Thoughts Happen

(This post is the third of a blog being built elsewhere (https://knotthere.net). If you feel so inclined, please go subscribe to the RSS feed, as the majority of posts, in time, will be exclusive to that site.)

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What are thoughts? It’s difficult to think about thoughts because, in doing so, you end up in a strange, infinitely expanding loop of witnessing that doesn’t find any cohesive end, structure, or thing. Looking at looking at looking at looking…thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking…and on and on it goes, this very process being upheld by the assumption of an ‘I’ (the knot) which is the bounds to all thought and therefore can, at some apparent point, cohere everything into an order. This never happens, of course. We simply use thought to explain thought, never allowing ourselves to sit and be open with the strangeness of thoughts, plural.

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Sit for a while and notice your thoughts.

Where do your thoughts come from?

Where do your thoughts go?

What is between each thought?

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Now, one issue with the way mindfulness meditation (and ‘mindfulness’ in general) has been approached here in the West, is that because of the presumptive knot of the I, when we sit and watch our thoughts, we often do so with a sort of background meta-thought that is all the while presuming a center or foundation from which all such thoughts arise. This presumption (the knot) therein coheres all thoughts where there isn’t cohesion. It draws a tense boundary around multiple thoughts and calls it thinking, making such a process largely synonymous with something we call, mind (another bloody thing we can’t really find).

Yet, when we look at thoughts—or, if you must, our process of thinking—we find individual thoughts, detached from one another, rising, and then falling. A thought happens/appears/arises, it sticks around for a while like a sort of mental whirlpool, and then fades away. Then, another thought arises, dances a bit, and fades away. Repeat until death. It might appear then that from this, one could surmise that the process of thinking is:

Thought > Thought > Thought > Thought,

-but in truth, if we settle ourselves, we can notice that the process is:

Thought > Pause > Thought > Pause > Thought > Pause etc.

Thoughts arise and fall as a wave of Being itself. They arise from nothing and they disappear into nothing.

The fact is, we don’t think thoughts. They happen and we witness them. When asked where a thought arose from—let alone an idea—we would be at odds to explain where it came from or why it arose. Thoughts are always after the fact of what is being thought about, translators of some other quality that, by-and-large, deconstruct and whittle it down to something to be controlled. Thoughts happen so fast and have such a draw, and we’re so deeply conditioned to trust their after-the-fact as the before, that we never really see that we aren’t our thoughts. Allow me to give you a metaphor.

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The Hologram Human

Imagine a person standing in an empty room. Before them, to the left, is an ENTRY door, and to the right, an EXIT door (we’ll be using these later). Other than this, the room is entirely empty of anything else.

Now, let’s turn to the person. They are standing in this room, and unbeknownst to them, there is a 1-to-1 hologram of them—that is, an exact hologram of the person—overlaid over them (it doesn’t matter where it’s ‘coming’ from for now). The person is Being, and the hologram is our thoughts.

The hologram is so overlaid over the person that it appears that the person and the hologram are one and the same. In standing, moving, or existing, it appears that the difference between the two is null, thereby leading many to assume that the hologram (thought and knot) and the person (Being) are, in fact, the same.

As we saw, however, with the aforementioned process of Thought > Pause > Thought, there is a pause, that is, a distance between one thought and the next. That is to say, there is a distance or break between Being and thought. Of course, thought (and, by extension, the knot) works with such unbelievable speed when it comes to ceaselessly trying to justify and prove its existence, we rarely, if ever, are still enough to perceive this distance.

If, then, we metaphorically zoom in on this person-hologram overlay, right into the edges, as far as we can go, we will see a tiny gap between the two. And if, then, the person (as Being, Awareness, etc.) was to look down and notice this distance, something strange might happen.

This noticing of the distance between Being and thought is the exact same process of noticing the pause between thoughts, as has already been mentioned. In becoming aware of this distance, there is then a realisation of This (Being) and then (after-the-fact) a translation from thought. Or, more abstractly, there is a pure intelligence and then a translation or mediation via conditioned intelligence.

To actively attend to this process of noticing is paradoxically impossible (see my previous post on why the knot can’t undo itself), yet, it does happen. And from this process of noticing the distance, the gap between Being and thought increases. Or, to return to the metaphor, the hologram starts to ‘split-off’ from the person and, soon enough, one is able to be Aware of a thought arising as if it were ‘in front’ of them, or ‘away’ from them, or even ‘over there’.

This process of expanding distance is the beginning of the end for suffering. No longer is it the case that one is sad, or is angry, or is anxious, because that would be to conflate the hologram with the person. Those feelings (that in turn appear to bring about various thoughts) still arise, but they do so at a distance. It is no longer the case of an overwhelming, immediate holographic overlay of emotion, but a matter of perceiving how thoughts are from afar.

It is as if, in the metaphor, the person now stands as they Are, and the ENTRY door opens, in pops a thought—be it I am angry, I am sad, or I am miserable!—and Being/Awareness simply sees it as the arisen thought it is, pass in front of it, at a distance, and fade away out the EXIT door. The half-life of this process, over time, becoming ever shorter.

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No one has ever died from contradictions.

- Anti-Oedipus

Thoughts arise from nothing and fade back into nothing. The knot, in its paradoxically false process of knotting, declares that each and every thought is of a single, separated mind. Even then, it is the case that near enough every other thought we have is in contradiction to the one ‘prior’ to it (they have no coherence, really): I want to lose weight, I am eating the iced bun; I want to stop smoking, I’m going to buy a pack; I desire this, I am bored of this, and on and on it goes. A ceaseless tapestry of intricate hypocrisy, contradiction, and bullshit! But that doesn’t matter to the knot, because No knot has ever died from getting more tangled up. The knot adores contradiction because the battle that ensues is a justification of its existence. The knot loves hypocrisy because the felt tension is its reality. The knot cherishes bullshit because debate and argument are the bread and butter of its ever-needed strain.

So, much like everything else, all other processes and experiences, thoughts happen. Like the seasons, the growth of a flower, or an eddy in a river, a thought arises, dances, and fades away. From nothing to become something, from something to become nothing. And all the while Being Is.

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Addendum on Cogito, ergo sum:

In terms of sheer philosophical stupidity and hubris, there is no greater representative than Descartes’ famous dictum Cogito, ergo sum. Translated to, I think, therefore I am, this phrase not only stands as an abject lie, but is, in its progression, inherently self-defeating.

It’s quite simple, for the statement I think, therefore I am, to be thought—or more aptly, to arise as a thought—being had to already be. Amness, being, isn’t predicated on thought; it just Is. For the statement to even begin (let alone get to its end) with the word I, being has to be there already, for this thought of what it is to Be to be altogether, there has to be Being already. You are, then thoughts arise. The thought ‘I see’ doesn’t see. The thought ‘I hear’ doesn’t hear. The thought ‘I am’ isn’t Being.