Op/Ed: If I Don’t Think, Then I am Naught
Over 400 years ago, “first philosophy” was borne from the consciousness awakening “cogito ergo sum” via Rene Descartes. “I think, therefore I am” is a cornerstone in our hyper-individual culture. From this, we have built tall, immovable self-perceptions; If I think the thing, it is the truth to me and that’s that with that :)
Our minds are an amalgamation of interpretations of sense perception, narratives, and pattern recognition. Because we survive through efficient categorization and forging the “path of least resistance”, our thinking selves receive and process these inputs and move on to the next categorization. This is a perpetual motion process that, in a culture of “go-go-go” and “do-do-do” more and more, doesn’t have the space for “stop and reflect” in the same way that our parents and their parents had.
In Buddhism, the ultimate emptiness of all things is the foundation upon which all thought and reflection is built on. In a moment when “mindfulness” and “meditation” have become nebulous (big thanks to capitalism), returning to the roots has to be the first step to initiating real and sustaining personal change and strength.
For narrators that have written their stories in pen, returning to the true empty nature of things can feel like a loss that initiates a cascade of self-protecting fail-safes. If we are to challenge our categorizations, especially the ones we’ve held close or are deeply entrenched, what does that mean about our “selves”? If we don’t think, what are we? And if we don’t think the way we’ve always thought, are we “me”?
The answer, just like the “chicken v egg”, lies in an acceptance of both. Before and without chickens, eggs exist. Before you were a thinking thing, things were things to other things. The stories existed, exist, and will continue to exist. When your story exists painfully (as is inevitable for all of us), expanding your view- killing your ego- breaks patterns and deprograms the perpetual-motion narrative. Meditation on “thinkinglessness” quite literally uninstalls your pain-points, creating drive space for new opportunities.
