher suggesting we should or could eliminate all thinking, and I’m certainly never suggesting that. That would be a fool’s errand. It may sound as if this is being suggested sometimes, usually when a sentence is taken out of context and/or misunderstood. But no one I know is suggesting this. Creative thinking and reasoning have done incredibly wonderful things, and we wouldn’t survive without functional thinking. Moreover, thinking is something that happens uncontrollably. There is no thinker authoring the thoughts. They bubble up automatically. Anyone who takes up meditation discovers this very quickly.

Because thoughts pop up and instantly dissolve, they can easily zip by so quickly that we don’t even see them. As a result, we are often completely unaware of habitual thought patterns. This is where meditation can be helpful. It allows us to slow down, be still, and do nothing else other than simply being, present and aware. And in this way, we begin to see more and more clearly what the mind is doing, and the more it is seen, the less believable it becomes and the more these habitual thoughts lose their grip and fall away.

I’ve often spoken about my first all-day silent meditation retreat at the San Francisco Zen Center, when it was suddenly seen that all my thoughts were about the future. I was sitting there imagining my next silent retreat, thinking about what to do on the break that was coming up and where I would park the car tomorrow when I went to work, and so on. I’d never noticed this before. Once it was seen, it was as if a light had been turned on in a previously darkened room.

From then on, whenever thoughts about the future happened, they would be noticed—sometimes instantly, sometimes after the attention had been occupied with them for quite a while. I began to see what was alluring about future fantasies, and also how it was a form of suffering. Gradually, over many years, this habitual pattern got weaker and weaker until it dissolved. Not that it never happens now, but it rarely happens, and never obsessively anymore.

Thought was powerless to remove this pattern. Having the thought, “I need to stop thinking about the future,” would only be another thought about the future—and about “me,” the imaginary thinker. Awareness was the transformative power.

The best teachings help us to discern the difference between the map and the territory in ever more subtle ways. They also recognize that mapping is something the territory is doing, and that language, imagination and thought are all vital and emergent activities of the universe, inseparable from the whole. These can all serve us beautifully, or they can get us into massive trouble, and it is profoundly liberating and helpful to discern what’s helpful and what isn’t, while also recognizing that, in the absolute sense, the apparently helpful and the apparently unhelpful are “not two” and can never actually be pulled apart.

A work of fiction, a poem, a beautiful painting, an evocative dance, a piece of sculpture, a great movie, beautiful music, a mathematical formula, a scientific theory— these certainly cannot and should not be dismissed as unreal or mere illusions. They are all quite real. And so is the spiritual dimension—boundless awareness, openness, presence, spirit.

Intelligent spirituality is operating on multiple levels, we might say—both conventional and absolute, sensory and imaginal, conceptual and actual—and these pairs can’t really be pulled apart. The boundary-lines are always themselves conceptual. Some teachings lean more one way, some more another—and certainly, in my writing, one paragraph, article or chapter may lean more one way, and another paragraph, article or chapter many lean more in another. Taking things out of context can be very misleading. We see this all the time in the political realm and in clickbait headlines.

Ultimately, ALL dividing lines between one thing and another are conceptual—they are like the lines on a map. Where exactly does the mountain become the valley? Where does heads turn into tails on a coin? Where does the body end and the environment begin? Where does inside become outside? Where is the boundary between awareness and content, or between the screen and the movie? We can’t say. We can’t deny difference and variation, but we can’t find actual separation. That recognition is what nonduality is all about.

In my experience, the most liberating forms of spirituality are those that pull the rug out from any place we want to land and from any impulse to plant a flag. Landing nowhere, freefalling, we can play freely in all realms, sticking to nothing and open to everything.

The Tao that can be spoken both is and isn’t the true Tao. Everything we say both is and isn’t the truth. Not one, not two. Or, as Dogen put it, leaping clear of the many and the one. Not fixating or getting stuck on one side of a conceptual divide.

A few words about nonduality

When people tell me they are into nonduality, I ask them what they mean, because the word has been used in so many different ways over the centuries. In recent years, nonduality has become a buzzword in certain subcultures, where it can refer to anything from Tony Parsons to Rupert Spira. There isn’t one definition upon which everyone agrees. Many people claim that their version is the One True Nonduality, but that, in my view, is dualistic nonsense.

