Who am I without Thought?

The great Advaita Vedanta sage, Ramana Maharshi, experienced the truth of who he was when he lay on a floor in his uncle's home, and asked himself what it would be like to die. Spontaneously he moved into the experience he later called Self.

Buddha experienced it under the bodhi tree when he determined to sit until he knew the Truth. He called it an experience of No-Self.

Zen Master Bankei said he discovered the Unborn when he awakened. He told a group of 1,683 Zen priests gathered in 1690, "not a single one of you people at this meeting is unenlightened. Right now, you're all sitting before me as Buddhas.

Each of you received the Buddha-mind from you mothers when you were born and nothing else. This inherited Buddha-mind is beyond any doubt unborn, with a marvelously bright illuminative wisdom."1 This essential awakeness or Buddha-mind is called Unborn because it existed before any mental sensation, concept or image of yourself, and before this physical life, and will continue afterward.

Zen Master Hongshi, back in the Song Dynasty in China, spoke of cessation. He told us: "Buddhas and Zen masters do not have different realizations; they all reach the point of cessation, where past, present, and future are cut off and all impulses stop, where there is not the slightest object. Enlightened awareness shines spontaneously, subtly penetrating the root source."2

What is this mysterious experience that, while seeming to be nothing, and defined as indescribable, has also been the inspiration and the heart of spiritual searching for eons? And why, if it is such an intimate part of our being, is it so elusive to touch, and so impossible to grasp? The subject of countless scriptures, lectures and books, the realization of Truth is commonly believed to be so rare that even the few who dare to search for it often doubt their own capacity to attain it. Yet those who are awake claim everyone already has it.

There is a simple reason for this. The mind is correct, it will never get it, no matter how far and how deep it searches. There is only one doorway into the Truth, and the hints abound in the stories of mystics - death, doing nothing, never being born, cessation. Since ordinary mind, by its very nature, carries the birth and continuance of our identities, by storing experiences, running continual checks on the sensate condition and emotional status of the human system, and sending out thousands of thoughts to remind us we are somebody and must do something, it is completely invested in our remaining ignorant of that space within which is empty, or unborn. It believes it is vested with responsibility for our life and all the drama, both pleasurable and challenging, which it brings. It wants to give us meaning, and opportunity and healing and righteousness, along with whatever other patterns are imbedded within the brain structure. Out thoughts, and the emotions generated by them, create our world, and collectively they form the field of the larger culture and universal experience. Through an interweaving of these thoughts and reactions the species gradually winds it way through the evolutionary cycle. It appears to be very real and meaningful, because each person is so completely absorbed in the process.

The most useful question a spiritual seeker can ask is "Who or what am I without thought?"

Have you ever awakened in the early morning and for a few seconds you were nobody? Just a blank slate? Perhaps someone you loved had just died, and for a second you did not remember it, and you felt open. And then you could watch your thoughts bring in the memories of what day it was, what you needed to do, inflicting pain mercilessly. Or perhaps it was just a normal day, with thought reminding you of some problem that had troubled you the day before, as if to ask "Are you going to take this up again now?" If you rested in the interval, before thought, for a few seconds, you were at the threshold of your true nature. If you had fallen backward into the silence instead of forward into the mind, you would have been home.

Or perhaps, if you are a meditator, you struck a stillpoint as you followed your practice, a blankness where the mind momentarily lost its foothold on the shore where it had been watching thoughts, or images, or the breath arise like fireworks along the ocean. And there was nothing arising. The mind can become quite frightened when this occurs, and jump immediately into a new field of action - a twitch in the leg becomes a call to readjust yourself, a memory becomes something you need to work on, a slight energetic response becomes a sexual impulse that causes you either pleasure or self-judgment. But here, you were standing again on the threshold, and you didn't recognize the door.

Realization is not the big and elaborate display that most minds imagine it to be. It is seeing clearly our true nature, that which is the source and natural basic condition underlying awareness or consciousness, before thought is born, before the mind takes off on its journey of individuation. It is meeting the formless like a yawning abyss at the edge of our psyches and flowing into it until we realize we are it. When we give up the urge to think of it, control it, master it, love it, or take any other kind of action in relationship to it, we are letting go of the manipulations of ego to own the Truth, and in this act we become the Truth. In this becoming is the recognition we are That, and always have been, and That is consciousness itself and never dies. In one sweep we have lost everything we thought we were, and discovered we are eternal.

Such an experience, if one is even able to consider it a possibility, has many implications for the mind and so thoughts are produced to block our access to it, or distract us and hook us back into the ordinary patterns of our life. The difference between awakening and enlightenment is that an awakened being knows the truth, and the enlightened person has surrendered everything to it and simply lives within it. Actually, it may be more correct to say that the truth itself has stripped away everything of the life that was identified as "me" so that the enlightened person lives as stillness and presence with little or no mental clutter most or all of the time. The working mind is available for practical tasks but the thinking mind is made irrelevant.

