The Inability to Think

Man no longer thinks, he has his thinking done for him. Cogito, ergo sum has been replaced by cogitor, ergo non sum.    

Max Picard, The World of Silence.


The inability to think is one of the great danger's of our age. This inability is the result of a sort of vacuousness that penetrates our 'culture' and which permeates our minds. When I say 'think' I am talking primarily of a process that involves not just being able to join the dots but which implicates you and your being in the universe as a whole. That more or less means being able to decipher in amongst all the 'noise' - the exegesis of the media, the deception of advertisers, the lies of politicians - what is actually going on, and how you your self is implicated in these actual goings-on. Thinking then becomes a sort of 'karmic connecting' eventually leading to nirvana, whereby one, by virtue of working out one's actions (in the way that the body works out a splinter) one realises one's implication in the whole sordid mess (that had hitherto absorbed you), and does something about it. Thinking (like this) is not only intimately connected to a moral  and ethical codex but also to one's daily behaviour and being. Ultimately, then, he who thinks, is an enlightened being who has ejected his karma, thereby removing himself from the hellish cycle (of birth and rebirth); effectively, he has raised himself from the dead and achieved his own 'salvation'. His hands are no longer covered in blood, and his mind is clear of all the interference and distortion that infects so many people. Thinking is a tough thing to do, to be sure, but ultimately, if you want to be human (in the original sense), then you have a duty, and a responsibility, to think. Just as Heidegger wrote of questioning as a pious activity, insofar as it was one's duty, so to do I suggest that thinking be a responsibility of all human beings. 

Yet, in today's clamour of modernity, with all the various frequencies hammering us from every angle, it becomes increasingly difficult to think. I have been living with a 61 year old from London for the past six weeks here in Kazakhstan whilst on a teaching assignment, and it has been a revelation if only to see how incapable this man is at thinking. I have been able to see, in this experiment, how he works on super-imposed sub-routines (and second-hand thoughts, which have been handed down to him by conventions, the media etc.), and how his 'monkey mind' now requires noise, in order, paradoxically, to feel at peace. Silence and solitude themselves are threats. His constant skyping with his wife and whoever he can gets his hands on illustrates how tragically cut off (and bored) this man feels. And yet, cut-offness and boredom are simply indictments on one's self, one's lack of self-development, one's lack of a deeper understanding, and one's inability to be at peace (to read a book, have a bath, enjoy listening to some music, go for a walk), and to sit still 'Pascal-like' in a room. It is an indictment on one's shrivelled and dessicated nature, and the complete absence of any meditative factor.

But the most important factor in his inability to think is his complete inability to listen. I have seen it before where people, even after 'dancing' with them for some weeks, are still completely unaware of the physics of dialogue. This is because they are never really involved in a conversation with someone else (or something else), but only and ever involved in a monologue going on inside their own shrink-wrapped minds. When they are not speaking, they are simply thinking of what they have just said or what they are about to say. They are, emphatically, not listening. And it is this 'not listening' that causes most of the problems in not being able to think. 

By contrast, the images of advertisers, and of the media, does not require people to listen. Images work in a completely different way and penetrate the mind without the need for ears. This is the dastardly truth of how we become informed, and how we are formed. Emphatically, by not having to listen.  And here, I have a prime example in the form of this 61 year old deaf and dumb man. (One's inability to listen often precludes an ability to speak).

Yet, thinking fully also implies a thinking emptily. Again, we touch on the disaster that thinking has become, especially in the West: the inability to not think. The Zen Master Seung-Sahn used to call this 'before-thinking', which was simply not falling into the trap of having to think and find an answer. The answer he maintained was already there. We just had to see it as it was. So, it was more about 'seeing' than actually thinking. But the distortion that was our concepts and constructs, and our readiness to abstract, lead us away from this seeing and ineluctable state of 'just is-ness'. The mere notion that there was only one possible answer also came into the equation. Correctness itself is a construct. And so he tried to get students to enter a state of before-thinking, a state which was empty and clear like space, and broad and wide like the ocean. Everyone has felt this spaciousness when, let's say, they enter a food-trance, or gaze emptily out of a bus window and start thinking about nothing (itself a kind of contradiction in terms). It is this 'thinking about nothing' that is so precious in the overall art of thinking. But, gradually, it is being whittled away, by the limited and inhumane objectives of a money-centric (and hence consumer-centric) way of living. Soon, there will no nothing in our thinking, no space between our thoughts, and when that happens (imagine music without space, or indeed this article!!), it is no longer the 'fall' of man (a fall implies that there is a still the possibility of breaking that fall), but the complete and utter bludgeoning of his being.

It's our readiness to think that becomes the problem. But thinking isn't just about thinking. The thinking itself is the problem. 

And therein lies the paradox. 

The Human Route

Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed -

That is human.

When you are born, where do you come from?

When you die, where do you go?

Life is like a floating cloud which appears. 

Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.

The floating cloud itself does not exist.

Life and death, coming and going, are also like this. 

But there is one thing which always remains clear.

It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.

Then what is the one pure and clear thing?

Seung-Sahn

And so it is: people cannot think.... therefore they cannot be. And if they are not (just is), then what is the point of ethics and morals? Being human is an ethical enterprise, being post-human is not. Thus, the hellish cycle feeds itself, until eventually it comes to the crunch. And you really don't want to be around for the crunch. So, as Zen Master Seung-Sahn (Tall Mountain) used to sign off in his letters to his students:

I hope you always keep a mind which is clear like space, soon finish the great work of life and death, and save all beings from suffering.

Full Dome, Empty Dome - Zero distortion on the Kilpatrick Plateau....

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply: Create silence! Bring men to silence. The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midts of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create silence.

Soren Kierkegaard