4

Nondual Thinking

I never think — my thoughts think for me.

— Lamartine

Chapters 2 and 3 constitute a radical critique not only of perception and action but also of thinking. Chapter 2 discussed how language and thought usually distort our perception by reifying nondual percepts into an objective world distinct from the perceiving consciousness. Chapter 3 argued that intention bifurcates the nondual action of our “psychic body” in a similar way. In both cases it has been claimed that the superimposition of thought obscures the true nature of the experience. If one also considers the emphasis on meditation in the nondualist Asian traditions, one might conclude that the act of thinking is nothing but an interference that distorts reality; therefore we should strive to eliminate or minimize it. But this inference would be just as wrong as believing that sense-perception or physical activity must be “transcended.” None of these should be rejected, but their actual nature must be realized. The linkage between perception/conception and action/intention may be explored from either side. If concepts veil the nondual nature of percepts, and if intentions do the same for nondual actions, perhaps percepts and actions also obscure the true nature of thinking. When the thought-forming activity of the mind is used primarily in a system of representation and intention, then something fundamental about the nature of thoughts is obscured too. Our thought processes are usually preoccupied with creating and maintaining the apparently objective world, with physically and psychologically protecting the sense of self, and with obtaining desired objects, but we should not assume that these indicate the limits of thought processes. Perhaps such dualistic activities tell us nothing about the nature of thinking in itself. “Thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself, and none of these things trouble her — neither sounds nor sights nor pain, nor any pleasure — when she has as little as possible to do with the body and has no bodily sense or feeling, but is aspiring after being” (Plato).183 Just as there is nondual perception and action, so there may be nondual thinking — which also would be radically different from our usual understanding of thinking.

In Zen, the fifth of the Ten Oxherding Pictures describes a stage of enlightenment in which one realizes that thoughts too should not be rejected. “Enlightenment brings the realization that thoughts are not unreal since even they arise from our True-nature. It is only because delusion still remains that they are imagined to be unreal.”¹⁸⁴ A Zen master once began a sesshin I attended by saying that those striving for enlightenment should look upon thoughts as the enemy to be fought, but then he qualified this by adding that thoughts were not really an enemy, as we would understand when we came to self-realization; only temporarily in our meditation practice must they be treated as such. This implies that the problem is, not thoughts per se, but a certain way of thinking. According to the record of his own enlightenment experience, the same Zen master struck his bed and exclaimed: “Ha, ha, ha! There’s no reasoning here, no reasoning at all!”¹⁸⁵ But what kind of thinking is left if we eliminate reasoning? Sometimes the type of thinking that is criticized is called conceptual thinking or conceptualizing, but exactly what these terms refer to is not clear, especially if an alternative mode of thinking is supposed. If conceptual thinking means “thinking that uses concepts,” it is difficult, indeed impossible, to conceive of what thinking without concepts could be, and it is unlikely that that would be satisfactory even if it were possible. The main concern of this chapter, then, is to characterize the difference between reasoning/conceptualizing and whatever type of thinking is supposed to occur after enlightenment.

In the previous two chapters, nondual perception and nondual action were elucidated by taking familiar concepts from the nondualist traditions and interpreting them nondualistically. In the case of perception these were prapañca and the common Indian distinction between savikalpa and nirvikalpa perception. In the case of action, there was the Taoist paradox of wei-wu-wei. In this chapter the equivalent is the Mahāyāna concept of prajñā, which is discussed in the first section. The second section argues that thinking may be realized to be “unsupported” (without a thinker) when thoughts do not “link up in a series” (Hui Neng). Just as dualistic perception and action are both due to thought-superimposition, so the “empty” nature of thoughts and their true origin are overlooked as long as thoughts are superimposed upon each other — which is what we understand as the act of thinking that “I” dualistically do. The third section uses this view to understand the creative process in art and science, and the fourth discusses parallels to prajñā in Western philosophy, focusing on the later work of Martin Heidegger. The conclusion reflects briefly on the implications of nondual thinking for philosophy.

PRAJÑĀ

By now the parallel pattern is clear. In order to conflate the subject–object relation, nondual thinking must negate any thinker distinct from the thoughts that are thought. When we look for an equivalent to such nondual thinking in Asian thought, the term which comes closest is prajñā, a Sanskrit term used to describe the “wisdom” that is said to come with enlightenment or to constitute enlightenment. This wisdom is not something that can be gained or grasped, however, for it has no objective content; instead, it is often described as knowing in which there is no distinction between the knower, that which is known, and the act of knowing. This concept of prajñā was developed most in Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially in the vast prajñāpāramitā (“transcendental prajñā”) literature. Yet, despite innumerable references to it, prajñā was treated much like its counterpart in early Buddhism, nirvana: both were recommended more than explained. For an analysis of the concept we turn to D. T. Suzuki, who begins his paper on “Reason and Intuition in Buddhist Philosophy” by distinguishing between prajñā and the more usual vijñāna:

Prajñā goes beyond vijñāna. We make use of vijñāna in our world of the senses and intellect, which is characterized by dualism in the sense that there is the one who sees and there is the other that is seen — the two standing in opposition. In prajñā this differentiation does not take place: what is seen and the one who sees are identical; the seer is the seen and the seen is the seer.186

Prajñā is indeed the most fundamental experience. On it all other experiences are based, but we ought not regard it as something separate from the latter which can be picked out and pointed to as a specifically qualifiable experience. It is pure experience beyond differentiation.¹⁸⁷

In a chart he lists the various counterbalancing characteristics of prajñā and vijñāna, the “non-duality” of the former contrasting with the “duality” of the latter.¹⁸⁸ The title of Suzuki’s paper derives from his translation of these terms. Vijñāna, which is sometimes rendered as “conceptual thinking” or “conceptualizing,” he translates as “reason or discursive understanding.” In contrast, prajñā is translated, perhaps unfortunately, as “intuition.” The philosophical meaning of intuition is “the immediate apprehension of an object by the mind without the intervention of any reasoning process”¹⁸⁹ — as in Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, the third and highest form of knowledge, the perception of a thing “through its essence alone,” which does not consist in being convinced by reasons but in an immediate union with the thing itself. In this sense Suzuki’s term is appropriate and even fortuitous for the viewpoint of this chapter. However, “intuition” is unfortunate in the sense that it more commonly suggests another faculty of mind apart from the intellect, whereas the function of the “intuition” here is nothing more than the function of the intellect when it is experienced nondually. As Suzuki repeatedly emphasizes, prajñā underlies vijñāna:

If we think that there is a thing denoted as prajñā and another denoted as vijñāna and that they are forever separated and not to be brought to the state of unification, we shall be completely on the wrong track.

Vijñāna cannot work without having prajñā behind it; parts are parts of the whole; parts never exist by themselves, for if they did they would not be parts — they would even cease to exist.190

The etymologies of vijñāna and prajñā are revealing. They have the same root jñā (to know). The vi- prefix of vijñāna (also in vi-kalpa and vi-tarka) signifies “separation or differentiation.” Hence vijñāna refers to knowing that functions by discriminating one thing from another. In contrast, the pra- prefix of prajñā means “being born or springing up” — presumably referring to a more spontaneous type of knowing in which the thought no longer seems to be the product of a subject but is experienced as arising from a deeper nondual source. In such knowing the thought and that which thinks the thought are not distinguishable. This claim is explicit in the Mahāmudrā passage quoted in chapter 3, that the Moving (the thought, according to Evans-Wentz’s commentary) and the Non-Moving (mind) are one:

One cometh to know that neither is the “Moving” other than the “Non-Moving,” nor the “Non-Moving” other than the “Moving”. . . .

