Space
and the freedom it offers are available at the center of present
experience, just as it is. If we do not discover space in our
experience, it is because this space availability has been covered over.
To recover space 'presence', we must clarify the operation of the
thinking mind, whose active naming and identifying structure a world in
which space has disappeared.
Although
thoughts often come and go as a kind of reflex, passing so quickly that
they go unnoticed, if we take the time to focus on the stream of mental
events, we soon observe that we are almost always thinking. We might
well wonder why this should be so. After all, in terms of their content
thoughts tend to be trivial and repetitive. They recycle the same themes
and images, call up the same memories, dwell on the same concerns. They
react to whatever stimuli present themselves, leading nowhere in
particular. As we go about our day, thoughts cycle through our minds
like the background hum of a household appliance or a nervous gesture
that we repeat almost unconsciously.
The purpose of all this activity
seems linked to the role of thoughts as the 'carriers' or 'vehicles' for
the interpretive structures that give experience continuity. In
thinking, we affirm certain connections and identities that allow us to
make sense of what is happening. Apart from its specific content, a
thought considered as an action aims to conserve and pass on the order
given by the interacting presentations of the field communique. Just as
breath sustains the body, so thinking sustains the world that we
inhabit.
Before
thoughts can carry and deliver experience, they must 'box' and 'label'
it. To do this, they make use of the materials at hand - the customary
and accepted, the world as it has been known in advance. As each thought
arises, its content is located or assigned in terms of past experience
and future concerns. Grounded in a well-known history and heading toward
a presupposed future, emerging properties are immediately referred to
the certainties of identity, disclosing features similar to what has
gone before.
In
this world of substance and identity, there is no possibility of gaps.
Each known thing has its appropriate place, and each new experience
arrives ready to be situated within this presupposed order. Even when
our mind wanders idly, even when we resist or rebel against our
circumstances, the thoughts that guide us confirm the situation in which
we find ourselves. Though new patterns emerge and there may even be
breakthroughs of various kinds, in each successive moment the 'outcome
is the same: Everything once again 'falls into place'. If a gap does
arise, it is like a tear in the fabric of reality. We speak of such
events in terms of madness or nervous breakdowns, of identity crises or
- perhaps - of genius.
Projected
Familiarity
Thoughts
structure experience by 'building up' reality. Together with their
content, they communicate the substantiality of that
content - a sense of persistent qualities and independent 'presence': a
special kind of 'mass' that exerts its own gravitational pull. This
gravitational force in turn shapes what appears 'to' and 'through' the
mind in ways that structure the whole, conforming to the established
order.
For
thoughts to confer substance, must they possess substance? If substance
arises only with the act of identification, this seems impossible, for
there could never be an ultimate substantializing thought: Each thought
in turn would have to be given substance by another thought. Experience
confirms the insubstantiality of thoughts, which most often seem to
flash into the mind from nowhere at all. Even when the content of one
thought traces to the immediately preceding thought, there seems to be
no clearly defined mechanism through which the first thought gives rise
to the second: no way in which substance can be transmitted.
Yet
the power of thoughts to establish substance and the unfounded nature
of what is thought about apart from the act of thinking - is accepted
unthinkingly. We can trace this 'unthinking' acceptance to our previous
commitment to the communique. Thoughts may arise like bubbles in a
stream of water, but we are intent on
entering the
thought's 'bubble world'. From within that world we can no longer ask
where the bubble comes from or goes to, nor can we challenge the
substantiality of what appears within the bubble. The pronounced content
of the thought refers to and affirms other related content understood as
being situated 'elsewhere': the content of the previous thought, the
existents present in the preceding moment, the preceding moment itself;
in fact, the whole lineage of the present arising. Patterns of
engaged
images yield familiar projections, which are pronounced into daily life.
This
projected and measurable familiarity confirms as known what is not known
at all. What has been pronounced as real has its source in an arising
that remains mysterious. We encounter this mystery in the wide range of
questions we seem incapable of answering: "How does appearance
originate?" "Why was I born in these circumstances?"
"How does time move from one moment to the next?"
Ordinarily,
we have no way of inquiring into these mysteries. Bound to the
communique that thoughts communicate forward and the specific order they
project, we live in a world of fixed boundaries. It would be different
if we could question thought itself, but this does not seem possible. In
presenting their content, thoughts refer their own identity to this
content. In the act of establishing, they withdraw.
Like the space that allows for
physical objects, thought apart from its content presents itself as
wholly lacking in substance - a blank availability. But just as
with physical space, this 'no thing' is in fact the opposite pole of
'something': the indispensable prerequisite for substance to arise.
Starting from the 'zero point' of thought, points take form as solid,
and zeroless space disappears into the dichotomy of
substance/nothingness. Gravity is activated and order imposed; substance
proliferates, and the transitional constructions of multidimensional
appearance give way to a reality that has already been established.
