Not Being Fooled by Thought

and a movie recommendation

The human mind loves to think. Our ability to reconstruct the past, imagine the future, and think in the myriad complex ways that we do has gotten us to the top of the food chain and well on our way to colonizing Mars. But it has also gotten us into immense suffering and confusion. No dog smokes and drinks itself to death worrying about what will happen to it after it dies, and no cat ties itself into knots of contracted energy trying to figure out which philosophical or metaphysical explanation of reality is most true. But we do all these things.

For other animals, emotions are immediate—fear, anger, grief—they arise and pass quickly. Unlike us, other animals don’t have stories and self-reflective thinking accompanying the bare sensations. They do what they do without guilt or blame. But we can carry grudges for centuries and be consumed by guilt, blame and self-doubt.

I periodically find myself entangled in one of those imaginary problems created by too much thinking—the grasping kind of thought that is trying to get control and find security and certainty by pinning things down conceptually. The mind is running around and around on a mental hamster wheel trying to figure out some seemingly vital question such as which comes first, the chicken or the egg. This particular imaginary problem, as with most of them, begins with conceptually dividing a seamless actuality into apparently separate parts, such as chickens and eggs, and then trying to figure out how they go together and which comes first. The problem is utterly imaginary and has no solution.

Thought is dualistic and divisive by nature. It creates imaginary separations. It cannot hold two seemingly contradictory realities at once. It wants to land on one side of the imaginary divide it has created. Either there is free will or there isn’t. Either the chicken comes first or the egg does. Consciousness is all there is, and Here-Now is the only reality, or there was a long process of evolution over time and consciousness emerges out of matter. Either we survive death or we don’t. There is a self or there isn’t. Thought wants to grasp the correct answer, imagining that doing so will resolve the deep longing of the heart and give us peace.

Round and around thought goes, chasing the carrot of resolution that is forever just out of reach, and the whole organism contracts and tenses up in response to this grasping activity. When this kind of hamster wheel thinking happens, it is a kind of compulsion, exactly like compulsive fingerbiting or any other compulsion, and even if it is painful and we know it never delivers the promised satisfaction, we often can’t stop. That carrot is so enticing, so promising. If we just keep thinking for a little bit longer, we will surely catch up to it, nail down the correct answer, and then we will finally be able to relax at last and be at peace, just as we are. But first, we have to get that carrot.

Zen Master Huang Po addressed this situation with great clarity:

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists… It is that which you see before you—begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error… your sole concern should be, as thought succeeds thought, to avoid clinging to any of them… Do not permit the least movement of your minds to disturb you. This alone is what is called liberation. Ah, be diligent! Be diligent!

—Huang Po

I remember Toni Packer reading those words to us at the end of every retreat she gave. I’ve heard and read them hundreds of times. And yet, that clinging, grasping disturbance still happens at times. Maybe you have this experience, too.

The abstract, divided up, conceptual map-world to which we devote so much of our attention is so deeply conditioned, so culturally reinforced and so ubiquitous that it is not easy to see through it. We believe things are as we think they are, and we overlook what is known directly in favor of our accumulated second-hand knowledge. We often can’t even tell the difference.

We frequently mistake the map for the territory without realizing we are doing that. And yet, the living actuality (THIS) is always right here, utterly obvious—this present experiencing, this awaring presence, this beingness, this immediate knowing-experiencing-awaring-being that is seamless and boundless, without beginning or end—THIS is always right here, right now. And nothing we say or think about this can capture it. Learning to discern the difference between the conceptual and the actual, between direct knowing and second-hand knowledge, is vital to liberation.

But it’s not as if we can eliminate concepts and thoughts, nor do we need to do that. In fact, all our thoughts, ideas and mental maps are nothing other than THIS. There is no way to actually deviate from the living actuality, the undivided whole, because that is all there is. Mapping and thinking are part of what this living reality is doing, but the maps are always only an abstract representation and the thought-stories are never the whole truth.

Conceptualizing, mapping, getting hypnotized by the map-world and waking itself up from its own imaginings are all part of what consciousness does. We could see it as a cosmic game of hide and seek that the universe (or consciousness, or God) is playing, one that is perhaps not as deadly serious as we so often imagine.

We can never really miss the boat. Even these mental tangles and bodily contractions, these perplexing runs on the hamster wheel and all other forms of human folly are nothing other than this living reality. It’s all impersonal weather. Clouds, storms, clearings—nothing substantial or fixed. It may be unpleasant, and it may bring about suffering, but it’s simply another passing shape that this living actuality is momentarily taking. The one to whom it seems to be happening, the one who seems to need liberation, is nothing more than a mirage, a character in a dream. What we are seeking is always already here. THIS is it. This one bottomless moment, just as it is. And that is perhaps the most liberating realization.

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Movie Recommendation:

PERFECT DAYS — directed by Wim Wenders, written by Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, with beautiful acting by Kōji Yakusho in the role of a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Slow moving, minimalist, visually beautiful, one might describe this as a film about the heart of Zen, in which the sacred is found in mundane work done with great care, in the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, and in unusually intimate encounters with strangers and loved ones. The toilet cleaner has a seemingly repetitious life, and yet, he sees each moment as new. He listens to wonderful old cassette tapes while driving, some great old songs by Lou Reed, Nina Simone, Otis Redding, Patti Smith, the Stones, and others. If you stay through all the credits, at the very end, there is an image of leaves moving in wind accompanied by a bit of text explaining the word “Komorebi” as “the Japanese word for the simmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment.” I loved this film. Very highly recommended. More here.

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Love to all….