Reality cannot be found in thought --

Meditation, truth, and sense-making thinking

by A State of Wonder 12/27/19

We take up meditative practices for a variety of reasons, but all meditative practices ultimately
have the same aim, which is to checkmate logical thinking.

More accurately, the thinking they work with is sense-making thinking — that is, the kind of
thinking that conceptualises the world, tries to solve it, fix it, or make sense of it.
When this happens and sense-making thinking reaches its limits, it becomes apparent that there
was something else going on all along which we were not aware of, something so obvious that
our first reaction to it is usually a huge belly laugh.

The point of these practices is not to stop using sense-making thinking. The point is to find that
there is another option and then to have both options available at all times without being
compulsively dragged into thinking when we would prefer not to.
Meditative practices are techniques we engage in to find out what that other option is.

Types of practices & thinking

The most common meditation techniques start with objects of focus which do not require any
thinking at all to be experienced. These might be our breath, our physical sensations, or the
sounds around us. We are asked to focus on them not in order to pull them apart or interpret
them, but precisely to stop doing so. The objective is to face the fresh pull of the air, the
uncomfortable press of a sensation, the naked appearing and disappearing of a sound, and just
experience them as they are — raw and unmediated. Breath, physical sensations, and sounds
are ideal because they are always accessible to us in a way in which, for example, eating cake
might not be. However, some meditative practices tend to use physical objects (like the flame
of a candle or a flower) to help us notice what we experience through the five senses and what
comes up only in thought.

Mantra meditations, like Transcendental Meditation, work with the same principle by turning
sound into a mental sound in the form of a mantra. This has the advantage of engaging our
thinking by giving it a specific task (repeating a mantra), thus taking away its power to worry
compulsively about something else. Basically, if your thinking is busy repeating a specific
thought, it’s easier for other thoughts to simply not arise. This makes Transcendental
Meditation a good practice for compulsive thinkers. It offers a quick and easy respite from
sense-making thinking, while also allowing us to start noticing what else is going on at all
times that we are usually not aware of.

Other practices go straight to the point by telling us to look at our thoughts as they arise and
disappear. This is astoundingly difficult. We’ve been training ourselves our whole life to do the
exact opposite, that is to say, to make sense of things, not to observe them with no agenda; and
so for most people this practice is beyond frustrating. The theory is simple. When you look at
your thoughts coming and going, you are looking at your thinking. And if you are looking at it,
you are not in it. At that point, you can notice that the only thing thinking has in common with
you is that it’s happening in you, and so the reality of you cannot be within thoughts. You can
also notice that you cannot look at thinking and use it at the same time.

In fact, if you are looking at your thinking and this comes in from the backdoor to comment on
itself, you’ll find that you are not looking at it anymore, but you are now looking from it again;
you are back into sense-making and problem-solving. Any commentary that arises about
watching your thoughts is a thought. Anything you try to devise to stop thinking is more
thinking. And so, at some point, you realise that there is nothing you can do about your
thoughts except for letting them all go and be their messy selves. You are over here looking at
them anyway, so you are not really affected by anything they come up with.

Zen looks at this from another angle. It recognises that humans cannot do this easily or
willingly because the pull towards thoughts is too strong – and so it takes the opposite
approach. It exasperates thinking. Zen koans are puzzles, in the form of questions or stories,
which cannot be solved through a linear thought process. This forces logical thinking to reach
its limit, completely exhaust itself, and give up. When it gives up, the answer is suddenly
apparent.

A Zen master may ask: “What is your original face, before your mother and father were born?”
or tell you this story: “After taking the high seat to preach to the assembly, Fa-yen raised his
hand and pointed to the bamboo blinds. Two monks went over and rolled them up in the same
way. Fa-yen said, ‘One gains, one loses.’” Feel free to ponder them for a bit. I’ve explained the
first one here and I’ll discuss the second one later in this article. The thing to understand about
koans is that they do have a solution. It’s just not in the koan.

