One Time, One Meeting

“Maybe you’re thinking too much,” my wife once suggested. She was not the first to do so. Nor, to paraphrase John Lennon, am I the only one. “Non-stop thinking,” Thich Nhat Hanh has called it. And in our present hyper-connected, information-driven era, that common human tendency has become ever more prevalent.

For centuries Zen masters have warned against over-reliance on conceptual thought. According to Zen teachings, our dualistic concepts—subject/object; self/other; up/down—interpose an “ego-filter” between our minds and our sensory experience. They mediate between what is and what we believe it to be. Likewise the abstract words we use to frame our experience. They impose a yardstick, as the Zen teacher Shohaku Okumura Roshi puts it, on a universe that is in reality boundless, indivisible, and ungraspable.

Take, for example, the term Village of Alfred. That term designates a geographic entity. Its boundaries have been delineated, its contours mapped. But were you to fly over the Village of Alfred in a small plane, as I did once with a local pilot, you would perceive no fixed boundaries. Rather, you would see a deciduous wilderness, in the midst of which a configuration of impermanent man-made structures, many of them bearing terracotta roofs, has been created. Village of Alfred is an abstraction, a thought-form superimposed upon an amorphous space. At once useful and artificial, that form is easily mistaken for reality itself.

And the same is true of other mental constructs, however real they may appear. Zen practice is in part about gaining awareness of thought-forms, especially fixed, habitual thought-forms, and their sometimes harmful impact on our lives. Beyond this fundamental point, however, the practice also aims to liberate us from unnecessary thinking, obsessive thinking, and attachment to what the American philosopher Thomas Kasulis has called the “retrospective reconstruction of reality.”

With respect to unnecessary thinking, one venerable piece of advice, attributed variously to a Stoic philosopher, the Dalai Lama, and a sagacious baseball player, can provide a practical corrective. “If you can’t control it,” so the saying goes, “then why worry about it? And if you can control it, then why worry about it?” To that general guideline Buddhist teachings would add a specific corollary. Pain is one thing, suffering another. Pain is what we experience; suffering is what we add to that experience, often by way of fear-based speculation. Mindful of the difference, we can abstain from speculation and focus on the experience itself: the pain and ways to relieve it.

Obsessive thinking is another matter. Psychologists speak of “thought-loops,” by which they mean endlessly repetitive patterns of thought. Leading nowhere and yielding nothing, our thought-loops return, time and again, to where they began. Teachers of vipassana (“insight”) meditation advise us to probe the emotional subtexts beneath our habitual patterns of thought: the fear beneath the compulsive planning, the regret beneath obsessive reminiscence. By and large, Zen practitioners refrain from such analysis. The practice is rather to note our thoughts as they arise and disappear. The more acutely we recognize their insubstantial nature, the more we free ourselves from their grip. And over time, if we persist in the practice, even our obsessive thoughts diminish of their own accord.

Beneath these practical measures, Zen teachings offer a deeper critique of thought itself. Taizan Maezumi Roshi, a twentieth-century Zen master, expresses that critique succinctly:

Thinking is an abstraction. It is not being, it is thinking about being. And since we are born and die seven thousand times in one second, the conditions that we think about are already gone. We are thinking about shadows rather than being this very life itself.

All thinking, in other words, is after the fact.

Concurring with Maezumi’s perspective, Thomas Kasulis, in his book Zen Action, Zen Person, draws an analogy between the process of thinking and the actions of a batter at the plate. “Being” is what happens when the bat hits the ball. “Thinking” is what happens a moment later, as onlookers reconstruct what has just occurred: A line drive to third base. A high fly ball to right field.

Thinking is a natural activity. No one is proposing to demote it. The objective is rather to strike an even balance between “thinking” and “being.” By so doing, we not only become present for the speeding ball. We also empower ourselves to reflect, clearly and concretely, on those experiences that constitute our lives.

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Non-stop thinking: Thich Nhat Hanh, Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise (Harper, 2016).

Thomas Kasulis: T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action , Zen Person (University of Hawaii, 1985), 57.

Taizan Maezumi Roshi: Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice (Shambhala, 2002), 11.

Photo: Rodin, The Thinker, Aaron Zhu