The World as Just So, Part 8: Disturbing Confusions of the Mind

When you are perfectly free to feel stuck or not stuck, then you’re unstuck. Because actually, nothing can stick on the real mind, and you will find this out if you watch the flow of your thoughts. There is an expression in Chinese which means ‘the flow of thoughts,’ or what we call in literary criticism ‘stream of consciousness.’ And they put the character for thought (念) three times: niàn, niàn, niàn. And so you will notice that thought follows thought follows thought when you are just ruminating.

And those thoughts arise and go like waves on the water; all the time, they come and go. And when they go, they are as if they had never been here. So, actually, this shows your mind doesn’t stick. Really. You can get the illusion of it sticking by, for example, cycling the same succession of thoughts over and over again. And that gives a sense of permanence in the same way as when you revolve a cigarette butt in the dark, you get the illusion of there being a solid circle although there is only the single point of fire. And it is from this connecting of thoughts that we get the sensation that behind our thoughts there is a thinker who controls them and experiences them. Although, the notion that there is a thinker is just one member in the stream of thoughts.

For example, if you get a certain kind of rhythm that goes ‘diggy diggy diggy diggy boop diggy diggy diggy diggy boop diggy diggy diggy diggy boop diggy diggy diggy diggy boop,’ the ‘boop’ is part of the rhythm. But it can be used as a cue. So you get—in relation to ‘diggy diggy diggy diggy boop’—you get ‘thought thought thought thought thinker thought thought thought thought thinker.’ And if this happens regularly enough and long enough, you get the illusion of there being someone who thinks apart from the stream of thoughts that come and go; the stream of experiences. And we use such absurd phrases not only as ‘thinking our thoughts,’ but ‘feeling our feelings,’ ‘seeing sights,’ and ‘hearing sounds.’ But you must understand: it is perfectly obvious that seeing a sight is seeing; hearing a sound is hearing; feeling a feeling is feeling. So, in the same way, thinking a thought is thinking.

But you get split-minded, you see, and so you get ‘I’ and ‘me,’ and the ‘I’ who ought to—or must—control ‘me’ as a sensation of some real entity that stands aside from thoughts and chooses among them, controls them, regulates them, and so on.

Actually, this is a way to have one’s thoughts not controlled. The more there is this duality of the separate ‘thinker’ standing aside from the thoughts—the separate ‘feeler’ watching or feeling the feelings—the more the stream of feelings is coaxed into self-protective activity; into getting more and more like a stuck record, the purposes of which are to protect and to aggrandize and enlarge the status of the supposed ‘thinker.’

When Jōshū, who was a Tang dynasty Zen master, was asked—he had made some reference to the enlightened mind being like the mind of a child—and they said, Well, what is the mind of a child?

And he said, A ball in a mountain stream.

Why?

Thought follows thought instantaneously without interruption.

So the saying: Walk or sit as you will. But whatever you do, don’t wobble.

Now, we can see this very clearly from confusions we can get into in activity. I have just said, We can see this very clearly from confusions we get into in activity. What kind of a statement is that? When I raised the question—what kind of a statement was it that I just made—I’m beginning to talk about talking. And one can do that, provided you don’t try to do it while you are making the original statement.

If I want to say something about what I’ve just said, then I must do it later, mustn’t I? But not at the same time. I cannot say You are a fool, and at the same time say I’m giving you an insult in so many words. I cannot say—or, in mathematics—I cannot write down a certain equation, and as I’m writing in down, simultaneously, state what kind of an equation this is. Unless, of course, I invent an exceedingly complex language which talks about itself as it goes along. But in the ordinary way, people get completely mixed up by that. In the middle of being about to say to somebody anything, you start to think about whether this is the right thing to say. And you start wobbling. You get, in other words, too much feedback. And too much feedback makes any mechanism go crazy.

So, in the same way, when you are very, very aware of the difference between the deeds and the doer, and the doer—while doing the deeds—is always sort of commenting on them; the doer really never gets with it! In other words, you are about to strike a nail and you wonder—as you are about to hit it—Is this the right place to put it? And so you’ve probably hit your thumbnail instead of the nail, because you don’t go right through with hitting that nail. This is not saying—let me mark this again—it is not saying that there should be no criticism of thought. But if you criticize thought while thinking, as if there were a critic thinker standing aside from the stream of thought, then you get all balled up. And that is exactly what happens in the process of attachment, or what are called in Buddhist kleśa, which mean ‘disturbing confusions of the mind.’

And, you see, this kind of confusion is something to which the human organism is peculiarly liable, because the human organism has language, has—you see, thinking is silent language, and I mean ‘language’ in the most inclusive sense of the word: not only words, but also images and numbers; notation. Just because, then, we can talk about anything. We can talk about talking, we can talk about thinking, we can talk about ourselves, as if we could stand aside and say, ‘Said I to myself’ said I. All we are actually doing is making a second thought, or thought stream, which comments on the one that went before, and then pretending that the second stream is a different stream than the first. That’s because there are built into our minds all kinds of phony images about memory.

We think, for example, of memory by analogy with engraving. In order to remember something we write it down. And so we have a flat and stable piece of paper, and we make marks on it with a pencil, and they stay there. So we begin to think, Isn’t mental memory something of the same kind? Is there something stable, upon which the passage of thoughts makes an impression? We say, He impressed me very much; this was a lasting impression on my mind, as if we were tablets. Indeed, the philosopher Locke used the expression tabula rasa, or ‘clean slate,’ to describe the mind of a child. This is a mind which has not yet collected any memories, as if there were some sort of surface which accumulated these things and preserved them, and that’s me.

But, you see, this superstition is related to a much more ancient superstition that the world consists of two elements, one of which is ‘stuff,’ and the other of which is ‘form.’ This is a myth based on a model of the world which is fundamentally ceramic. God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground. And so there is a ‘stuff,’ and so there are ‘forms’ engraved in it, or imposed on it, or stamped on it like a seal is stamped on wax.