By: Brad Warner
If you start really paying attention to your own thought process—I’m talking here about the process itself and not just the contents of the individual thoughts that make it up—you’ll notice that thoughts don’t just go on and on continuously. There are little spaces between them. Most of us tend to habitually try and fill these spaces up with more thoughts as fast as we possibly can. But even the best of us can’t fill them all, so there are always little gaps. See, you might say that there are two basic kinds of thought. There are thoughts that pop up unannounced and uninvited in our brains for no reason we’re able to discern. These are just the results of previous thoughts and experiences that have left their traces in the neural pathways of our brains. You can’t do much to stop these, nor should you try. The other kind of thought is when we grab on to one of these streams of energy and start playing with it the way your mom always told you not to do with your wee-wee in front of the neighbors. We dig deep into these thoughts and roll around in them like a pig rolling in its own doo-doo, feeling all that delicious coolness and drinking deep of their lovely stink.
To practice “thinking not thinking,” all you need to do is ignore the first kind of thoughts and learn how not to instigate the second. This is easier said than done, of course. But get into the habit, and it begins to come naturally.
…Now try to look at the natural spaces between thoughts. Learn what it feels like to just stop generating more and more stuff for your brain to chew on. Now see if you can do that for longer and longer periods. A couple of seconds is fine. Voilà! Thinking not thinking!
Note: Brad Warner is a Soto Zen teacher, writer and former punk rock bass guitarist. His books include Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, and the Truth About Reality, and Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master. This quote is from an article by Warner titled “Think Not Thinking” in Tricycle Magazine, which can be found here.