If the real nature of the “Moving” and the “Non-Moving” be not discovered by these analyses, one is to observe: —

Whether the Intellect, which is looking on, is other than the “Moving” and the “Non-Moving”;

Or whether it is the very self of the “Moving” and the “Non-Moving.”

Upon analysing, with the eyes of the Self-Knowing Intellect, one discovereth nothing; the observer and the thing observed are found to be inseparable.191

This passage was cited in chapter 3 as another example of the wei-wu-wei paradox; later we shall see in what way nondual thinking might also be an instance of wu-wei, paradoxically being both active and passive.

If thought and thinker are indistinguishable, then it is impossible to observe one’s own thoughts objectively. The Śikṣāsamuccaya of Śantideva contains a meditation on thought that dwells on this point:

For thought, Kāśyapa, cannot be apprehended, inside or outside, or in between both. For thought is immaterial, invisible, non-resisting, inconceivable, unsupported and homeless. Thought has never been seen by any of the Buddhas, nor do they see it, nor will they see it. . . . A thought is like the stream of a river, without any staying power; as soon as it is produced it breaks up and disappears. . . . A thought is like lightning, it breaks up in a moment and does not stay on. . . .

Searching for thought all round, he does not see it within or without. . . . Can then thought review thought? No, thought cannot review thought. As the blade of a sword cannot cut itself, as a finger-tip cannot touch itself, so a thought cannot see itself.¹⁹²

But this seems contradicted by our experience. Surely thought can review itself, for that happens often, whenever we ponder the logical implications of some thought as part of a sequence of reasoning. The point of the passage must be that the various thought-elements of such a sequence do not coexist at the same time. At any moment there can be only one thought. A “review” of that thought, or any other thought that arises, is a completely new thought. The next section explores the implications of this.

AN UNSUPPORTED THOUGHT

It thinks, one ought to say. We become aware of certain representations which do not depend on us; others depend on us, or at least so we believe; where is the boundary? One should say, it thinks, just as one says, it rains.

— Lichtenberg

In the Western philosophical tradition, the self as thinker has been considered even less dubitable than the self as perceiver or agent, which means that the corresponding denial of a thinker is even more radical than the denial of a perceiver or an agent. Modern philosophy begins with Descartes’s postulation of the subject which functions autonomously as its own criterion of truth, and this subject is founded on the fact that the act of thinking requires a thinker, an “I” to be doing it.

What of thinking? I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me: it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease to exist. . . . I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks.193

Descartes argues that it is self-contradictory to doubt one’s own existence. “For it is so evident of itself that it is I who doubts, who understands, and who desires, that there is no reason here to add anything to explain it.”¹⁹⁴ But as a proof, this begs the question: to assume that “I” am doubting my own existence is to go beyond what is empirically given. What is experienced is thoughts, some of which involve the concept “I,” but from this it is illegitimate to infer a thinker distinct from the thought. No cogito can be derived from cogitans.

In reaction, Hume’s conception of the mind (quoted in chapter 2) denies the existence of any identifiable self and emphasizes the “intentionality” of all consciousness, by which he means that consciousness always has a content:

I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible to myself, and may truly be said not to exist.195

That the “I-consciousness” is intentional in this sense (not the same sense of “intentionality” discussed in chapter 3) is a notion essential to the nondualist position, for this is implied by the nondualist’s claim that there is no autonomous self (“I . . .”) distinguishable from its experience (“I am aware of . . .”). John Levy has elaborated this concept of intentionality into what is perhaps the classic argument against subject–object duality. The importance of the following passage can hardly be overemphasized:

When I am conscious of an object, that is, of a notion or a percept, that object alone is present. When I am conscious of my perceiving, what alone presents itself to consciousness is the notion that I perceive the object: and therefore the notion of my being the perceiver also constitutes an object of consciousness. From this, a most important fact emerges: the so-called subject who thinks, and its apparent object, have no immediate relation.

. . . the notion, I am reading, does not occur while we are thus absorbed [in reading a book]: it occurs only when our attention wavers. . . . a little reflection will show that even when we are not thus absorbed for any appreciable lapse of time, the subject who afterwards lays claim to the action was not present to consciousness when the action was taking place. The idea of our being the agent occurs to us as a separate thought, which is to say that it forms an entirely fresh object of consciousness. And since, at the time of the occurrence, we were present as neither the thinker, the agent, the percipient, nor the enjoyer, no subsequent claim on our part could alter the position. . . .

If the notions of subject and object are both the separate objects of consciousness, neither term has any real significance. An object, in the absence of a subject, cannot be what is normally called an object; and the subject, in the absence of an object, cannot be what is normally called the subject. It is in memory that the two notions seem to combine to form an entirely new notion, I am the perceiver or the thinker.196

From this, Levy later concludes: “Memory and the consciousness of individual existence are therefore synonymous.”¹⁹⁷

When I am conscious of a percept, only the percept is present, and when I am conscious of a thought, there is only that thought: from this modest and undeniable premise, the most extraordinary consequences follow. It implies what the Japanese Zen master Dōgen claimed to have realized, that “mind is no other than mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.”¹⁹⁸ Originally, there is no distinction between “internal” (mental) and “external” (physical), which means that trees and rocks and clouds, if they are not juxtaposed in memory with the “I” concept, will be experienced to be as much “my mind” as thought and feelings.

Levy develops a point stressed in Advaita but often misunderstood: although there is only the Self, that Self cannot be known, for to know it is to make it into an object. What is usually overlooked about this point is that our usual sense of self is the result of just such an objectification. The sense of subject–object duality arises not only from a simple bifurcation between grasper and grasped. The subject must also be “grasped” in an objectification whereby I identify my consciousness with thought (including memory), a body, and its possessions — all of which are objects lacking the most essential characteristic of Self, consciousness. According to Śaṅkara this is the primary superimposition, the fundamental ignorance that needs to be overcome.

Levy’s emphasis on memory as the source of duality is consistent with Śaṅkara’s reference to it in his definition of adhyāsa, quoted in chapter 2 and restated here: superimposition is the apprehension of something in the present as different than it actually is, due to the interference of memory-traces. There is a parallel in the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra: “When the triple world is surveyed by the Bodhisattva, he perceives that its existence is due to memory [literally, ‘perfuming’] that has been accumulated since the beginningless past, but wrongly interpreted.”199 The usual function of memory as superimposition is to interpret the perception so that it is seen as — in this case, as an object presented to a subject. Levy’s argument is of paramount importance for the nondualist. We have already applied it, in effect, in developing models of nondual perception (memory-superimposition as savikalpa determination) and nondual action (memory-superimposition as intention) in the two previous chapters. But the most important implications of Levy’s argument are for nondual thinking. For what if memory were not there to relate together the distinct notions of percept and subject? Or (it amounts to the same thing) if the memory-trace were experienced as it is, “an entirely fresh object of consciousness” quite distinct from the other thoughts and percepts upon which it is usually superimposed? The significance of the Śikṣāsamuccaya passage quoted at the end of the section on prajñā becomes obvious. If memory “wrongly interpreted” is equivalent to what Levy calls individual existence because it is a case of “thought reviewing thought,” then the experience of each thought as autonomous will eliminate that sense of individual existence — in our terms, would dissolve the sense of subject–object duality.

Nietzsche came to the conclusion that each thought is autonomous by developing the implications of his remarks (quoted in chapter 3) on intention and causality:

“Causality” eludes us; to suppose a direct causal link between thoughts, as logic does — that is the consequence of the crudest and clumsiest observation.

