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Thinking
About Not Thinking
by Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
September 26, 1997
As
a practice advisor, I am often asked, in one way or another, "How
can I stop thinking?" And so I've done a lot of thinking about this.
Thinking about not thinking is thinking and the notion of trying to stop
thinking comes from thinking about it and is a strategy, a kind of thinking.
In the text The Straight Path, Zen Master Anzan Hoshin
quotes the following from Zen Master Dogen's Fukanzazengi,
or How Everyone Can Sit:
"Think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking? Be before
thinking. These are the basics of zazen."
The Sensei unfolds the meaning of this passage in this way:
"This means: No opposites. Zen is not a matter of thinking (shiryo)
or of shutting out thought (fushiryo) but of being Before Thinking
(hishiryo). Before Thinking means to be prior to experiences
in the same way that a mirror is always prior to what it shows even at
the moment of showing it. We cannot be anything that we are aware of.
We are always the context of whatever content arises. When we release
all of our states and our avoidance and identification then we are always
right there at the very moment that the world arises, right at this pointless
point. Bring together every aspect of mind, everything hidden and everything
obvious, and allow each to resolve itself into the knowing of it. This
is zazen, the shikan-taza of all Awakened Ones."
If reading that were enough, I wouldn't need to say anything further.
Although the Sensei provides clear instructions on how to understand our
practice in one concise paragraph, we don't do it. Instead, we think about
every sentence. When we read, we think we are reading about thoughts and
that we should think about them. When the Sensei speaks, he tells us how
to practice. When he uses words like "release" or "bring
together", or "allow", it's not just good prose. These
are technical terms for certain activities of attention. This book The
Straight Path is a guided tour through the structures of attention
we experience and a manual for opening them.
It's all very simple. So simple that we don't know what to think about
it. We sit. The longer we sit, the more we see that any thought that comes
up is just another thought and that all thoughts arise within the vastness
of Awareness. When we think, we are experiencing thinking. Depending on
the extent to which we are practicing, there is some awareness of the
thinking. If we are not practicing at all, we have withdrawn, obsessed
with our stories, recoiling from present experiencing into fabricated
labyrinths that lead us nowhere and teach us nothing. When we practice,
we can allow the thoughts to rise and fall and know simultaneously that
they are only thoughts, without substance, and allow them to be simply
a movement, like a breeze rustling through leaves.
Even when the thoughts and feelings are so dense, so confused that we
feel as though we can't see our hand in front of our face, we can still
see the wall, hear the sounds, see the colours and know that we are in
reality, just sitting in a room and there is nothing going on. With practice,
even when the thoughts and feelings are about utter desolation, fear,
anger, hopelessness, through practice, we can come to know that thinking
is just an activity of bodymind, something that it does, like eating or
shitting and means nothing about who or what we are. Isn't it odd that
when we sit down to eat a bowl of soup, we don't look into it and think
"Oh, that's who I am, that's what I mean." When we shit, we
don't look into the bowl and say "Oh, that's who I am, that's what
I mean." So sorry if this sounds a bit rude but monks arent
quite the sort of people you want to invite to a garden party.
My point is that when we think, we think that's who we are and what we
mean. It doesnt occurs to us that if we really were this thought
and the meaning of this thought, we wouldn't need to think another, because
we would be that all of the time. How many thoughts do we have in the
space of a minute? It's worth looking into. And at the end of that minute,
who are we, and what do we come to mean? And in the next minute? And the
next? How odd that with the experience of countless minutes, we still
think that "this thought is true, this is the one".
Often, during practice interviews, when a student asks a question about
thinking, there is an accompanying frustration and when I respond by asking
"Right now, are you feeling your breath, your hands, your feet?",
the frustration deepens. Until they actually allow themselves to do this
and then everything shifts and they laugh and shake their heads at how
absurd their frustration was.
We hear the phrase all of the time, "open up around it". When
we have managed to really shore up our belief in a self by working up
a good state all around it to give it a place to be, we don't want to
hear this. It seems too expensive to us. And that's true. Opening up around
it all will cost us everything. All of our thoughts, our beliefs, our
belief in our thoughts, all of it. It will leave us not knowing where
we are, and because we are so used to living mediated by our delusions
we doubt whether we can support ourselves without them.
But our thoughts and stories have never been how we were really able to
actually live: to see and hear and cook and eat and stand up and sit down.
