Joy beyond thinking: Only stupid people smile

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it…..Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. —Mary Oliver

No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple joy could shake you. —Toni Morrison

Go deeply into the urge to be silent and not the mental interference of how, where and when. If you follow silence to its source you can be taken by it in a moment. —Jean Klein

It was a breeze, a ghost, the cat padding over my thighs. I don’t know what it was that woke me up, but I came to pre-consciousness this morning in full darkness, eyes wide. I was swimming, swimming, swimming up from some deep place that is so familiar, so intimate, so close, that it cannot even be thought. As sometimes happens when I first (almost, but not quite) wake up, I wanted to laugh. Maybe I did laugh a little. For as I blossomed into awareness, I felt held, blessed by the open arms of pure promise. A wholly new set of possibilities yet to be revealed. This state of in-betweenness—where I have not yet agreed to re-up as myself—is a limbo of limerence, a glorious pre-cognitive emptiness. It is a tabula rasa saturated with plenitude. And it waits for me, not just before dawn, but whenever I am able to preempt or transcend habits of analysis, rumination and rationalization.

But I should have begun this essay in a different place. At an earlier point. By first explaining that I have long been a philosopher. Not just as a matter of temperament, but someone who has earned a living doing more or less philosophery things. And it is the language of a philosopher that still hangs in my mental closet, although I do not wear it as much. Still, these are the words that possess me when I am excited about an idea or when the trance of discursive waking unconsciousness overtakes me. Sometimes it has seemed to me that the philosopher’s sacred task is precisely to revere and adore this very power (thinking, thinking, thinking) that, as a spiritual seeker, I have wished to slip past unnoticed. Human as rational animal, the tippy-top of the evolutionary tower, the self-designated destroyer and decider, an apocalyptic agent made (and remade) possible by this buzzing, thrumming, high-octane, cognitive thing we human animals have evolved to do.

This hierarchical worldview is based on an impoverished version of philosophy, one largely focused on existential dis-ease, with efforts aimed mainly at locating contradictions, rooting out inconsistencies, and, all too often, offering up bleak diagnoses of the “human condition.” Such a narrowly construed philosopher imagines himself as incisive, wise, and “mature” enough, to accept that, in this realm of unavoidable suffering, one’s best bet is to think, think, and think some more. Indeed, we are almost meant to recognize these stereotypically brilliant luminaries —still usually imagined as white men—by their joyless, grim expression, rumpled clothes, and inclination to bloviate. This is merely a stereotype, of course, but if there is a grain of truth in it, it is the inclination to fetishize this one fabulous (and fabulously limited) capacity: thinking, thinking, thinking.

It was in graduate school, while studying with a philosopher from India, that I first learned that cognition might be understood, not as the end-all-be-all, but as just one significant ability among a panoply of capacities. From an Eastern point of view, thinking is sometimes construed as being on the same plane as our other natural senses — vision, taste, hearing, and so on— rather than as the lord and master of them. There are also Western philosophers who have also taken thinking down a peg, Nietzsche, for example, who suggests that it is because human beings are so relatively deficient as animals — naked, slow, and weak— that thinking has had to evolve. Thinking, then, is not so much our crowning glory as a necessary crutch, a concession of nature to otherwise unimpressive creatures. And, then, like insecure bullies on the playground, we strut around with our big heads, crowing about this supposed superiority that separates us from the rest of natural creation. Meanwhile, the kids who smile “for no reason” will be disdained as uncool, and probably stupid to boot. The “mindless” joy of simple creaturely awareness will be beaten out of most of us before recess has ended.

It is paradoxical that philosophers imagine that we are diving so deep when we actually tend to remain on the surface, in the shallows, the only zone where concepts have evolved to survive. For it is below thought —in the cool and murky depths — that so much of the really interesting stuff is happening. What I did not know, perhaps, could not have known, before I began to meditate, is that there are nourishing wellsprings far below discursive thinking. There where there is no need, no fear. Not of pain, or change, or even death, all of which require conceptualization of some sort to gain traction. In the meta-geological layers far below thought, there is a bursting, expanding fullness that I want to describe as pure awareness even though I know this too is just one more concept. All I really know is that, far below my thinking self, I am and am and am. To visit this place is to wander backstage for a moment and climb into the scaffolding above the performance that holds the audience transfixed. And when I return to my cheap seat at the back of the auditorium — which I always willingly do — my only wish is to carry with me the scent and stain of my clandestine interlude with joy.

If you’d like to be notified of new posts by email, hit the menu button above to find the subscribe link.