“Thinking,” as epistemologists conceive it, simply does not occur: it is quite an arbitrary fiction, arrived at by selecting one element from the process and eliminating all the rest, an artificial arrangement for the purpose of intelligibility —

The “spirit,” something that thinks: . . . this conception is a second derivative of that false introspection which believes in “thinking”: first an act is imagined which simply does not occur, “thinking,” and secondly a subject-substratum in which every act of thinking, and nothing else, has its origin: that is to say, both the deed and the doer are fictions.

We believe that thoughts as they succeed one another in our minds stand in some kind of causal relation: the logician especially, who actually speaks of nothing but instances which never occur in reality, has grown accustomed to the prejudice that thoughts cause thoughts . . .

In summa: everything of which we become conscious is a terminal phenomenon, an end — and causes nothing; every successive phenomenon in consciousness is completely atom-istic.200

Nietzsche relates the denial of a thinker to a denial of the process of thinking. Why, after all, do we believe that there is an act of thinking? Because that act is what the thinker does: stringing thoughts together by forming new thoughts on the basis of the old thoughts. If there is no such thinker then there need be no such act. That leaves only thoughts, one at a time, although the succession may be rapid.

The significance of Nietzsche’s remarks for us is that we find the same claim in the Asian nondualist philosophies, particularly evident in Mahāyāna. In the Platform Sutra, the Sixth Ch’an Patriarch Hui Neng explains what prajñā is:

To know our mind is to obtain liberation. To obtain liberation is to attain Samādhi of Prajñā, which is “thoughtlessness.” What is “thoughtlessness”? “Thoughtlessness” is to see and know all Dharmas [things] with a mind free from attachment. When in use it pervades everywhere, and yet it sticks nowhere. . . . When our mind works freely without any hindrance, and is at liberty to “come” or to “go,” we attain Samādhi of Prajñā, or liberation. Such a state is called the function of “thoughtlessness.” But to refrain from thinking of anything, so that all thoughts are suppressed, is to be Dharma-ridden, and this is an erroneous view.201

The term thoughtlessness would seem to recommend a mind free from any thoughts, but Hui Neng denies this. Instead thoughtlessness is the function of a mind free from any attachment. The implication is that for someone who is liberated thoughts still arise, but there is no clinging to them when they do. Why the term thoughtlessness can be used to characterize such a state of mind will become clear in a moment. But the question that arises first is how one can ever be attached to thoughts if, as the Śikṣāsamuccaya says, a thought has no staying power, if like lightning it breaks up in a moment and disappears. Hui Neng answers this later when he says more about “how to think”:

In the exercise of our thinking faculty, let the past be dead. If we allow our thoughts, past, present and future, to link up in a series, we put ourselves under restraint. On the other hand, if we never let our mind attach to anything, we shall gain liberation.²⁰²

We cling to a thought by linking up thoughts in a series, rather than letting each thought arise spontaneously and independently. The effect of such linking is that the nondual nature of each individual thought is obscured. This is not to deny that thoughts also stand in a causal relationship; from another point of view, it is undeniable that previous thoughts somehow condition later ones. But when one “forgets oneself” and becomes a nondual thought, there is no longer any awareness that the thought is caused. Then it arises spontaneously, as if “self-caused.” (This relationship is discussed further in chapter 6, which considers the paradoxical Mādhyamika equivalence between pratītya-samutpāda conditionality and the Unconditioned.)

According to the autobiographical first part of the Platform Sutra, Hui Neng became deeply enlightened and realized that all things in the universe are his self-nature when his teacher read him a line from the Diamond Sutra: “Let your mind (or thought) arise without fixing it anywhere.”203 The passage just prior to this one — which Hui Neng must also have heard — puts this in context. Edward Conze translates it as follows:

Therefore then, Subhūti, the Bodhisattva should produce an unsupported thought, a thought which is nowhere supported, which is not supported (apratiṣṭhiti) by forms, sounds, smells, tastes, touchables, or objects of mind. . . . And why? What is supported has no support.²⁰⁴

A thought is “unsupported” when it is not experienced as arising in dependence upon anything else. It is not experienced as “caused” by another thought (which is a “mind-object”) and of course it is not “produced” by a thinker, since the Bodhisattva realizes that “thinkers” (like ego-selves generally) do not exist. Such an “unsupported thought,” then, is prajñā, arising by itself nondually.

Hui Neng’s grandson-in-the-Dharma Ma-tsu agrees with Hui Neng and the Diamond Sutra: “So with former thoughts, later thoughts, and thoughts in between: the thoughts follow one another without being linked together. Each one is absolutely tranquil.”²⁰⁵ That each such unsupported thought is absolutely tranquil is a new point, although perhaps implicit in Hui Neng’s use of the term thoughtlessness. When one loses sense of self and completely becomes an unsupported thought, there is again the paradox of wei-wu-wei, in which action and passivity are combined. As the Mahāmudrā claims, there is the movement of nondual thought, but at the same time there is an awareness of no movement. That is why such an experience can just as well be described as thoughtlessness. The later Ch’an master Kuei-shan Ling-yu referred to this as “thoughtless thought”: “Through concentration a devotee may gain thoughtless thought. Thereby he is suddenly enlightened and realizes his original nature.”²⁰⁶ Thoughtless thought is not a mind completely void of any thoughts. Rather, “one (nondual) thought is thoughtless thought,” just as one nondual sound is soundless sound (chap. 2) and one nondual action is actionless action (chap. 3).

Buddhism describes this awareness of that-which-does-not-change as realization that the thought is śūnya (empty). In chapter 6 I argue that the Vedāntic equivalent of śūnyatā is its concept of Nirguṇa Brahman, that knowing but attributeless consciousness which cannot itself be known. If this is true, we can see a parallel to the Buddhist account in the Advaita claim that “unvaried consciousness penetrates the modifications of the mind like the thread in a string of pearls.”207 This consciousness is not a thinker in the dualistic Cartesian sense, but is, like the puruṣa of Sāṅkhya, that which never changes.

An even more striking parallel is found in this statement by the great twentieth-century Advaitin Ramana Maharshi:

The ego in its purity is experienced in the interval between two states or between two thoughts. The ego is like the worm which leaves one hold only after it catches another. Its true nature is known when it is out of contact with objects or thoughts. You should realize this interval as the abiding, unchangeable Reality, your true Being.²⁰⁸

The image of the ego as a worm that leaves one hold only after catching another might well have been used by Hui Neng and Ma-tsu to describe the way thoughts are linked up in a series. The difference is that Mahāyāna Buddhism encourages the arising of an “unsupported” thought, whereas Ramana Maharshi understands unchangeable Reality as that which is realized only when it is out of contact with all objects and thoughts. This is consistent with the general relation between Mahāyāna and Advaita: as we have seen, Mahāyāna emphasizes realizing the emptiness of all phenomena, whereas Advaita distinguishes between empty Reality and phenomena (both physical and mental), thus devaluing the latter more.

The image of a worm hesitant to leave its hold was used in a conversation I had in 1981 with a Theravada monk from Thailand, a meditation master named Phra Khemananda. What he said was not prompted by any remark of mine; it had been taught to him by his own teacher in Thailand. He began by drawing the diagram illustrated in figure 2.

Figure 2

Each oval represents a thought, he said. Normally we leave one thought only when we have another one to go to (as the arrows indicate), but to think in this way constitutes delusion. Instead, we should realize that thinking is actually as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3

Then we will understand the true nature of thoughts: that thoughts do not arise from each other but by themselves.