Whatever you or I think about anything is inconsequential. It means nothing
about who we are or what is actually going on.
So what is going on here? Are you feeling your breath, your hands, your
feet? Are you seeing the colours, the depth of the space in front of you
and to the side, above and below? Are you hearing the sounds, the sound
of (present sound) of your breath, the breathing of the person next to
you? Are you feeling the temperature of the air on your skin?
Thoughts rise and fall and come and go just like the breath comes and
goes. We dont need to try to stop thinking in order to practice.
We just need to allow ourselves to recognize that the world is unthinkable.
That who we are is beyond thought and cannot be captured in the web of
our same old stories.
Have you ever noticed how every thought we think is familiar? Every shadowy
trail we follow is already known, because we've already followed them
in one way or another. Sometimes we might re-combine them in some convoluted
way and think that we're thinking something altogether new and brilliant,
and get really into it, but it's only a matter of time before we see that
these, like every other thought we have ever had, was only the flickering
of mind.
Our storylines spin endlessly, but our lives are not a story. Our lives
are taking place right here, right now and the storylines take place within
our lives and cannot define our lives. When we sit, we see again and again
and again, that there is only what is going on right now and what's going
on right now isn't inside any of our thoughts or our feelings. The only
place from which we can do anything about anything is only ever right
here; the only time we can do anything about anything is always only right
now. Right here right now is not a thought.
Practice is inconceivable. It can only be understood through doing actually
doing it. Anything we think about our practice is just thinking. It's
not practice, just more stories.
We love stories, ours and everyone else's. Recently, someone mentioned
that they would be interested in hearing my story.
I think you'll enjoy my response. I wrote:
In my story, like everyone else's, there's lots of suffering, lots of
nonsense, lots of hard-won wisdom, and more importantly the mystery, to
me, of how I got here and what "here" is. The Sensei has spent
thousands of hours with me, literally, showing me how to release past
experiences. But for that to happen, I had to be willing to show them
to him. Exposure - such fear we have of it. Sometimes, when there was
too much fear, he would show them to me. I'll give you an example of how
subtle this can be. This was a memory that came up when I was walking
with him one day. It was almost completely forgotten, and seemed not important
at all.
Some background: My mother loved dancing. She used to tap dance during
the war, loved Fred Astaire movies, loved swing and so on. She was in
England during the war, was in the WAF, so when she was transferred from
one base to another, the first thing she would do would be to check out
the local dance halls. She was very beautiful, very energetic, and she
had a fabulous sense of rhythm.
When I was three, we (my father, mother, older sister and older brother)
emigrated to Vancouver. About six months later, we bought a turntable
and I discovered Tschaichowsky - the Nutcracker Suite. I think it was
the first piece of classical music I'd heard, and I thought it was just
fabulous. There was a picture of a doll on the cover. That just made my
day. I didn't have any dolls. My parents had very little at that point,
so I had dishtowels with a knot tied in them for dolls. So this beautiful
sound and the painted dolls on the cover were jewels and I got up and
danced for joy. (Though I felt a bit silly doing so).
My mother got really into this. It became a thing we shared. When she
had the energy (she was working nightshift as a nurse in a mental institute)
we put on Tschaichowsky and I would dance and she would say do this, do
that and so forth. It was a lot of fun, but it was also very intense.
The memory that came up:
I have a somewhat blurry recollection of the intensity. At three, the
wiring isn't working too well, so I had a really difficult time trying
to sort out what was my stuff and what was hers and what was true about
any of it. It was kind of like standing on a tilted floor -- it was askew,
but I didn't know where my sense of balance was coming from, let alone
how to articulate it.
What I said to the Sensei did not include any of the details, and what
I said was simply this: "When I was little, I loved to dance."
That was all.
We were walking down the street at the time. He didn't say anything, just
started whistling a piece from the Nutcracker Suite.
I still dont know what to think about this. So many events like
this in my life are unthinkable. All of my practice continually points
me to That which is Before Thinking, the space of open Awareness in which
thinking and not thinking, colours and forms and sounds and birth and
death are all coming and going. We dont need to stop thinking and
we dont need to follow thoughts. We can just release them. Then
we find that they occur in a space bigger than they are and that we can
bring all of how we are together as just this moment. And release that
into a yet larger space. And so I want to just point out to you that this
is what your practice is as well. What do you think about that?
Have a GOOD morning.
 
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White Wind Zen Community. All rights reserved.
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