Self enquiry also aims at exhausting the mind, but it does so in a different way. Instead of
looking at all your thoughts, self enquiry identifies the root thought of all thinking as the
concept I am. Then it asks you to look at it, either by considering it as a statement (“I am”) or
by asking the question “Who am I?”.

Your logical mind flares up and looks around, trying to find yourself as something to put into
words. You question and ponder and scramble for an answer, sure that it must be there, ready to
be found if only you could manage to look at this in the right way. But how can you find an
answer to “Who am I?” at the end of a process? How is it possible to find yourself over there, if
you are over here, looking? So when we engage with self enquiry practices, we soon find that
what we are looking for has nothing to do with anything that happens in (or is on the other side
of) any thought, not even of a basic one such as “I am”. The thought “I am” is no truer than any
other thought. The question “Who am I?” doesn’t linearly lead to any truth. And so who are
you?

Other teachings start from the premise that it’s very difficult to let your thoughts be if you are
actively suffering because of them. For these practices, the problem is not thinking, per se, as
much as the fact that we believe in what we are thinking. If we believe a thought, and that
thought is hurting us, then we must use another thought to shield ourselves from the first one,
thus getting more and more enmeshed in all sorts of thinking and losing track of what’s actually
true. Until we can see that there’s no truth within thinking — no truth within any thought,
neither the ones that seem to attack us nor the ones that seem to protect us — we cannot let
thinking be.

Byron Katie devised a system called The Work that takes into account human suffering and
uses it as a starting point for enquiry. The aim is to understand how suffering happens so that it
can have the space to fall away or transform on its own, rather than us transcending it or
bypassing it. You start with a thought that upsets you, formulate it as a sentence (for example,
“He doesn’t understand me”), then stay with it and consider it honestly. You ask yourself: Is it
true? Can I absolutely know that it’s true? How do I react when I believe this thought? Who
would I be without this thought? Then you turn the thought around into its opposites (for
example “I don’t understand him” or “I don’t understand myself”) and consider these thoughts
too, one by one.

Is the turnaround you are considering truer or at least as true as the original sentence? Can you
find 3 examples of how that is so? The only thing required in this practice is honesty. If a
turnaround doesn’t ring true, you don’t have to force it. When engaging with The Work, it’s
often astounding to see how much of the situation you were not seeing before, when you were
stuck in a specific position. And so that begs the question, where is truth if it cannot be found in
any of those statements?

Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō tried to crystalise this in what he called the “The Logic of
Basho”, or the logic of place. If you take two opposites and hold them both in your mind
without trying to solve them, synthesize them, or choose one over the other, a third place opens
up which you were not aware of before — a place that includes both.

Truth and thinking

In experience, if you take two opposing statements (for example “I know what I’m doing” and
“I have no idea what I’m doing”) and you contemplate them for truth, switching from one to
the other, back and forth, and then holding them together, you’ll soon find that they are both
true and false; that is to say, they are equal. Truth is in neither of them. What’s more, even if
you hold in mind opposing concepts, such as “truth” and “falseness”, you’ll find that truth is in
neither of them either — which is pretty mind-boggling. “Truth” is not, in fact, truer than
“falseness”. They are both just concepts. They happen in a place (reality, you) that holds both.
Let’s go back to our koan. “After taking the high seat to preach to the assembly, Fa-yen raised
his hand and pointed to the bamboo blinds. Two monks went over and rolled them up in the
same way. Fa-yen said, ‘One gains, one loses.’”

We have two monks. Their Zen master asks them to roll up the blinds and they both do so in
the exact same manner. However, the Zen master inspects their work and comments that one
did it well, the other didn’t.
Now imagine being one of the monks. You might immediately start wondering what the master
meant. Who did it wrong? Was that you? Oh god, why? How? Was it so bad that your teacher
felt the need to comment on it? It all becomes pretty upsetting. However, we know that there’s
no truth in that statement. The koan tells us that “they rolled them up in the same way.”
“Gain” and “loss” are just concepts. They are not happening in reality.