This understanding of thoughts not linking-up-in-a-series but springing up nondually is consistent with D. T. Suzuki’s conception of prajñā:

It is important to note here that prajñā wants to see its diction “quickly” apprehended, giving us no intervening moment for reflection or analysis or interpretation. Prajñā for this reason is frequently likened to a flash of lightning or to a spark from two striking pieces of flint. “Quickness” does not refer to progress of time; it means immediacy, absence of deliberation, no allowance for an intervening proposition, no passing from premises to conclusion.209

This offers insight into the many Zen dialogues in which students are criticized for their hesitation or praised for their apparently nonsensical but immediate replies. That the reply is immediate is not itself sufficient; what is important is that each response be experienced as a nondual “presentation of the whole.” Hesitation reveals lack of prajñā because it indicates either some logical train of thought or the self-conscious paralysis of all thought.

Even more important, this also explains how meditation functions, since letting go of thoughts breaks up the otherwise habitual linking of thoughts into a series. Huang Po:

Why do they [Zen students] not copy me by letting each thought go as though it were nothing, or as though it were a piece of rotten wood, a stone, or the cold ashes of a dead fire?210

Working on a Zen koan such as Jōshū’s Mu (discussed in chapter 6) can be understood in this way, for the end of the process is to experience Mu precisely as such an unsupported thought — which is important because it leads to experiencing everything else as unsupported too.

We are now in a position to answer the problem posed at the beginning of this chapter: how to characterize the difference between reasoning/conceptualizing/dualistic thinking and the type of thinking that occurs after deep enlightenment. The problem with reasoning/conceptualizing is that it involves thinking as a logical process leading to a conclusion — that is, as a series of linked thoughts. The thought elements of such thinking never stand unsupported by themselves but are understood only with reference to previous thoughts, apparently “caused” by them and having no meaning apart from them. The experience of prajñā seems to be that, instead of my laboriously extracting the logical implications of one thought for another (for which process a self is assumed to be necessary), thoughts spring up full-grown, like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus.

But something is still unclear. If the sense of self is a result of this reflective linking of thoughts together, it cannot also be postulated as the cause. “I” can’t cling to thoughts if the “I” is a consequence of the clinging. Then precisely who is this “I” that links thought in a series? If we answer that it must be Mind itself, the nondual Absolute, this just pushes the problem back one step, for why does Mind need to link thoughts together delusively, when It presumably lacks nothing?

Insofar as this involves looking for a “first cause” — in this case, the origin of delusion — no definitive answer is given in the nondualist traditions, presumably because none can be given. What can be provided is the phenomenology of the process as we experience it now. The second noble truth of Pāli Buddhism identifies the cause of our suffering as craving. This refers to more than physical desire. The common ground between such desire and most of our other mental processes, including philosophizing, is seeking. Why does the mind seek? Because it is trying to fix itself, to find a secure home. The mind tries to objectify itself because it experiences its own formlessness, its emptiness, as uncomfortable. That the ego-self is a fiction is not something that we need to learn from an exotic philosophy, for we all experience it. But we experience it as a lack, a bottomless hole which, try as we may, can never be filled up. The frustration of our lives is that there is always something which needs to be done. The emotional equivalent is the feeling of inadequacy; psychologically it is guilt. We constantly feel the need to validate our existence in some way, which is self-defeating because the preoccupation with gaining something or proving something is what keeps mind from noticing its own nongaining, nonlosing nature. This resolves the problem of how there can be such a thing as a sense of self: there isn’t. The sense of self can be understood only as a process that continually but vainly attempts to secure itself in one way or another. The ego tries to deny its emptiness in a way which just reveals its obsession with that emptiness, by always needing to get ahead of itself, by grasping at the next thought, and so on. The ego is this constant thrust into the future — a thrust which, more precisely, generates the future, as we see in chapter 6. By definition, the self is that which is “deferred.” That is why the prospect of physical death can so often lead to ego-death: death is the end of all deferral.

Now we see why prajñā does not have any content, why it cannot involve grasping anything mentally: because the compulsion to grasp something is just as problematic whether it is a craving for sense-objects or the spiritual need To Know The Truth. But the solution to this is not a quietism that dwells peacefully in blankness of mind: “The Way is not a matter knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not-knowing is a blank consciousness” (Nan-ch’üan).211 When we look for another alternative, the “middle way” between these two extremes, we resolve another dualism: that between enlightenment and delusion. Yung Chia’s “Song of Enlightenment” begins:

Have you not seen a man of Tao at his ease

In his non-active (wu-wei) and beyond learning states

Who neither suppresses thoughts nor seeks the real? To him

The real nature of ignorance is Buddhatā

And the non-existent body of illusion is Dharmakāya.²¹²

To reject delusion and accept truth is just another form of delusion, Yung Chia says later, for such discrimination between rejecting and accepting is still dualistic; one who practices in this way mistakes a thief for his own son. The Way is not a matter of escaping delusion, because there is nowhere to escape except to an equally delusive quietism. It is rather a matter of liberating delusion, as Dōgen might say. What distinguishes liberated delusion is the utter freedom of the mind to dance freely from one śūnya thing to another, from one set of concepts to a different and perhaps contradictory set. The difference is not necessarily in the concepts themselves — they may be the same — but how effortlessly the mind is able to play with them without getting stuck. To the extent that the mind thinks there is an objectifiable Truth (whether already grasped or not yet), or to the extent that it thinks dwelling in blankness of mind is the Truth, this freedom is not realized: the mind trips over itself, sticks at this, jumps to that, and doesn’t want to let go because it still understands its fundamental task as finding and dwelling in a secure “home” for itself.

Should your mind wander away, do not follow it, whereupon your wandering mind will stop wandering of its own accord. Should your mind desire to linger somewhere, do not follow it and do not dwell there, whereupon your mind’s questing for a dwelling-place will cease of its own accord. Thereby, you will come to possess a non-dwelling mind — a mind which remains in the state of non-dwelling. If you are fully aware in yourself of a non-dwelling mind, you will discover that there is just the fact of dwelling, with nothing to dwell upon or not to dwell upon. This full awareness in yourself of a mind dwelling upon nothing is known as having a clear perception of your own nature. A mind which dwells upon nothing is the Buddha-Mind, the mind of one already delivered, Bodhi-Mind, Uncreate Mind . . . you will have attained to understanding from within yourself — an understanding stemming from a mind that abides nowhere, by which we mean a mind free from delusion and reality alike. (Hui Hai)213

Because of its preoccupation with various types of seeking, because of its identification with various types of phenomena, the mind does not realize its formless, nondwelling nature. It is not the case that the mind wants something in particular, for as soon as mind obtains what is wanted it wants something else, as we know. Most of all, mind wants itself, but the great irony is that this is the one thing it can never have. This does not stop mind from trying to grasp itself, however, and the result of that reflexivity is ego or sense of self. This gives a kind of security, but at a tragic cost, because fear is generated at the same time: anything grasped can also be lost. No objectifications are stable enough, for “all things pass away” — fortunately, since success here would be a sort of petrification. But fear of loss of self — which we experience in many forms, most notably as fear of death — becomes a suffering which pervades life, sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously. It results in the sometimes desperate attempt to find a kind of “substitute immortality” through symbols — for example, by collecting money or possessions (equals accumulating life) or by creating culture-objects (e.g., books, artworks) that will be gratefully appreciated by posterity (equals surviving death in symbolic form).214

