There's thinking... and there's thinking about thinking as a stream of thoughts...

Think about it...

Here goes a thought... Here goes another... And so it goes... On and on and on...

Consciousness has been compared to a river: like a river, mind flows, from one thought to another, incessantly, irrevocably...

Here's one of the thoughts that Buddhism built its psychological salvation on: "there has never been a thought that didn't go away."

Hmm...

No need to try to not think about what I don't want to think about! No need to resist the thoughts that I am already having! No need to push the thoughts I don't like out! No need to do anything but stay and watch the thoughts go... After all, if it's true that there's never been a thought that didn't go away, why do the river's work? The river knows how to flow...

Wow...

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

What if... what if I let go of every thought except this one? What if all I thought was "there's never been a thought that didn't go away?" What would that be like?!

So, here I'd sit, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, watching thoughts pass, thinking "there's never been a thought that didn't go away." What would that be like?!

Swami Vivekananda, in writing about Dattatreya, the author of Advahuta Gita, a Vedanta text on Nonduality, wrote: "Men like the one who wrote this Song <...> they care for nothing, they feel nothing done to the body, care not for heat, cold, danger, or anything. They sit still <...> and though red-hot coals burn the body, they feel them not." (1)

Such people are sometimes called "non-returners" - having left the stream of consciousness, having found a place in the shade of the meta-cognitive distance, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, they never re-enter the river of the experience. They think of thoughts as thoughts, and, thus, remain un-touched by the never-ceasing evanescence of their mind-states...

My guess is that what it'd be like...

Is that possible?

Journalist Malcolm Brown witnessed one such "non-returner" in 1963 when a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc performed an act of self-immolation. The man sat down, poured gasoline over himself and lit himself up. What's amazing - to me - is not the cause, not even the decision, but what happened after... Nothing happened: the man sat, in a lotus position, while burning alive. The skin of his face coagulating in flames... Dying... Burning alive...

Thich - a real, historically-documented non-returner... He didn't return because he never left the place of his here-and-now presence.... even with a river of pain-lava flowing through his mind...

How's that possible?

It is.

Imagine you had a chance to ask Thich this very question: "How is this possible? How are you able to just sit while you are on fire?"

My guess, Thich would've asked in return: "What fire?"

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

In this myriad of fleeting thoughts, perhaps, this one is the only one worth holding?

Pavel Somov, Ph.D.

Copyright 2008

References:

Jerry Katz, "One: Essential Writings on Nonduality," First Sentinent Publications, 2007.