It is a strange thing to discover this late in life that I am, when all is said and done, a philosopher. And to accept that I am one of those thinkingest-of-thinkers is both disconcerting and a relief. For one thing, it allows me to reassure myself that, even as most meditators may find it hard to step out and away from the stream of thinking, I seem to have incarnated as an especially eager and devoted cogitator. The upshot is that I’m both better and worse off when it comes to dealing with the limitations of thinking, especially its efficacy in overcoming the compulsions and limitations of thinking itself. Because I have explicitly studied the forms and variations that thought can take, I can often quickly recognize its twists and turns, including its backfilling rationalizations. But because I have indulged my penchant for thinking so deeply—professionally and over several decades—I suspect I am also more susceptible to its siren song. More than most other “rational animals”—Aristotle’s definition of humans—I am easily swept away by thinking’s frequently seductive charms, a fact that has shaped my experience as a meditator and meditation teacher.
I describe my apparently irredeemably philosophical nature as an obvious fact, but it was only this morning that I was surprised by the recognition that I had, yet again (and quite unconsciously) fallen back into trying to think my way out of my over-reliance on thinking. That I had returned to this pattern of trying to out-clever myself, to try to manipulate myself through concepts and discourse into a state behind, below, or, in one way or another, transcendent of thinking. It can be especially tiresome because I’ve learned this lesson over and over again, and over many years. I mean, one of the most basic insights and salubrious discoveries of my long meditation practice has been precisely the space behind/beyond thinking that thinking itself cannot touch. And to arrive and abide there, I “know,” is always an experiential process, one toward which words and thoughts can only clumsily gesture. But still the temptation to descend back into thought rises up in me, including when I feel especially vulnerable to the world, and it can claim me for days on end. Eventually I drag myself to shore after our latest tango, breathless and puzzled: How could I have given in yet again? And especially when I am trying to be a GOOD MEDITATOR, the shameful hangover following such discursive orgies can linger for days.
It’s helped for me to notice that it’s usually when I’m already feeling a little beaten down that I’m most tempted to cognitively manhandle myself into shape, to use pep talks and VERY BIG IDEAS to whip myself back into fighting form. Then the words in my head come scattershot and relentless: reminders of Buddhist principles about remaining in the present moment, long quotations from my own teachers. Sometimes it feels like I am a student being punished through repetitive writing on the blackboard: “I will remain in the present moment. I will not identify with my thoughts.” Over and over again, as if I could brainwash myself back into peak realizations that I experienced—didn’t I?—but that may feel so far away today, this week, this month. But this morning it occurred to me that it is just as significant that it’s in the other extreme of life—when I feel belonging and happiness and ease—that I sometimes also reach for the thinker in me. At those times she is like a lover who has slipped out of my arms during a long sleep. When I am playful and joyous and hopeful, my thoughts do not attempt to self-correct or to edify, but twirl in my mind and escape like butterflies from my writing fingers or speaking lips.
I am thinking(!) now then that to be a student of not-thinking practices who happens also to be very deeply philosophical is not my tragic flaw but part of my complex human destiny. My overthinking ways are not merely proof of my weakness and error, then, but confirmation of the particular kind of tail-chasing human animality that I am enacting this time around, in this particular incarnation. I am a creature like this, drawn to musing and verbalizing and conceptualizing as I am attracted to running and dancing and splashing in the waves. And when I think about it—yes, THINKING again—sometimes it seems that I reach for discursive framings just as I reached for the monkey bars on the playground as a kid, that it is that natural and sweet. There too I could be lost for hours, feeling the magic of my gangly animal body with its sunburnt skin and thumping heart. My world of human play is still OUT THERE, to be sure, in the cool woods and on the flat blue of nameless Michigan lakes. But it is also very much IN HERE (taps forehead), in this Legoland of my mind, where sometimes I am at my happiest-human-animal-best when I am thinking about not-thinking. Then I am a bird singing, a dog howling, a busker singing for her supper in a crowded subway tunnel.
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