In reality the blinds have been rolled up. Everything that happens in the monks’ thoughts from
the moment the master utters “One gains, one loses” is completely fabricated and has nothing
to do with what is. In fact, nothing our thoughts fabricate is true. Nothing thinking can put into
words is true. No concept we use to organise, categorise, or comment on reality is true. No gain
and no loss exist outside of comparison, and comparison exists only in thinking. When you stop
thinking about gain and loss, they are not there. Reality is as it is. Anything else happens in
thought.

Here’s another koan.

“Two monks were watching a flag flapping in the wind.

One said to the other, ‘The flag is moving.’
The other replied, ‘The wind is moving.’
Huineng overheard this. He said, ‘Not the flag, not the wind. Mind is moving.’”

“Flag”, “wind”, “moving”, and even “mind” are all concepts imposed on what happens.
Thinking is segmenting experience, giving its part names, but experience is always happening
as a whole. It has nothing to do with thinking. Thinking is happening in experience too, it’s part
of the whole. If you take away the wind or the flag or the monks or your mind, the whole scene
cannot happen.

Truth and subjectivity

Let’s go a step further. From where you stand, right here and right now, the whole scene with
the flag, the wind, and the monks is appearing in your mind. So what is actually moving?
Surely it’s your mind. But let’s say you were actually in the scene. Where would the whole
scene be appearing anyway?

That’s the case with us as well. Right now, where is this whole moment happening? Who are
you in relation to it? You think you are the person reading these words and interacting with the
world, but the person you think you are is within experience, being experienced too. You can
think about this person. You can form a mental image of them. But if you are having thoughts
about them, then this person is nothing but something happening in thinking. So who’s having
the experience? Surely something that is not in thinking.
The experiencer is fabricated within experience

If you think you are the one experiencing this right now, that’s a thought, and thoughts are not
true. If you think you are not the one experiencing this right now, that is also a thought, and
thus not true. If you hold both thoughts together though, what else opens up? What was here all
along that is not in thinking?

Basically: if thinking cannot find reality because reality precedes it, this means that you cannot
know reality as something you find in or at the end of a thought process; it does not mean,
however, that you don’t know reality already. When you look for yourself, you are what you
are looking for, so you already have the answer. But you cannot put it into thought. Once you
put it into thought, it’s a thought.

There’s reality and there’s thought happening in reality. If thought starts thinking about reality,
that’s just thought, not reality itself. But it’s still happening in reality.

There’s you and there are thoughts about you. If thoughts about you come up, those are just
thoughts, they are not you, they don’t hold the reality of you. But they are still happening in
you.

In Zen, this is called taking the backward step. We stop trying to find truth in thoughts or get
somewhere else through thinking and step back out of thinking into what was here all along,
intimate and familiar.

What do you really know?

There’s only one thing we can be sure of right now, and that is that there is a subjective
experience happening. It’s how we are aware of these words. It’s how we are thinking, feeling,
breathing, sensing. Anything that we see, hear, feel, think, or otherwise sense happens within
this subjective experience. But whose experience is it? That’s the question. Surely it’s yours.
But who are you? And we are back to square one. Take the backward step.
Let’s go a bit deeper. What can you absolutely know apart from the fact that there is a
subjective experience happening right here and right now? Can you know anything else? For
example, can you absolutely know that there is an objective reality out there at all? Where
would “out there” even be? Can there be an outside to subjective experience? And if there was,
how would you know?

What we call objective reality, you only know it’s there because it’s appearing in your
subjectivity, and so you cannot truly know whether it’s out there or not. You could vow to find
out more and pick up a scientific book or enroll in a physics course, but that would be part of
your subjective experience too. Can you get out of subjectivity at all?
This is not meant as a metaphysical statement. There might very well be an objective reality out
there, but the point is, how can you know? You can’t. The moment you are aware of something,
it is a subjective experience. The only thing you know directly is your own subjective
experience.

