Some Thoughts on "No-thought"

10/14/2006
by Daniel M. Ingram

I got an email a while ago from a seemingly nice guy who said basically: I did some Taoist practices, got enlightened, and now am incapable of thinking any thoughts or visualizing, yet I seem to function normally. What do you think of this?

I put a lot of thought into my response, and so I think it is worth posting it here, in slightly edited form:

Dear (No-thought),

One of my dead teachers, Bill Hamilton, used to talk about how people's conceptions of what was supposed to happen would have some influence on subsequent events, with some question about what that influence was. We used to discuss this often, with possibilities including:

1. People with different models of awakening might actually achieve different results. I am no fan of this proposition but admit the possibility.
2. People with different models might achieve the same thing but describe it differently. I tend to believe this one more than the first.
3. Some combination of these.
4. People might fail to achieve results but be scripted to report or believe that they had achieved something in line with their own working model. This is a common occurrence, one that I have observed in myself more times than I can count and also in the practice of many other fellow dharma adventurers. Bill would often mention people's ability to self hypnotize into semi-fixed states of delusion. He had a long run of hanging out in scary cult-like situations with crazy psychopathic teachers and got to observe this first hand in himself and others: see his book Saints and Psychopaths for more on this.
5. People with different models and techniques might have very different experiences of the path along its way: this is clearly true in some aspects and yet the universal aspects of the path continue to impress me with their consistency and reproducibility regardless of tradition.
6. Other possibilities we hadn't considered, in the style of Rumsfeld's Unknown Unknowns.

When people occasionally send me emails like the one you have sent, I remember this debate and proceed based upon its considerations and the following additional obvious points:

1. While some might have or have had this ability, I currently do not have the ability to look into anyone's mind and know the exact mechanics of what is going on.
2. Language is a very imprecise and reductionistic method for communicating anything, much less something so subtle and profound that language clearly seems to be insufficient, as your assertion that you can "barely describe" the situation states well.
3. Each tradition has various degrees of obsession with exactness of terminology, some being very loose, others being exceedingly rigid, and even given this each tradition may use words differently, examples including such difficult words as samadhi, consciousness, thought, etc., all of which play key roles in your question.
4. The secondary gain issues surrounding achievement and accomplishment, meaning the need for recognition, a feeling of importance, worth, value, merit, status, etc. are generally large in us all, thus making it difficult to sort out what is embellishment, wishful thinking, confusion, delusion, mental illness, skullduggery and good old deception, etc. from what is just one's honest attempts at sorting the thing out and being precise and honest.
5. Long experience and conversation with a person before making any attempts at guesses about what people have understood is considered by most to be a very good idea. This is obviously hard to come by.

The no thought question is an interesting one. It is commonly used in some traditions as being the goal, these including some strains and descriptions of Hindu Vedanta, multiple non-aligned traditions, and others. Zen sometimes toys with the idea on its periphery. As to Taoism: I did a bunch of reading of the old Taoist masters some years ago, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert on it's current practice or dogma.

Buddhism as I know it does not generally consider not thinking or not being able to visualize among its goals, which brings us to the points mentioned above. For instance, the Awakened Buddha often says things in the old texts like, "It occurred to me that I should wander by stages to [such and such a place]." Or, "This spontaneous stanza, never heard before, occurred to me." Furthermore, if we note the old texts as reference, all of the enlightened disciples of the Buddha and the Buddha himself were described as thinking thoughts. Further, many of the Buddha's disciples could visualize, as could the Buddha, and if we look to modern times you can't be a Tantric master without some strong visualization abilities.

Further, the notion that one can write an email or do engineering, which inherently involves abstraction (mathematics) and other concepts being converted into actuality, or even speak and have it not involve thought, is one that I think is merely a conceptual understanding itself and thus an arbitrary designation. Further, as intentions fall into the realm of thought, and all physical actions are preceded by intentions by the fixed mechanics of the system, the notion that action can occur without thought falls into the same camp. This also applies to all such things as memory, which you clearly demonstrate, as this inherently must involve thought essentially by definition (with caveats as above).

Given those assumptions, the question I ask is: have you simply stopped calling those processes "thought" so as to fit with an arbitrary and dogmatic model, or have you forced yourself to stop noticing that mental processes occur as you thought that was supposed to happen, or have you achieved something real and because of your preconceptions choose to describe it through that terminological filter, or have you achieved something completely different from those that is not on my radar screen for whatever reason, possibilities including my own delusion or lack of experience, just for the sake of completion and reasonable skeptical doubt, which is always a good idea.

The terminology that I am used to involves seeing thoughts as they are, thus having them be just a very small and transient part of the natural, causal field of experience. However, it must also be admitted that, since thoughts can only be experienced as aspects of the other five sense doors, then labeling thought as thought is also just an abstraction and just as arbitrary, as is labeling the other 5 sense doors as such. These are simply convenient designations for the sake of discussion.

When one notices that all things simply arise on their own, including those sensations that may or may not be designated as thoughts, to be empty of a self, as they are and always have been, with no separate or independent observer or controller or doer that is not just a part of the field of experience or manifestation, then that is what I advocate people try to understand.

Thus, the model that I tend to prefer, as I believe it to be practical, non-esoteric and direct, is that:

1. Sensations that can be labeled as thoughts occur.
2. Thoughts are natural, causal, and essential to nearly every function we perform.
3. Thoughts are not self, not other, part of life, and empty in the good sense.
4. They always have been this way, before and after any spiritual achievement, and when their true nature is seen, they are still as they were.
5. With this being perceived clearly in a "non-condition dependent" way (for which I do not like to use the word "state", see why in my book, though all of these terms relating to permanence are dangerous), one can use words like awakening, etc. if one wishes, realizing that there are stages to the thing and at one stage it may be hard to see the limits of that stage for a while.

Note: I was an anagami (another semi-arbitrary designation for a complex process) for a number of years, during much of that time I had a very hard time distinguishing whether or not I had this understanding for all thoughts and experiences or not. The answer was no, but I must say that in real time this was extremely difficult to sort out for a long time. Thus, I am very cautious about anyone saying that they have done something like this completely for all mental or physical constructs, or whatever one wishes to call subtle aspects of experience, as I know how subtle these things can be and how long they can be very subtle. I continue to keep open the possibility that I am still fooling myself, as only a fool would do otherwise.

An essential question regarding enlightenment is: does it make things different from how they were, or does it merely reveal a true and accurate perception or perspective on how everything always was? I advocate latter view, as I believe it is more helpful to practice and more accurate. Thus, in this view, which is just one view, anything that could happen before, such as thought or visualization, can happen after, with the only thing changing being some untangling of the previously held knot of tangled perception.

In terms of my experience, another interesting conceptual designation, and using relative and down-to-earth language, I can make my inner voice as loud as it could be before, it is much more clear than it was before, it is perceived as part of the natural field of causality in a way that it was not before, and mindfulness comes and goes as before. In high jhanic states the inner voice is very subtle, but I can still visualize as before, sometimes with even more clarity depending on practice conditions. In short, I have not lost abilities nor have I changed much about the way the system operates. That said, something is clear that was not clear before, and the sense of a special centerpoint seems seen through, though the sensate patterns that made it up generally seem to still occur as before, and it is only the perception of them that is different.

In the end, what anyone thinks of your practice is relatively trivial, unless you are looking to get into some clique or club or teaching position. That said, it is natural to want to compare experiences of the path with others for a whole host of reasons, some noble, some otherwise.

I hope you find this essay helpful in some way to your practice.

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