It
might seem that we could cut through these complications by going\ to
direct experience, prior to all thoughts. But is this alternative really
available? We do seem to experience and act non-conceptually; for
example, when we perform a habitual action such as walking without
having to think about each step along the way. Yet even if such everyday
'no-thought experiences' are in one sense undeniable, they are also
inaccessible. As soon as we focus on such an experience, we make it an
object of thought and thus lose the experience itself. If we claim we
can rely on the experience without describing it, this claim is again
the product of thought.
We
are caught in a dilemma: If affirmation of the 'no-thought' realm comes
through the medium of thinking, the 'translation' from one realm to
another risks losing or corrupting the original experience in ways that
are undetectable. Though there may be awareness without thoughts, it is
not clear how this awareness can be transmitted forward into the next
moment in order to be known without thereby making it the object of the
thinking mind.
There is another difficulty. To rely
on the immediacy of 'no thoughts' separates experience as it is thought
from the 'no-thought experience'. Making this distinction actually
hardens the substantiality that thought has set in place. Moreover, as a
marked-out realm distinct from thought constructs, the 'no-thought'
realm has again been identified and designated. Seen as a goal to arrive
at, the realm of no thoughts is itself a thought.
Freedom
Without Foundation
Whether we choose to affirm what
thoughts pronounce or attempt to bypass thought entirely, we seem to
arrive at impenetrable barriers. Suppose instead that we simply paused
to notice thoughts as thoughts - the simple phenomenon of
thinking. One moment we are watching a bird fly by or enjoying a cup of
tea, and the next there is a thought. How does this happen? At one level
there may be explanations; at another, it is just so. Thoughts simply
'pop up': sheer appearance, sourceless.
In
its initial arising, its popping up, thought appears to be
dimensionless. Even if a transition to dimensionality follows at once,
there must still be an instant when the arising thought is not yet
committed to its content; when it remains free to take virtually any
form at all.
We
have grown accustomed to thoughts that establish a world and are
themselves established, defined exclusively in terms of their content.
But in this initial moment, the thought is unestablished, and the world
is unestablished with it. Could we stay with the freedom of this being
unestablished, savoring its flavor? Without
rejecting the
content that appears 'through' thought, could we simply leave it as
unestablished? Could we unknow the knowing of the known to know anew?
We
saw before that when thoughts affirm their content, they affirm
themselves as the absence of content: as zero. But this is a false
affirmation, for zero in its nature cannot be affirmed. When zero
appears (for example, when we draw its outline on paper), it does so
only symbolically. Although we point, there is no place and no property
to point to. The 'zero point' is pointless, and zero itself is 'zeroless'.
For
thoughts, this 'pointlessness' of zero is just the point. Thought
presents its content without establishing what is presented. Nothing
arises, yet this non-arising appears. There is no need for
this to be so, but this is how it is. And since it is so, it is vitally
important to 'point out' that it is not so at all.
This
way of talking is not a trick meant to establish a particular point or
point of view. There is nothing to
be
established, for to establish we would have to proceed point by point,
and then we would miss the point. Previously a claim to have established
was pronounced; now it calls forth a response. We could say it is
pointless to continue making pronouncements, but making this claim
means we have already continued. In fact, we cannot help but continue.
Then
how can we respond more appropriately? By activating appearance as
symbolic: appearance as zero and zero as zeroless. In this modality,
thoughts become the symbols of their own arising.
Freed from the responsibility for
constructing a seamless whole, thoughts can become the agents of
zeroless space. The dimensionalized structure they proclaim is flattened
in a quite specific sense: What appears and the operations to
which we attribute its appearance arise side by side, together with the
dynamics of their interaction. We see that established
dimensionality simply 'pops up' together with each arising thought. In
such a flattened realm, where each point is 'pointless', thoughts no
longer exert a gravitational pull capable of shaping appearance into
substance.
When
we abide in unestablished thought, we enter a space from which knowledge
has not been foreclosed. No longer inhabiting conventional space, we
have nowhere to go and no path to follow. Without departing from the
known, we are free to be any way at all. We discover an inner ease that
nourishes us and awakens unexpected capacities. Relaxing into a reality
available on its own terms, we can recover a knowledgeability that has
been foreclosed since before the beginning of time.
Zeroless
thinking offers the prospect of freedom and beauty. Instead of thrusting
toward the substantial, thoughts could reveal a zeroless world:
appearance without substance and presence without source. Naturally
joined to awareness and insight, they could evoke the remarkable power
of appearance to assume virtually any form. Emerging out of the zeroless
truth of their own non-arising, they could become the agents of a
boundless space creativity.
Dynamics
of Time and Space
Mindfire