Some thoughts about thinking, part II

June 18, continued

 The difference between mechanical thought and actual thought is that actual thought can observe; and, in a paradoxical bootstrapping nature, can even observe itself, because self awareness is exactly that. The third kind of thought is, however, not observable in the same sense because it takes place in the realm of true thinking, that inner place so amply examined by Meister Eckhart where the soul comes into contact with God. This is a silent realm that’s influenced by divine qualities, not human ones, and represents the point of contact between the information that flows in from mechanical thought and actual thought – that is, things of creation, of the outer world — and the divine itself. 

The contact with God here, of course, is not direct — direct contact with God occurs only in the single highest angelic realm — but it’s contact with the angelic realms through which God’s influence flows into us. This particular piece of territory provokes a much higher kind of thinking, and from here all truly original and creative thought flows into the “reservoir” of mechanical and actual thinking that exists within an individual human being. 

In this sense, the soul receives its tiny portion (“our daily bread”) of the divine thought of God, a purified substance gathered, as the honey of heaven, by the bees of the divine realm. The more still and quiet the entire Being is, the more of this substance may become available. Generally speaking, it flows in at night and there’s a certain reservoir of it present at the beginning of the day, which can either be augmented and concentrated by a work of mindfulness, awareness, and actually thinking, or quickly expended in mechanical action. 

Because the raising of the rate of vibration from mechanical thinking to actual thinking depends on the assistance from this divine thought which concentrates itself, so to speak, beneath the floor of one’s being as a support, if it’s expended early, there is nothing but mechanical thinking available for the rest of the day.

I make these comments in order that I might perhaps concentrate my attention a bit more on the nature of my thought and see the emotional center of gravity in mechanical thinking and the way it drives it. I need, so far as I can, to become more aware of this and inhabit the nature of mechanical thought more fully — without attempting to impede it, but rather stay very close to it and follow it as it proceeds — in order to see how it functions and to make more clear to myself the difference between who I am and what mechanical thinking says about myself and about life. 

Mechanical thinking has gathered enough information from the outside world to create a mirror that appears to be an accurate reflection of what is going on; but the contamination from selfish emotional impulse always renders that reflection inaccurate. Discussion of mirrors and reflections of the moon and so on in Buddhism are all allegorical references to this issue. Yet if I don’t see the action of selfish impulse and the nature of its influence on mechanical thinking, I haven’t actually seen anything true. Instead my mind, which can act in complex and impressively Baroque ways, sees everything through selfish impulse of one kind or another and immediately pronounces it true. This active pronouncement is reflexively and automatically built into the process. I should thus be aware of pronouncement when engaged in this activity of observation. Pronouncement is the enemy. It’s the messenger that brings forth and calls out loud conclusions based on selfishness. 

It draws its strength from drowning the other parts of thinking.

This action of inhabiting actual thinking, however, is nowhere near as reductionist and clinical as the description I’ve just given. It’s actually a form of suffering, that is, a form of thinking that involves all three centers: and everything that involves all three centers ultimately becomes a form of suffering if it’s properly understood. 

To be with one’s mechanical thinking is uncomfortable and provocative. One has to have the critical faculty to stay there; this is one of the things that Jeanne de Salzmann was referring to when she said we have to “stay in front of the lack.” In this case, the lack is the lack of unselfishness in the form of thinking; and to stay in front of the lack is to become acutely aware of the selfishness of mechanical thinking. This is a form of emotional suffering, because in the end, this seeing involves three things.

The first thing is being in the body physically in the present moment, which provides the root of the awareness-function in seeing.

The second thing is having an active mind in the present moment, a mind that does not derive its initial impulse from selfishness, which provides the supervisory or analytical function of seeing.

Once these two elements work together, the third thing is to have a real feeling, that is, a feeling that is fed by the divine food stored in the reservoir of the soul, which can come into the equation and provide a completely different impulse to the seeing than the impulse from the selfish part of thought. This provides the suffering function.

These three things together provide what could be a real thought, rather than a mechanical one. Yet when they’re not together, over 90% of what takes place is automatic; and although a great deal of it very effectively mimics spiritual work of one kind or another, such thinking is in every case ersatz and leads only back to itself in one of two selfish results, self-aggrandizement or self-judgment, each of which is actually an ego action. 

It can become quite interesting to watch self-aggrandizement in particular, because it attempts to insert itself into one action after another all day long. We might call self-aggrandizement the politician of our inner life. This is the easier of the two things to see, because self judgment does a terrific job of posing as a preacher. The difficulty here is that both of them, the politician and the preacher, are inveterate liars. 

I can’t trust the politician. I can’t trust the preacher. 

Someone else needs to get into the game here.

On behalf of our search for inward relationship,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.