Isn’t thinking essential in order to survive in this world?
Your mind is an instrument, a tool. It is there to be used for a specific
task, and when the task is completed, you lay it down. As it is, I
would say about 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only
repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often
negative nature, much of it is also harmful. Observe your mind and
you will find this to be true. It causes a serious leakage of vital
energy.
This kind of compulsive thinking is actually an addiction. What
characterizes an addiction? Quite simply this: you no longer feel that
you have the choice to stop. It seems stronger than you. It also gives
you a false sense of pleasure, pleasure that invariably turns into pain.
Why should we be addicted to thinking?
Because you are identified with it, which means that you derive your
sense of self from the content and activity of your mind. Because you
believe that you would cease to be if you stopped thinking. As you
grow up, you form a mental image of who you are, based on your
personal and cultural conditioning. We may call this phantom self the
ego. It consists of mind activity and can only be kept going through
constant thinking. The term ego means different things to different
people, but when I use it here it means a false self, created by
unconscious identification with the mind.
To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future
are considered important. This total reversal of the truth accounts for
the fact that in the ego mode the mind is so dysfunctional. It is always
concerned with keeping the past alive, because without it — who are
you? It constantly projects itself into the future to ensure its continued
survival and to seek some kind of release or fulfillment there. It says:
“One day, when this, that, or the other happens, I am going to be
okay, happy, at peace.” Even when the ego seems to be concerned
with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it
completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it
reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in
the mind-projected future. Observe your mind and you’ll see that this
is how it works.
The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find
the present moment as long as you are your mind.
I don’t want to lose my ability to analyze and discriminate. I wouldn’t
mind learning to think more clearly, in a more focused way, but I don’t
want to lose my mind. The gift of thought is the most precious thing
we have. Without it, we would just be another species of animal.
The predominance of mind is no more than a stage in the evolution of
consciousness. We need to go on to the next stage now as a matter
of urgency; otherwise, we will be destroyed by the mind, which has
grown into a monster. I will talk about this in more detail later.
Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a
small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without
consciousness, but consciousness does not need thought.
Enlightenment means rising above thought, not falling back to a level
below thought, the level of an animal or a plant. In the enlightened
state, you still use your thinking mind when needed, but in a much
more focused and effective way than before. You use it mostly for
practical purposes, but you are free of the involuntary internal
dialogue, and there is inner stillness. When you do use your mind, and
particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every
few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and
no-mind. No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way
is it possible to think creatively, because only in that way does
thought have any real power. Thought alone, when it is no longer
connected with the much vaster realm of consciousness, quickly
becomes barren, insane, destructive.
The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense
against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information —
this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists,
whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from
inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or
insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative
breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising
result of a nationwide inquiry among America’s most eminent
mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods,
was that thinking “plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive
phase of the creative act itself.” 1 So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because
they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to
stop thinking!
It wasn’t through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is
life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is
clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How
can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter
contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600
pages each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the
more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and
how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes
a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.