If you want to explore the subject of nonduality in a comprehensive intellectual way, I highly recommend David Loy’s excellent book, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy. David Loy is a Zen teacher and a professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy, so he brings both the discernment of a trained philospher as well as the experiencial understanding of a long-time Buddhist practitioner to the table. The book compares and contrasts the Advaita notion of Self (Immutable Reality) with the Buddhist understanding of no self (impermanence, thorough-going flux, no-thing-ness), and it explores concepts such as time and space, substance, causality, freedom, and spiritual path from a nondual perspective, drawing not only on Advaita and Buddhism, but also on Taoism and Western philosophy.

Of course, nonduality is more than an intellectual philosophy. It is a living realization, a way of seeing life that brings forth a different way of being.

It seems to me that the common thread in all the different versions of nonduality is the sense of wholeness and the absence of separation. None of these different nondual perspectives are denying the appearance of diversity, differentiation, multiplicity, variety and polarity, but they are all seeing it as one inseparable whole that cannot be pulled apart. It is always a holistic perspective in which everything is included and nothing exists independently.

In Advaita, this wholeness or unicity is typically seen as the Self or the One Consciousness that underlies and is everything that appears—the ground of being. In Buddhism, it is more often understood as emptiness: impermanence, interdependence, groundlessness, and the absence of any persisting or separate self-nature in anything. Of course, within Buddhism there are many subdivisions, including the One Mind school that says, “All there is, is Mind.”

And nowadays we have expressions that don’t fit neatly into any of these pre-existing categories, or that draw from several of them—people such as Toni Packer, Adyashanti, Tony Parsons, Darryl Bailey, Peter Brown, John Astin, or myself. So there are many variations on the theme of nonduality, but in some way, all of them point to an indivisible unicity that is at once both seamless and infinitely varied.

I would also say that all the versions of nonduality that I’ve encountered point out the non-substantial nature of everything that appears. In Advaita, it is compared to a dream in which there seem to be mountains and people and events, but it’s all nothing other than the dreaming consciousness. It all vanishes upon waking up from sleep. Nothing that appeared to be there was really there in any substantial, observer-independent way. It was all a play of consciousness.

In Buddhism, it is more the understanding that no solid, discrete, independent, persisting, substantial things ever actually form, and yet, we can’t say this is nothing. But there is no-thing we can grasp that it is. The “it” is imaginary. There is only it-less-ness. As the great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna pointed out, no way that we try to conceptualize life holds up to careful scrutiny, and the true understanding of impermanence is that there is no impermanence, because impermanence is so thorough-going that no-thing ever actually forms to be impermanent.

Buddhism and Advaita are not the same, nor are Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons, and yet, they all point to a similar sense of wholeness, nonsubstantiality, and freedom from imaginary bondage. We can emphasize the differences, or we can see the commonality. I can appreciate both Buddhism and Advaita. I have enjoyed both Rupert Spira and Tony Parsons. At different times, I have found all of these expressions liberating. They might see each other as off-the-mark, but I don’t feel compelled to choose between any of them.

In my view, all the ways of conceptualizing, describing and mapping this living reality are in some way incomplete and inaccurate. This living reality can’t really be captured conceptually. The ultimate liberation, in my view, is in not landing anywhere, not concretizing any view (or non-view), not mistaking any map for The Truth.

Ultimately, we don’t know what this is or how it all works, and yet, here it is, clear and obvious—until we start thinking about it and trying to nail it down with words and concepts. Then suddenly, it seems very paradoxical and confusing.

And whatever this is, it keeps unfolding and revealing itself in ever-new ways. I feel less and less sure of anything I think, and this uncertainty only feels problematic when I think that it should be otherwise. What feels very real and undoubtable to me is the openness of Here-Now, aware presence, and this ungraspable present experiencing.

As I say on the current home page of my website:

We habitually search for special experiences, for certainty and something to grasp. But in holding on to nothing at all, there is immense openness and freedom.

Being awake as I mean it is simply an openness, a willingness to live without answers, to be here in all simplicity, to see through the stories and beliefs that create suffering and confusion or that provide false comfort, to not land in any fixed view.

Present experiencing is ever-changing while never departing from the immediacy of here-now. It is infinitely varied, yet cannot actually be divided up or pulled apart. A person is like a waving of the ocean—an ever-changing movement inseparable from the whole.

We tend to think that we are an independent entity with free will—the thinker of our thoughts, the maker of our choices—living in a world outside of us. But in looking closely, no substantial boundary between inside and outside, and no thinker apart from the thinking can be found.

What is offered here invites firsthand exploration and direct discovery, not belief or dogma. There is no finish-line, no formula, no method, only this ever-fresh aliveness, this one bottomless moment, right here, right now, just as it is.

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Love to all…