Chapter 6 discusses the solution to this problem, which is simple but not easy. In order for formless mind to realize its formlessness and its corollary freedom, the reflexively objectified sense of self and all its projections must collapse. The difficulty is how to approach that without making this collapse into nonseeking just one more thing the ego seeks, which as we shall see later is what happens with the usual spiritual dualism between practice as means and enlightenment as goal. The alternative is not to willfully abandon the spiritual search, for the value of that search is that it is able to take all the desires and attachments wherein the mind is dispersed and concentrate them into one; it is the evaporation of that one which can then put all seeking to rest. Unless the empty, unborn nature of mind is clearly realized and not just conceptually grasped, the unconscious search for symbolic self-validation and substitute immortality continues, because the fear of loss of self has not been fully resolved. The only true solution is for the mind to let go and indeed lose itself. “Men are afraid to forget their minds, fearing to fall through the Void with nothing to stay their fall. They do not know that the Void is not really void, but the realm of the real Dharma” (Huang Po).²¹⁵

An objection may arise spontaneously in reaction to this conception of nondual thinking, along the same lines as the objection raised in the previous chapter about the desirability of nonintentional action: without the direction of a thinker to organize one’s thought into some order, thoughts would arise randomly and chaotically and one could not function in any meaningful way. This objection gains its force from our experience of the free-association that occurs during daydreaming, when the conscious controls that normally direct (or seem to direct) our thinking are relaxed. But we should not equate concentration of mind with a thinker. The former — “one-pointed mind” — is much recommended in Zen, for example, even though the ego-self is denied. Prajñā is an instance of the first because there is not the self-conscious “reviewing” of the second. A manifestation of this occurs in the dharma-combat which advanced Zen monks were expected to engage in as a way to test and “polish” their own realization. When a monk was challenged with a “Zen question,” his answer needed to be both immediate and appropriate to the situation, since these are the publicly observable criteria for nondual thinking. The point here is that, contrary to our usual understanding, it is not necessary for reasoning to mediate by choosing the most appropriate response from among various alternatives, for what arises spontaneously and nondually in “prajñā-intuition” will be appropriate if self-hesitation does not interfere.

This is no special process of “intuiting”; it is the natural function of mind for someone without the delusion of duality. But if nondual thinking is to parallel the other types of nondual experience, then there has never been a thinker creating and linking thoughts. There is certainly a pattern in the organization of “my” mental life, but it is not something that “I” have imposed upon it. The difference between a “tip-of-the-tongue” kenshō and the anuttara-samyak-sambodhi of a Buddha is that the former is only a first glimpse of nondual experience in which the sense of self lets go but quickly reconstitutes, so that the sense of duality returns even though the realization that it is delusive persists. With nonregressive satori, the core of one’s being remains empty and there is nothing to obstruct the “welling up” of nondual thought, and so on, from an innermost source unfathomably deep. That welling up brings us to the topic of creativity.

CREATIVITY

The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination: that is God himself/

The Divine Body . . . We are his Members. It manifests itself in his

Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision).

— William Blake, The Laocoön Plate

In chapter 3 Hume was quoted as pointing out that the power or energy by which we move our limbs, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable. This is implied by his view of causality; another corollary, which Hume discusses immediately after that passage, is that we cannot even understand how the mind can create an idea.

This is a real creation; a production of something out of nothing: which implies a power so great, that it may seem, at first sight, beyond the reach of any being, less than infinite. At least it must be owned, that such a power is not felt, nor known, nor even conceivable by the mind. We only feel the event, namely the existence of an idea, consequent to a command of the will: but the manner, in which this operation is performed, the power by which it is produced, is entirely beyond our comprehension.216

There is something mysterious about how any thought arises, all the more so if thoughts are believed to spring up (pra-) nondually instead of each conditioning the subsequent thought in a sequence. Because we experience the latter frequently, or think we do, it loses its mysterious quality until someone like Hume draws our attention to it. Nondual thinking seems more essentially mysterious; do we have any experience of it, or is it a mere possibility, a mystical light at the end of a meditative tunnel? The answer is that we glimpse it in what is normally expressed by the term creativity. Nondual thinking is the source of the creative process, which does not “explain” creativity but rather explains why creativity is so essentially mysterious.

Many examples could be given of the emphasis on egoless spontaneity in Asian art and literature (e.g., Zen brush painting and haiku composition); the reader is referred to D. T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture and Chang Chung-yuan’s Creativity and Taoism for detailed discussions of this subject.²¹⁷ But few are aware how widespread this phenomenon is, especially among those acknowledged to be the most creative — the famous composers, writers and, as we shall see, scientists as well. That nondual thinking is the source of creativity is important for illustrating what was discussed in the previous section, so I shall devote a few pages to examples of the nondual creative process.

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We begin with the creative experience of composers. Musical composition is an instance of thinking which, although not conceptual in the usual sense, is yet “logical” in that we would normally expect it to be determined by the various rules of harmony, key change, sonata or fugue structure, and so on. All of this, we might well assume, would require the direction of a “thinker” highly trained in such technical skills and able to apply them consciously in working on his thematic material. How unexpected then that such a “formal” composer as Mozart should have written a letter describing his creative technique thus:

All this fires my soul and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. . . . All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream.218

This passage contains two points we encounter repeatedly: that the subject enlarges — that is, creates — itself, and that this process is “dreamlike.” These two points are two sides of the same coin. The process is dreamlike because it is without the sense of a directing ego, which is why the thought processes can occur nondually. Of course, there is still a pattern to the sequence of these notes and chords — without that it would not be music — but this is not inconsistent with the claim of nondual thinking. The important point is that the succeeding measures are experienced as arising by themselves, without a “thinker” linking them together and creating that pattern. The structure is not something that the “thinker” imposes. Tschaikovsky’s description agrees with Mozart’s:

Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. . . . It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any other way than by this simile. . . . I forget everything and behave like a madman: everything within me stands pulsing and quivering; hardly have I begun the sketch before one thought follows another. In the midst of this magic process, it frequently happens that some external interruption awakes me from my somnambulistic state. . . . such dreadful interruptions break the thread of inspiration.219

Sometimes there is the sense that one is communicating with another consciousness that is dictating the music. Richard Strauss described the composition of his operas Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier thus: “While the ideas were flowing in upon me — the entire musical, measure by measure — it seemed to me that I was dictated to by two wholly different Omnipotent entities. . . . I was definitely conscious of being aided by more than an earthly Power.” Since many composers were Christians, it is not surprising that they explained their inspiration in more conventional theistic terms. Puccini: “The music of this opera [Madame Butterfly] was dictated to me by God; I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public.”²²⁰ Brahms:

When I feel the urge I begin by appealing directly to my Maker . . . I immediately feel vibrations which thrill my whole being . . . then I feel capable of drawing inspiration from above as Beethoven did. . . . Those vibrations assume the form of distinct mental images. . . . Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in the mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods. . . . I have to be in a semi-trance condition to get such results — a condition when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance, and the subconscious is in control, for it is through the subconscious mind, which is a part of Omnipotence, that the inspiration comes.²²¹

Both “God” and “the subconscious mind” are what might be called “theoretical constructs” which are ready at hand in Western culture to account for what I am alternatively describing as examples of “nondual thinking.” It is not surprising that contemporary Western descriptions of the creative process often prefer “the subconscious” explanation to the theistic one. So Elgar looked upon himself as “the all but unconscious medium” through which his works were created.222

Brahms’s passage contains a significant new element: references to feeling “vibrations,” which Puccini also mentions (although not in the passage quoted above). Wagner was also convinced that “there are universal currents of Divine Thought vibrating the ether everywhere. . . . I feel that I am one with this vibrating force.”²²³ Brahms’s description makes explicit what was implicit in all the earlier quotations: the vibrations from God provide not only the theme or basic material but “the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration” — in other words, all the details, everything. Many more examples could be cited, but our last will be Stravinsky, who said “I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite of Spring passed.”²²⁴

■ ■ ■ ■

We find the same themes when we turn to literature, despite the fact that literature is more “conceptual” and hence should offer more resistance to nondual thinking. Nietzsche again:

Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. — If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation — in a sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down — that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form — I never had any choice. . . .

Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity. — The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors.225

Notice how Nietzsche identifies conditionality (“involuntarily in the highest degree”) and the unconditioned (“a gale of a feeling of freedom”) in the same sentence; in chapter 6 we shall have occasion to reflect on this. Beyond Good and Evil describes a philosopher as a man “who is struck by his own thoughts as though they were external to him, as though they struck him from above and from below, who is struck by his type of events as though by lightning.”²²⁶ With typical modesty Nietzsche concludes the above passage from Ecce Homo with the claim that one would need to go back thousands of years to find the same experience. However, Thomas Wolfe’s experience in the writing of his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, which catapulted him to fame, sounds similar, as quoted by Peter McKellar:

“I cannot say the book was written. It was something that took hold and possessed me. . . . Upon that flood everything was swept and born along as by a great river. And I was borne along with it.” He likened his mental processes to “a huge black cloud” that was “loaded with electricity . . . with a kind of hurricane violence that could not be held in check much longer.”²²⁷

Apparently unlike the work of the composers cited earlier, all of Wolfe’s novels needed considerable editing afterward. This seems to be the pattern rather than the exception for writers generally: the light of their inspiration later needs to be refracted through a critical lens. But the point remains that the lens of critical reflection remains powerless if the light of genius — what I have called nondual thinking — is not strong enough.

The sense of being possessed is common among mystical writers and, more surprisingly, among many nonmystical ones as well. Jakob Boehme always believed that his first book, Aurora, had been dictated to him as he passively held the pen that wrote it.

Art has not written here, neither was there any time to consider how to set it down punctually, according to the understanding of the letters, but all was ordered according to the direction of the Spirit, which often went in haste. . . . the burning fire often forced forward with speed, and the hand and pen must hasten directly after it; for it goes and comes like a sudden shower.228

In Paradise Lost Milton refers to his “Celestial Patroness, who . . . unimplor’d . . . dictates to me my unpremeditated Verse” even as he dictated it to his daughters.²²⁹ In a letter William Blake described the composition of his Milton likewise: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes even twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation and even against my will.”²³⁰ Goethe also said his poems came to him of themselves and sometimes against his will: “The songs made me, and not I them; the songs had me in their power.” Dickens said that when he sat down to write, “some beneficent power” showed it all to him. George Eliot told a friend “that, in all she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ which took possession of her and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which the spirit, as it were, was acting.”²³¹ It is well known that Coleridge composed Kubla Khan in an opium-induced sleep “at least of the external senses,” which he afterwards described in the third person: “if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”²³² Unfortunately, what survives is only a fragment of the “not . . . less than from two to three hundred lines,” due to that bane of all such creation, the interruption of a visitor. Again, the reference to absence of effort makes explicit what is implicit in the other accounts.

Apparently of less mystical origin, but equally relevant for our purposes, is Lewis Carroll’s account of how he wrote his children’s books.

Alice and Looking Glass are made up almost wholly of bits and scraps, single ideas which came of themselves. In writing it out, I added many fresh ideas, which seemed to grow of themselves on the original stock; and many were added when, years afterwards, I wrote it all over again for publication; but (this may interest some readers of Alice to know) every such idea and nearly every word of the dialogue came of itself. Sometimes an idea comes at night, when I have had to get up and strike a light to note it down — sometimes when out on a lonely winter walk, when I have had to stop and with half-frozen fingers jot down a few words which should keep the new-born idea from perishing — but whenever or however it comes, it comes of itself.233

The emphasis is Carroll’s. As one commentator has observed, “The point was apparently so important for Lewis Carroll that he had to say it four times in one paragraph and italicize it twice as well.”²³⁴ Similarly, A. E. Housman reported that snatches of lines would “bubble up” after a beer and a walk “with sudden and unaccountable emotions”; such poems then “had to be taken in hand and completed by the brain.”²³⁵

Finally, some reference to the apparently independent life of characters. Thackeray wrote in the Roundabout Papers, “I have been surprised by the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen. The personage does or says something and I ask: how the dickens did he come to think of that?” Echoing Thackeray is the prolific children’s writer Enid Blyton:

I shut my eyes for a few minutes . . . make my mind a blank and wait — and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in mind’s eye. . . . The story is enacted almost as if I had a private cinema screen there. . . . I don’t know what is going to happen. I am in the happy position of being able to write a story and read it for the first time at one and the same moment. . . . Sometimes a character makes a joke, a really funny one that makes me laugh as I type it on my paper and I think, “Well, I couldn’t have thought of that one by myself in a hundred years!,” and then I think: “Well, who did think of it?”236

In looking back over all these passages, we seem to find a wide variety of explanations for the creative process: musical subjects that take root and enlarge themselves in a dream or are dictated by God and/or the subconscious, with or without vibrations; pregnant storms of inspiration that sweep one away; books and poems immediately transmitted by God and songs that write themselves; “beneficent Powers” that show everything or take possession of one; characters that take their lives into their own hands; and, more humbly, bits and scraps of ideas and dialogue that, take note, come of themselves. Despite this plethora of interpretations, I suggest that all of these are descriptions of the same mental process, which I have called nondual thinking, experienced as more or less spiritual according to the artist’s religious convictions. That there is such a diversity of descriptions for this process is to be expected, for in trying to understand such an extraordinary experience one will naturally tend to use the explanation that is most familiar, be it spirit possession, dictation by God, or an irruption of the unconscious. The undeniable differences between the extremes of Boehme and Blake on the one side and Lewis Carroll on the other may be viewed as differences in depth which are quantitative rather than qualitative. For Carroll the experience was comparatively shallow, manifesting itself only as fragmentary nondual thoughts that he later put together. For Boehme and Blake, the process is so deep and automatic that it seems as if whole poems are being dictated to them. Perhaps it is relevant here that the former was a mathematician (who, as we shall shortly see, normally needs only “sparks” of inspiration) and the latter two primarily mystics and only derivatively writers.

An objection may be raised here that, while the people mentioned do speak of works apparently writing themselves, none of them explicitly denies the self. In fact many of them refer to an “I” that is observing the process, and so these do not constitute cases of thought transcending subject–object duality. My answer is that none of the people cited is a philosopher (except Nietzsche, who does deny a thinker), and so we should not expect them to derive such philosophical conclusions from their experience. Yet the references often made to “daydreaming” and the like suggest the equivalent, in which the sense of self as we normally experience it, controlling and directing the thought processes, is suspended. In the nondual experience consciousness does not disappear but becomes one with its “object”: I am the thought processes, and it is this negation of the usual duality of “thinker–thinking–thought” that has been described in the passages quoted above.

■ ■ ■ ■

Those not familiar with the methods of scientific investigation and discovery might suppose its procedure to be radically different from what has been described above. Unlike the purely “subjective” material that the creative artist works with, the scientist is trying to extract the laws of “objective reality,” by which all his theories must be verified. Yet the procedures employed in science require a creativity which has some similarity to that of the writer or composer.

