March 11, 2007
Today I was walking around at a local flea market scanning the isles for things I could use and occasionally doing my Walking Zen meditation, which is to work on my Koan “who am I?” while doing other things – spiritual multitasking. At one point I had a sudden awareness that something was up. Something in the atmosphere had changed. I stopped browsing and looked around. My first thought was there had been an explosion or some significant event. In these first few seconds of noticing this I was trying to figure what this “disturbance in the Force” was but I didn’t see anything. I thought it was something in the external environment but soon realized that it was something about me or the way I was experiencing things. Whatever was happening, it was quite startling when I first noticed it but as that feeling faded the experience became quite beautiful. Everything seemed somehow cleaner and clearer. It all looked the same yet colors seemed brighter and more colorful and it was as if some kind of invisible fog had lifted. I stopped by a tree out of the ambling traffic and just looked around. There was a deep calmness and stillness and a kind of subliminal joy present – and that’s when I realized that I had stopped thinking! I could still think of course and was doing so but now I could clearly see my thoughts rise into awareness, serve their purpose, and descend into oblivion. Now when I stopped thinking intentionally, my consciousness was quiet. No thoughts came up! No thoughts below the surface! Silence!! Not ordinary silence but much more profound – a silence undercutting the noisy colorful chaos around me – absolute silent stillness.
So I continued in this state for several minutes as it was easy to “not think.” There was a newness to the experience which I can’t explain and I felt something more phenomenal was going to happen with my awareness – a sort of “silent drum-roll” feeling. But nothing more profound happened although I did have some interesting insights. I noticed that when the thought machine is turned off what I’m left with is just pure and somehow heightened experience. It seems that the “thinking” this machine generates is like a massive amount of static that contaminates EVERYTHING, not by the kind of thinking, positive or negative etc., but by its very nature. It’s like a refrigerator that is noisy and blocks other sounds but it is constant so you don’t notice it until the compressor turns off. Suddenly you notice the silence and you also become aware of the presence of quieter sounds you didn’t hear before.
As I started thinking more and more ABOUT what I was experiencing, I was unknowingly turning the crank on the thought-engine, like you might crank up an old Model-T. After maybe 10 minutes of peace, the machine was running again. When it had turned off spontaneously however, keeping it off felt easy because it actually required some effort or intention to think, but now when it kicked in, I couldn’t turn off the unconscious noise.
This experience gave me the impression that I am addicted to thinking – it’s like a constant noise that keeps me distracted from a higher awareness, like biting one’s nails or gambling or even taking drugs or a million other things. Most of my thinking is a mechanical rehashing of the past mixed in with imagining and rehearsing various futures and a lot of just talking to myself in my head. In his books Carlos Castaneda talks about turning off the “internal dialog” as a means of “stopping the world”. What happened today reminds me of that. When my thinking ceased, the silence was startling. I was compelled to look around and be more aware of my surroundings – to be more present.
Thought is not a requirement for enlightenment or waking up. Awakening is not verbal or conceptual or even an understanding. It is purely the knowing of Self and thinking just gets in the way. . I’d like to be able to turn the noise off more often. Of course there’s a deeper reason than “habit” for any addiction. I’ll have to look into this.