to speak of thoughtlessness is already to engage in thought a thoughtless thinker is a terrifying creature no hesitation no regret no inner monologue holding them back a zombie and an enlightened Sage look eerily similar from the outside both move without doubt both operate without the burden of mental chatter the difference is that one transcended thought the other simply never had it in the first place so what separates a lunatic from an awakened being the truth is we are never in the Moment by the time you register a thought it's already old news reality moves faster
than your cognition leaving you perpetually one step behind narrating events that have already slipped through your fingers you are like a bad Sports commentator trying to keep up with a game that is happening just a little too fast even before a word leaves your lips it has already been sculpted in thought and before thought even forms something else precedes it thought is not even the first Domino it is a midpoint middleman pretending to be the source if thought is always too late always chasing the present but never quite reaching it then where is the present
actually happening by the time you recognize a moment it has already passed you are not thinking reality you are remembering it so you see the this isn't just about the gap between thought and speech the same delay exists between the raw unprocessed experience of reality and the thoughts that attempt to make sense of it something happens your mind grasps at it frames it in language and only then do you understand it but what about before that what is reality before you wrap it in words this is the Paradox of conscious experience you exist in a
state of constant retrospective you never meet reality headon you arrive slightly late to every moment only to find it has already moved on and if your thoughts are always lagging behind then who or what is actually living in real time the you that reflects is never the you that acts the moment you think about what you are doing you are no longer doing it the moment you think about being alive you are observing your life from the outside thought is not an instantaneous emergence it is an ongoing process where cognition references itself recursively generating higher
order Reflections such as thinking about thinking we are never fully able to speak our thoughts because words are clumsy and the Machinery of speech is a poor translator of our inner world the moment you think something it is already distanced from the original purity of the idea language always carries the residue of its imperfect medium what comes to your tongue is not exactly what was born in your mind so this distance is not merely temporal it's also ontological we are never fully able to represent the essence of a thought because the thought is bound by
the inherent gaps in language and perception every time you speak a fragment of the idea the pure thought is lost to the incompleteness of expression you speak it but if it's always fragmented imperfect and partial the distance is a necessary feature of reflective Consciousness there is something deeply absurd about the fact that even to negate thought we must think this is the distance between raw being and intellectual apprehension between presence and articulation there's why no experience can ever be described exactly as it was lived second you you translate life into language you lose the immediacy
of it words require structure the moment you think you fragment the moment you name you define the moment you define you exclude thoughtlessness is undivided but the mind is a machine of division even in meditation in those fleeting instances where thought seems to dissolve there is an awareness of the absence of thought this awareness itself is a form of cognition a meta thought a shadow of Thinking Beyond the micro gap of cognition there exists a deeper separation between pre-thought and thought before a conscious thought forms there is an underlying conceptual Gestalt a raw pre-linguistic structure
of awareness this is the non-thought form a space where ideas exist before they crystallize into words or even structured cognition some call this intuition others refer to it as preverbal cognition but the phenomenon is consistent thought does not emerge fully formed but congeals from an implicit often ineffable domain the non-thought form gives birth to thought the abstract becomes defined a vague intuition is now a specific mental model the state where thought does not observe itself even possible or is consciousness doomed to chase its own tail a snake devouring its own body in the endless orobas
of self- reference it looks like thoughtlessness is not a destination but a tension an iyot that the Mind approaches but never quite touches you may sit in silence watching thoughts drift like clouds but most of the time the Watcher remains and as long as there is a watcher there is thought so the only way to be thoughtless would be to disappear entirely to let go of the one who is trying to let go you cannot do thoughtlessness because as soon as you try you've already thought you grasp at it but it slips through your fingers
as elusive as smoke every time you think you've arrived at no thought it pulls you back into its gravitational pole what makes this dark Arc of Consciousness so deliciously maddening is that you are not a separate being trying to find yourself in a world of lost souls the very concept of Looking For Freedom is itself a cage a paradox wrapped in Chains of its own making the thoughtless thinker has discarded the idea of freedom as a grand ideal and simply lives it freedom is not a destination it is the absence of the need for destinations
to know nothing is to be everything the thoughtless thinker has given up knowing he no longer stands in the realm of answers the Paradox is clear no you must not know to know nothing is to slip out of the grasp of thought itself allowing the world to pour itself into you without the filter of interpretation the beauty is that the thoughtless thinker has surrendered the need for truth and in doing so has become the truth itself well if Consciousness comes from a wrinkled Electric sponge then what a humiliating origin story we've got the grand Cosmic
Observer built from cholesterol and protein every philosophy every spiritual system every scientific theory you've ever encountered is a way to distract you from The Knowing truth you are the source of everything what a curse what a beautiful dark gift this is why Seekers and lunatics walk the same Razor's Edge Chase thoughtlessness too far and you may fall into something Beyond human whether it's Enlightenment or Oblivion in Tibetan Buddhism it's said that in the moment between death and rebirth there is a realm called Bardo where the Mind experiences a pure unconditioned State a chance to escape
the wheel of Illusion what if the silence between thoughts is the same thing an opportunity to slip through the bars of the prison when you try to enter the silence you bring yourself with you and that is the problem CU who is the you that seeks silence it is thought itself to reach the silence between thoughts you must leave behind the one who wishes to reach it imagine a computer program designed to delete itself the moment it detects its own existence that's what the Mind does when it attempts to be thoughtless usually the more more
you try to silence your mind the louder it gets the thing is that a self-aware system can never fully shut itself down this is the first lesson of the thoughtless thinker you cannot turn off the Mind by force instead see it as an analog of the art of optical illusion you may have the freedom to move in all directions yet you are still a prisoner within your own idea of freedom develop the skill of seeing exercise your inner eye and you will be able to see both illusions