There are, then, no generally applicable “rules of induction,” by which hypotheses or theories can be mechanically derived or inferred from empirical data. The transition from data to theory requires creative imagination. Scientific hypotheses and theories are not derived from observed facts, but invented in order to account for them. They constitute guesses at the connections that might obtain between the phenomena under study, at uniformities and patterns that might underlie their occurrence. “Happy guesses” of this kind require great ingenuity, especially if they involve a radical departure from current modes of scientific thinking, as did, for example, the theory of relativity and quantum theory. (Hempel)237

The composer or writer requires constant or repeated “inspiration,” but the creativity that the scientist needs is just a spark — the “Eureka!” experience — to bridge the gap between the accumulated data and the rough idea, or metaphor, for a theory. Rigorous logical thinking is necessary but not sufficient here; something extra is needed that cannot be derived mechanically. One of the most eloquent descriptions of creativity in the history of science is that of the French mathematician Henri Poincaré:

For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions. . . . One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. By the next morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions. . . .

Just at that time I left Caen, where I was then living to go on a geologic excursion under the auspices of the school of mines. The change of travel made me forget my mathematical work. Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. . . .²³⁸

Then I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding researches. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that the arithmetical transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.

Poincaré gives further examples, but it is important to cite other sources too. Here is another French mathematician, Andrew Marie Ampère:

The matter often returned to my mind and I had sought twenty times unsuccessfully for this solution. For some days I had carried the idea about with me. At last, I do not know how, I found it, together with a large number of curious and new considerations concerning the theory of probability.239

A third mathematician, Karl Gauss, described in a letter how he proved a theorem he had been working on for four years:

At last two days ago I succeeded, not by dint of painful effort but so to speak by the grace of God. As a sudden flash of light, the enigma was solved. . . . For my part I am unable to name the nature of the thread which connected what I previously knew with that which made my success possible.²⁴⁰

The experiences of all three mathematicians apparently occurred in full waking consciousness. A fourth, Jacque Hadamard, described his as “the sudden and immediate appearance of a solution at the very moment of sudden awakening. On being very abruptly awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part.”²⁴¹

When we turn to other scientific fields, we find the curious phenomenon that many of the more celebrated discoveries were inspired by dreams. Kekule dreamed of snakelike atoms, one of which bit its tail, providing the image for the atomic composition of benzene, which he had been searching for. Bohr devised his model for the atom from dream-images of planets whirling around a sun. Frederick Banting won his Nobel Prize by dreaming of the physiological process that causes diabetes. Elias Howe, wondering how to construct a sewing machine, dreamed he was in a mob of savages, whose swords all had holes in their tips and went up and down, up and down . . .242

Arthur Koestler’s own researches into this phenomenon led him to the following conclusion:

All the biographical evidence indicates that such a radical re-shuffling operation as occurs in “creative originality” requires the intervention of mental processes beneath the surface of conscious reasoning, in the twilight zone of awareness. In the decisive phase of the creative process the rational controls are relaxed and the creative person’s mind seems to regress from disciplined thinking to less specialized, more fluid ways of mentation.²⁴³

Koestler implicitly assumes the prevalent (although not unchallenged) “conscious/subconscious” model to explain “creative originality.” But if we take conscious reasoning to be thinking in which thoughts are linked together in a series, and if the “twilight zone of awareness” is a twilight zone (cf: “a dreamlike state”) because there is no sense of a self directing the mental processes, then this passage can stand as a description of nondual “prajñā-intuition,” from which the more familiar vijñāna processes derive. This differs from “the subconscious” in that prajñā-intuition can be experienced more consciously, although not self-consciously.

Two qualifications regarding scientific inspiration must be made. First, apparently unlike musical and literary creativity, it normally requires a great amount of preliminary conscious work — that is, vijñāna. “Saturate yourself through and through with your subject . . . and wait.”²⁴⁴ Second, there is no guarantee that when such inspirations occur they will be correct. There is nothing in the inspiration itself to differentiate true from false hunches. Faraday, Darwin, Huxley, Planck, Einstein (who lost “two years of hard work” due to a false inspiration) and Poincaré have all commented on this.²⁴⁵ A scientific hypothesis is either verified or refuted by its accuracy in predicting what will happen, unlike sonatas or poems, which cannot be evaluated in this way because they are not simply true or false. Yet with the latter too, the fact that a work arises “nondually” is no guarantee of its value. Enid Blyton’s children’s books, although popular, are not expected to endure as immortal literature. One might try to account for the difference in value by variations in the “depth” or “intensity” of the nondual experience, but in order to avoid nonfalsifiability one would need an independent criterion of intensity. It is unlikely that a criterion of sufficient rigor could be found, and the examples that come to mind seem to invalidate the attempt. Alice in Wonderland survives because of an inventive charm that Enid Blyton’s books lack, and Mozart is “greater” than Puccini; but the inspiration for Alice, apparently unlike Blyton’s, came only in bits and pieces, and unlike Puccini, Mozart apparently did not feel that his music was dictated to him by God. I think one must accept that nondual thinking does not always produce inspirations of enduring value.

The implications of this are important. Since the nonduality of the creative process does not guarantee the truth of the solution or the value of an artistic work, more discursive and “reflective” thought-processes — Suzuki’s vijñāna and our “thoughts linked in a series” — are necessary as well. As mentioned earlier, creative inspiration often needs to be reflected through a critical lens. Just as vijñāna without prajñā becomes sterile, so nondual prajñā without vijñāna is often blind.

THE WAY OF THINKING

We never come to thoughts.

They come to us.

— Heidegger

In the West as in the East, a distinction between types of thinking is practically as old as philosophy itself. But what is probably the most influential example is comparatively modern: Kant’s discrimination between Vernunft and Verstand. “Concepts of reason (Vernunft) serve us to conceive (begreifen), as concepts of the intellect (Verstand) serve us to apprehend perceptions.”246 There is no parallel here to prajñā and vijñāna, but the distinction between Vernunft and Verstand was not original to Kant. It goes back at least as far as Jakob Boehme, whose interpretation was indubitably nondual. According to Boehme, Vernunft “comprehends nothing of the kingdom of God but the husk” and “always goes round in a circle on the outside of things”; it “stands always in doubt” and “out of it comes all strife.” This will of Vernunft “rules the outward world without the spirit and will of God, according to its own self-will,” so it “must be broken: it must be a living movement of the will which breaks through Vernunft and which strives against Vernunft.” Howard Brinton comments on this: “On the whole Reason [Vernunft] in Boehme’s writings seems to be condemned for partial truth rather than untruth. . . . Vernunft wholly isolated from Verstand becomes evil.”247 All of this could be used to describe vijñāna, just as Verstand’s transcendence of duality seems identical to that of prajñā:

In Vernunft subject and object are separated. Accordingly Vernunft is doubtful knowledge. In Verstand the subjective–objective distinction has been transcended, therefore Boehme held Verstand is sure knowledge, for knower and known are one.

Volition is an identification of subject and object in an action where all sense of otherness is lost because each penetrates and determines the other.

Vernunft struggles in vain from multiplicity to unity, Verstand beginning at unity sees reality as a whole filled with interrelated forms. Thus Vernunft is conceptual thought and Verstand is mystical experience. Verstand internalizes the external. It sinks into the lowest depths of the dark abyss within the soul, and rises up with God’s life to a deeper understanding of the same objects dealt with by Vernunft. It can see the meaning of things because it has come out of the source of all meanings. (Brinton)²⁴⁸

This description of Vernunft and Verstand agrees so completely with D. T. Suzuki’s account of the distinction between vijñāna and prajñā that one could substitute the Sanskrit words for the German ones. I wonder if Suzuki was familiar with Boehme’s work or Brinton’s study of it (published in 1930).

