Reclusland

Been thinking about just what it means to stop thinking lately.  At my zendo, I remember one talk where we were told that a great zen master had once said, “Make an iron wall against your thoughts!”.  For a tradition that emphasizes direct experiential mind-to-mind teaching over linguistic forms, those zen masters sure had a lot of good sayings…

But this one I remembered because it didn’t really sit well with me.  As has been pointed out here before, I do “have a desire to write down (my) thoughts and musings”.  Still, I also really like the zen stuff, so how to reconcile the two?  Well, in a book one of my roommates left in our bathroom one time, the Dalai Lama said something along the lines of ‘thoughts without emotion make us dead, emotions without thoughts makes us animals’.  I can’t find the book at the moment to look up the specific passage, but it’s called “The Heart of Compassion”.

And I like that idea, that thoughts are not something to be gotten rid of, but more properly that they are something we do not use correctly.  This ties in with what I was saying last post, and also with my earlier ideas about an “information body”.  Not to imply that I’ve “got it all figured out” yet, but it does seem to be a key issue for me at this point of my development.

But then, how do we stop misusing thought?  Can we think our way out of it?  Thinking about thinking can become quite an addiction, as has been pointed out…
“What’s the first step? Where do we begin? Have I only sunk deeper into the trap by even starting this conversation at all? What do you think and are you addicted to doing it? How do you stop it? Meditation? Masturbation? Do you even want to stop it? Are we all well and truly fucked, after all? See? See what I mean? This, this right here is the problem…”

I’ve also heard that “thinking your way out of thinking” can be compared to asking a corrupt police department to investigate itself.  The whole enterprise is doomed before it can even start.  Yet people still manage it, somehow…

To bring in yet another Buddhist master,Milarepa has said: “When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.”

Which implies that you are not the one throwing the sticks.  Figure that out, and you’re well on the way to having the whole game locked down.  Of course, try not to think too hard about it…

But I won’t leave you with just that.  Let’s go back to that book by the Dalai Lama for a moment.  The only part of the that book that I can quote comes from the “Search inside this book” header on the amazon page: “The Tibetan word ‘chos’ is known as dharma in Sanskrit, and it means ‘to hold’…”

And this brings to mind another thing I heard at the zendo: that the entire universe is the dharma, and that all dharmas are forms of emptiness. If that’s true, then it must also pertain to our thoughts, because if anything is a “form of emptiness”, a thought is.

And this brings us back to what makes the difference between “good” thoughts and “bad” thoughts. What I think is meant by that “iron wall” that I mentioned in the beginning is not that we should not think.  But that these thoughts should always be kept as outside the “self”.  They’re still there, we just don’t have to use them as “holders” for our identity.

Because anything your mind can imagine is held by thoughts. And we take these thoughts and try to send them back and forth, from one context to another, from one time and place to another.  Our thoughts are how we time-bind our experience.  If we identify with them, if we allow them the permanence that really only belongs to our awareness of those thoughts, then the thoughts (and therefore we) become containers for unreal things, things from another time or another space or another reality altogether.  They cease being the dharma-forms-of-emptiness and become ghosts to which we cling, notches in our potter’s wheel…

Time to repurpose those containers.