"Thinking only begins at the point where we have come to know that
reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of
thinking."
...
Martin
Heidegger
This essay,
It Thinks You,
is the companion piece to
If you stop for
a moment
and just look, you'll see that the way you relate to the source of
thoughts and to thoughts themselves and to thinking itself, is that
you're the one doing it ie that you're the one who's the source of your
thoughts, that you're the one creating them, that you're the one
thinking them. Like the "I" in the ubiquitous phrase "I think ...", you
regard thinking without question as if you're the one
doing it. In a word, you are that "I think ...".
There's
a simple and easy test
for whether or not you're really the one doing the thinking ie for
whether or not you're really the one thinking your thoughts. It's this:
if you're the one doing the thinking ie if you're the one thinking your
thoughts, then stop thinking them. That's right: stop
thinking them ... and watch what happens.
Tell the truth: you can't stop thinking them. You can't stop thoughts.
Even if you're
a yogi
who can calm your autonomic nervous system to the point where there's a
brief period of respite, thinking and thoughts start again all by
themselves. You can't stop thoughts, therefore you aren't the one
thinking them in the first place. To the contrary, you don't think
thoughts: thoughts think you. All that thinking you say you're
doing about something, you've cast as if you're the one thinking it.
But it's not you.
You don't think it.
It thinks you.
The process is on full automatic. And you can't stop this
process because you aren't the one who started it to begin with.
is a
gamechanger.
Really. Try this on for size (don't believe this, just
look): thinking itself generally (and thinking thoughts specifically)
isn't something we "do". Even though that's how we couch it
colloquially, thinking is a process we're born into. The process
thinks us. For centuries we've had it backwards. We've cast the
process as if it's we're the ones thinking our thoughts. And until
the possibility of being
transformed showed up on the planet,
that's how we kept it cast. With
transformation
comes the astonishing possibility (followed by the unavoidable
realization) that it's actually the other way around: that it's
actually thoughts that are thinking us.
You may have wondered about the two
quotes
I selected to post at the start of this essay inasmuch as they appear
to be conflicting. They aren't. And
demonstrating
that they aren't, could be a subject for another conversation on
another occasion. For the time being at least, first re-read and get
Werner's quote,
then re-read and get
Martin's
(in that order). Then consider that in the apparent conflict gap
between the two,
a breakthrough
in what really thinking is, lies waiting to be discovered.
