When you are thinking you are being communicated to from memory, the storehouse of the past. So in your thoughts you experience impressions created in the past, never the present. Although you are alive, certainly, you are not experiencing being alive.
Ego, as you probably know, means ‘I’ in Latin. It is a misleading root for the term ‘ego’ because the ego is ‘I being aware of experience’. Put another way, I cannot exist apart from my awareness.
Even more misleading is the often quoted motto: ‘I think therefore I am.’ This is as illogical as saying ‘I see a dog, therefore I am a dog.’ It would be better to say: ‘I think I think, therefore I think I am’ — a conundrum which happens to be the truth.
We think because there is something we want to know. There is also thinking where it seems there is no wanting to know anything. This is the thinking that comes from the ego’s desire to know it exists, which is the strongest desire in us. It beams out of us day and night, monitoring the environment for signs of danger. It has to know what is going on to protect us. So there is a continuous reference to memory, evaluating what is seen, heard, smelt and felt. We are unaware of most of this activity — we would go insane if we were — but where it occurs at the conscious level it becomes associative thinking. Thus a letterbox can remind us the gas bill is due and so on. Here, instead of protecting the body, the ego is evaluating the situation in terms of psychological self-interest. This is the ego preserving itself as the desire of the personality. It checks to see that what is ‘bad’ is resisted and what is ‘good’ is acquired or embraced; and what is neither good nor bad does not matter. As long as we have the self-interest of desire we will associate with whatever it is through memory and thinking.
Thinking is always the ego’s way of experiencing itself in existence. Where a person is too weak to stand alone in a state of not knowing, it props itself up all the time by relating to memory and affirming itself in gossip, discussion, and useless greetings.
The ego is a principle connecting memory with perception; a sort of two-way street of desire, one way pulling in more information, the other punching it out mostly as personality to reaffirm its own knowing or existence.
Thoughts are symbols of past experience stored in memory. It is impossible to have a thought about something you have not experienced. You can imagine, but the image will be an impression built out of what you already know. You cannot imagine my father’s kitchen or a new kind of animal without combining bits of information you already have.
What we imagine or build up by thinking will always be a re-arrangement of the past.
This is what happens: as we perceive the world, sensory symbols of our experience go into the memory; as we recall them they come up and associate into the series of thoughts we call ‘thinking’. Thoughts are regurgitations. Thinking is a slowed down, limited and secondary version of primary experience.
Anything we perceive that reminds us of an attitude throws up a related thought out of memory and we begin thinking about it. The selection mechanism is desire, which as we have seen is always a tension or stress. Particular thoughts are selected according to the strength of the tension in the desire. This tension supplies the energy which links the thoughts into thinking. As thought begins it generates emotion, a coarse expression of the tension in the desire; the greater the conflict the greater the hold of the thought-line and the momentum of the thinking.
We think because we classify things into good and bad, yours and mine. We select and reject according to our desires and conditioning which fix the basic attitudes on which we build the thinker in ourselves. This conditioning begins with my body, my family, my house; and soon becomes my friends, my enemies, my country, my beliefs and so on. When we are reminded of them, we think. And ‘good and bad’ is what is good and bad for these things of mine.
Is it possible to live without classifying?
Will our bodies, our families, our countries, be any less safe if we stop thinking? Are they any less safe at this moment? — although you are not thinking now, and may never think again. If someone walks in now and tells you your house is on fire, you will still take immediate action.
What is this nonsense of thinking all about? We don’t use it when we are taking action. We don’t use it when we are listening. We certainly don’t use it to experience love or the beauty of a sunset.
The fact is that we think when we are unconscious of being alive, when we have lost contact with reality. Thinking is us dreaming while we imagine we are awake. And most of our talking is also dreaming — expressed in words instead of thoughts.
The question is: How do we know when our thinking and talking is dreaming? And the answer is, when we are avoiding the fact.
(Follow this closely, because at this moment you are experiencing the truth of what is being said. You are looking for the fact. So you are neither thinking nor talking.)
Avoiding the fact is escapism. Thinking and most of our talking is an attempt to escape from the fact of life. This is a difficult and painful fact to face because it means the end of us as self-assertive, self-affirming entities. By thinking, talking and discussing we try to run away from the fact.
A fact can only be faced by living it.
You do not have to think or talk.
Just live it. Now.
Unless you grasp this fact instantly you are wasting your time.
We use the word thinking to describe a mental process that has two distinct functions. One is thinking as a form of dreaming. The other we use when we make plans or look to see what the situation is. The difference between planning and thinking is that when we plan we use only facts and always with the intention at that moment of translating them into action.
Action is the reality. We all know it is a world of facts which will mercilessly crush anyone who acts on airy-fairy notions and impressions. Realising this, whenever we have anything important to do, we look at the situation and take action. And when we want to escape into waking sleep (which includes worry) we think, or exchange dreams in talking.
I am not saying it is wrong to think or have discussions. There is no right or wrong in this — only finding the fact. ‘Right and wrong’, like ‘good and bad’ are judgments based on conditioned attitudes. If you have no attitude to what you are doing, when you look at a situation you see only the fact.
The optimum of man’s experience is beyond thinking and talking as a need.
When someone begins to see this, will he or she settle for anything less than the total, enduring experience?
Is this not the movement of life — always towards the greater experience?
And what of those who do not see this truth, or do not believe it, are they wrong?
You might have long periods of stillness and then suddenly find yourself thinking again. Why?
As we have already seen, thinking is a habit deeply ingrained in us by desire. When desire goes it leaves behind a furrow or groove along which we continue to think, sometimes much to the annoyance of someone who has experienced stillness. This ‘groove-thinking’ is sporadic and can be fairly quickly starved out. Although it doesn’t have the virulence of desire (rather the strength of a persistent idea) it is still pretty painful to obliterate the groove.
If you experience the fact that thinking is a form of sleep you will begin to wake up. You will think less and less. But if you have only followed this self-discovery intellectually, or even if you agree with me, you will go on thinking just as much as ever.
I can resume this (I just read briefly):
Don't engage in mind games anymore. Be alert. See your thoughts like a referee sees the game. Don't take part in this play. Just observe. After a time you'll understand what's reality and who you are.
It's true ?
#meditation
Yes, be aware. Be in the present. And strive to inner stillness.
Best wishes.
You say
You should give Descartes more credit. He was no dummy. Ask yourself this: "is it possible to be thinking and not exist?" Put another way, can things that don't exist be thinking? It seems that thinking requires something to do the thinking.
This is very different from the obviously fallacious "I see a dog, therefore I am a dog."
Before you dismiss the great thinkers it's wise first to try to understand them.