Although most people are addicted to thought, and believe they would be as helpless as infants without it, what enlightened people demonstrate is a relaxed, spontaneous and smooth responsiveness in life that seems to be very beneficial to those about them. They can talk or write or do astonishing tasks like running hospitals, monasteries and ashrams almost effortlessly, because there is no drag from a mind inhibiting them with anxiety, criticism, and divisiveness. They will tell you to give up concepts while they appear to be offering their own, but the new ideas are used the way one would use a thorn to remove a thorn. There is no need for attachment to concept when you speak from the Truth, because the Truth will spontaneously reassert itself in a myriad of ways all its own, without any effort on your part to remember it. If you are willing to live in the Truth, and give up all your mental concepts and beliefs, wisdom arises to carry the needs and expressions that will live out your life. Jesus said, "The Truth will set you free." What is this freedom? It is freedom from your concepts, from your self-imposed identity, from every belief and attachment, and therefore, from suffering.

Now, if the mind is convinced it might give up thinking, the next objection is usually that you would give up loving. How would you hold your family together if you didn't have attachment anymore? It is an illusion that attachment is the same as love. Attachment feels like love because it tells us a person is very important to us, perhaps is even a part of us, and we are touched and linked by a need for one another. This connectedness opens the heart, and human love makes us feel good around this lover or child or family member or friend. But along with this human attached-love arises negative feelings, because all movements of the mind come in dualities. So the negative feelings may be fear of loss, anger at rejection, a need to control, resistances to change, jealousy, longing, clinging and many other emotions that color the relationship. It is obvious that even rage and hatred can arise when an attached love is thwarted.

When we see through thought, which is like a collection of frames drawn from our past experiences and superimposed on the present, we are able to slip out of it before is drives us into behavior and emotional positions we later regret. In time an awakened person can discard a thought as easily as an old newspaper, and be present to what is happening without feeling any judgment or attachment to how it should turn out. This non-attachment is felt as a pure acceptance, a recognition of the beauty of another person just as they are. It obliterates division. In this environment the person who is your lover or family member or friend receives the innocent and natural love of the spirit for the spirit. Something in them begins to wake up, whether they know it or not. You are also able to love those with whom there was conflict. If they do not love you, it doesn't matter anymore. You see their pain rather than their rejection.

People who are awakened find themselves loving spontaneously, with no logic or reason, because the first movement of consciousness into life is driven by love, not necessity. The awakeness wants to live in form, to stand as trees, flow as rivers, float as clouds, walk and fly as animals and birds, and move and create and dialogue as humans. It wants to be formed into all the myriad of creations, the homes and planes and dinners and dances and celebrations, and even the traumas of existence. The little "me" has many reactions to all of this - as many as there are humans on the planet. All enjoy parts of it and hate other parts of it. But as the Buddha pointed out, there is only one way out of suffering within this system, and that is to know your true nature. This is freedom. It is quite and present, relaxed and loving, with no deliberate movement toward acceptance or rejection. It has been called the peace that passes understanding. No thought. This is the essence of being without thought.

Having no thought does not mean having no wisdom, having nothing to say, or giving up on the experience of living. It is more like becoming a natural part of the environment, open and moving from a deep knowing that everything will be okay, tuning into what is and responding with no resistance. Any scripture or poetry that has touched you to the core was written without thought, but from Truth itself. Many great insights and inventions have appeared spontaneously this way. It is the thinking of those who attempted to codify the spiritual revelations of mystics into a system of belief that cause distortions; or the thinking mind that takes a great revelation about the nature of energy, and turns it into a weapon, that clouds the gifts of insight.

Despite the fact that we are moved by those who stand in the Truth, ultimately any mystic will tell you that you cannot learn the Truth from him or her. There is only one passage, and that is the silence within you, now. We do not understand spiritual Truth. We die into it. When you want the Truth no matter what the price, and are willing to sit at the door of emptiness not arguing against your thoughts, but making them irrelevant, until the Truth of your nature is revealed, you cannot miss it.

Who are you without thought? Find out. The Truth is always there waiting for you. Just be quiet.

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1 Waddel, N. (transl. & Ed.) (2000) The Unborn: The Life and Teachings of Zen Master Bankei. North Point Press, NY, p.40.

2 Cleary, T. (transl. & Ed.) (2000) Zen Essence: The Science of Freedom. Shambala, NY, p.63.

Please do not Reproduce without written permission from the author

© Bonnie Greenwell Ph.D.

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