However, whatever the nature of what you are experiencing is, you are here. For this
experience to be here, you must be here. You can doubt everything, but you cannot doubt that
you are here having doubts. You can doubt the content of every thought, but you cannot doubt
that you are here doubting the content of your thoughts. If you are thinking about anything at
all, you must be here.

And if you stop thinking? You are still here too. When you stop thinking, all thoughts and
concepts about reality and who you think you are are gone — your mental monologue is gone;
the way you sort and categorise feelings, sensations, and perceptions is gone; all your
identifications are gone; all your ideas about your personality are gone; that which you think
life is all about is gone. But what’s not in thinking remains.

Aliens landing into our koan with the monks, the wind, and the flag would have no idea of
what “monks”, “flag”, “wind”, “mind”, and maybe even “moving” are. But they would see the
same thing as we do. They would not, however, have our mental commentary of the
experience, our conceptualisation of what’s happening. The whole world we have built around
that koan would not exist for them.
In reality, experience remains. Pure perceptions remain. But what’s in thought doesn’t.
No separation outside of thinking

If this is all happening in your experience, it follows that nothing of what you see, hear, feel,
think or otherwise sense is other than you. You cannot know if there’s anything that is other
than you, you don’t have access to anything outside of your subjectivity. All you see appears in
your subjective experience. Even the “you” you think you are is appearing in you. The only
thing that says that there is an outside is thought.

Let’s put this to test. Close your eyes and focus on a sound. Stay with it for a bit. Now consider:
Where does the sound end and you begin? Can you find a delimitation? A gap?
You could do this with your other senses as well. Where does your seeing end and objects
begin? Is any object ever outside of your seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, or
thinking?

Isn’t it interesting? You are never going anywhere. You are never not here. If you are having an
experience at all, no matter what its content is, you must be here. So, when you are looking for
yourself, where are you looking?

The last remnants of seeking

Let’s say that you still feel the need to find yourself because you still feel you are here as a
separate person and cannot see clearly that the person is being perceived with the whole
experience. If that’s the case, when you look for yourself, who is looking for whom? Is there
two of you? Is there a “you” that’s experiencing and a “you” that’s experienced? If so, which
one are you?

Take the “I am the experiencer / I am the experienced” pair of opposites and hold them in your
mind. Enquire into which one is true. Be completely honest; you don’t need prefabricated
answers, you need the answer that is true for you. When you try to figure out which one is true,
what happens? What comes up?
Stay with this enquiry for as long as you need. Is there a someone to be found outside of
thinking at all?

“If you awaken from this illusion, and you understand that black implies white, self implies
other, life implies death — or shall I say, death implies life — you can conceive yourself. Not
conceive, but feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world, not as someone here on sufferance,
on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your
own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in,
is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.” — Alan Watts

Test this too. If you enquire into subjectivity and experience, are they separate? Are they two?

No truth in words

There is a caveat to this article which is, of course, that none of it is true. It cannot be true,
because truth is not in or on the other side of words or concepts.

Reality exists before we think about it and put it into words. The invitation is to choose a
practice or several practices that work for you and to stay with them until all your doubts are
gone. Just remember that the answer is never in or on the other side of any practice or question.
I’ll leave you with some extra questions to contemplate anyway, because they serve us well.

If you stop trying to have an experience, aren’t you still having an experience?

Can you get out of experience at all?

If you stop trying to make reality happen, isn’t it still here?

If you stop thinking about yourself, aren’t you still here?

If for a moment you stop conceptualising the content of your life, what happens?

Where does your life go?

When your thoughts disappear and you are quiet, does your subjectivity go anywhere?

What is your subjectivity made of?

If you don’t refer to thought at all, what is it like to have this subjective experience right now?