The distinction between Vernunft and Verstand originally derives from the Neoplatonic distinction between the Aristotelian ratio and a faculty of intuition or intelligence superior to reason termed intellectus. The Greek equivalent to these Latin terms is found in the distinction Plotinus makes between logismos, mere understanding, and nous, the superior faculty of Intellect. For Plotinus the understanding sees the Forms separately from each other, but the Intellect sees them all together. According to Nicolas of Cusa it is by means of intellectus that we rise above the principle of noncontradiction and see the unity and coincidence-of-opposites in reality. Eckhart also distinguishes between them, interpreting intellectus more generally as a faculty for the transcendental which for him, like Boehme, was nondual: “the eternal process is a self-revealing of God in pure knowledge where the knower is that which is known.”249 But an equally striking parallel is to be found much closer to home.

If philosophy in the nineteenth century became historically conscious, philosophy in the twentieth century has become self-conscious. Attention has shifted from the construction of metaphysical systems to the act of philosophizing, that is, thinking itself. This has taken different directions in Anglo-American and continental European philosophy. The former grasps the nature of thinking more objectively, by identifying it with language, and has become sensitive to the ways in which philosophical problems arise due to the misuse of words; many problems are “dissolved” by uncovering the linguistic confusions at their root. On the continent, some phenomenology has continued the traditional pursuit of a scientific “presuppositionless” philosophy, but the influential writings of Heidegger, Jaspers, and more recently Gadamer and Derrida, have shifted attention to the “subjective” act of thinking itself. Their continually evolving work may best be understood as “process philosophies” of philosophizing rather than as the construction of systems that offer something objectively fixed; their most important insights concern the nature of philosophical reflection as such. Thus it is significant that the work of Martin Heidegger (the most influential of the four), and particularly his enigmatic later writings, provides some profound parallels to the account of nondual thinking presented in this chapter. Heidegger has little to say about the problem of perception and almost nothing about the body; rather, he meditated primarily on the nature of thinking. A comprehensive development of this subject would be a book in itself, but a few pages will be enough to point out that Heidegger’s general concern was to overcome subject–object duality and that his conclusions bear some similarity to those of the nondualist traditions.

It is not possible to discuss Heidegger’s “system” because, like Nāgārjuna, he has none. For Heidegger thinking is not a means to gain knowledge but both the path and the destination.250 Many of his titles are of peregrination: “Unterwegs zur Sprache” (On the way to language), “Der Feldweg” (The field path), “Wegmarken” (Way-markers), “Holzweg” (Forest paths), and so on. He ends his papers, not with summaries and conclusions but with further questions. In so far as Heidegger has a goal, it is simply to continue questioning and to think more deeply. “I have left an earlier standpoint, not in order to exchange it for another one, but because even the former standpoint was merely a way-station along a way. The lasting element in thinking is the way.”²⁵¹ This is not, as one would expect, because we can always progress further, but just the opposite: because there is no such thing as progress in thinking.

When philosophy attends to its essence it does not make forward strides at all. It remains where it is constantly to think the same. Progression, that is, progression forward from this place is a mistake that follows thinking as the shadow which thinking itself casts.²⁵²

It is hard to conceive of a more radical challenge to our ambitious Western philosophy, but such a denial of progress is also implied by the “empty tranquility” of nondual thinking.

Socrates is praised by Heidegger as “the purest thinker of the West.”

All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft of thinking, this current and maintain himself in it. . . . That is why he wrote nothing. For anyone who begins to write out of thoughtfulness must inevitably be like those people who run to seek refuge from any draft too strong for them.253

This is also why Socrates, according to Plato’s Apology, insisted that he knew nothing, for those sucked into the draft of nondual thinking must let go of that which they “know” — that is, they must not cling to any conclusions as final. Hannah Arendt, a student of Heidegger, described Socrates’ method as “unfreezing frozen thoughts.” “The word ‘house’ is something like a frozen thought that thinking must unfreeze whenever it wants to find out the original meaning.”²⁵⁴ That thinking can be “frozen” — reified into concepts and ideas which become things retained and used — parallels the “frozen percepts” of chapter 2. If visual objects are reified percepts, perhaps concepts and ideas are reified thoughts. Unstable, fluid thought, which in itself breaks up instantly (Śikṣāsamuccaya), may be held only by being petrified into an idea, and that-which-holds-it becomes the “thinker.” Whether or not Socrates himself was drawn into “the draft of thinking,” certainly that is Heidegger’s method and goal, and this requires that one not “freeze” any thoughts that arise but use them as a departure for further questioning.

In Was Heisst Denken? — the book that, as its name suggests,²⁵⁵ deals most specifically with what it means to think — Heidegger finds most “thought-provoking” the fact that we are still not thinking. Heidegger’s style in this book is exasperating to anyone looking for an answer. He clearly delights in the sheer movement of thought itself, leisurely exploring all the byways that his thinking encounters, and obviously feeling no necessity to reach a conclusion. The title question is designed not to elicit an answer but to effect a transformation, a deepening of thought.

The question “What is called thinking,” therefore, does not aim to establish an answer by which the question can be disposed of as quickly and conclusively as possible. On the contrary, one thing and one thing only matters with this question: to make the question problematical. . . .

The question cannot be settled, now or ever. . . .

To answer the question “What is called thinking?” is itself always to keep asking, so as to remain underway.256

Heidegger’s intention in Being and Time, his first important work, was to reawaken the question of the meaning of Being, which Western philosophy has neglected in its preoccupation with beings. Heidegger began by analyzing the Being of a particular being, of that being whose nature it is to raise the question of the meaning of Being — man (Dasein). Having grasped Being in this way, he then intended to turn around and redo the whole analysis from the perspective of Being ltself. Instead of this, Heidegger’s thinking underwent a crucial shift in the 1930s. The nature and significance of this “turning” or “reversal” (Kehre) is controversial, but in any case it marked a radical change not only in many of Heidegger’s philosophical views but most of all in his attitude toward the process of thinking. In Being and Time Heidegger stated that he wanted to “overcome” metaphysics, but the turning included a realization that his own thinking had still been metaphysical in form. He was still dualistically using thoughts in an attempt to “re-present” Being, still trying “to grasp Being in the network of his concepts.”²⁵⁷ This was replaced by a kind of thinking which has been “claimed by Being” and therefore serves Being: “Before he speaks man must first let himself be claimed again by Being.”²⁵⁸

Thinking . . . lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. . . . Thinking accomplishes this letting. Thinking is l’engagement par l’Etre pour l’Etre . . . penser, c’est l’engagement de l’Etre. Here the possessive form “de l’ . . .” is supposed to express both subjective and objective genitive. [Heidegger explains later that this “thinking of Being” means both “Being is what is thought about” and “Being is what is doing the thinking.”] In this regard, “subject” and “object” are inappropriate terms of metaphysics, which very early on in the form of Occidental “logic” and “grammar” seized control of the interpretation of language. We today can only begin to descry what is concealed in that occurrence.259

It seems then that in the most important sense Heidegger accomplished the project he set out for himself in Being and Time — he “turned around” and was thinking from the perspective of Being — but in order to do this his conception of that task (and of the means necessary for it) needed a revolutionary transformation. Only thinking that is “an event of Being” can be both means and goal, for only such thinking is sufficient unto itself and needs to accomplish nothing else. “Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. . . . for it lets Being — be.” Heidegger distinguishes such ursprüngliches Denken from the more calculative, re-presentational vorstellendes Denken. The latter includes the “technical interpretation” of thinking: thinking, as Plato and Aristotle (but evidently not Socrates) took it to be, as technē, “a process of reflection in service to doing and making.”²⁶⁰ Thinking can begin only when we realize that reason, glorified for centuries as man’s highest faculty, is actually the most obstinate opponent of true thinking. The obvious parallel with prajñā and vijñāna is strengthened by the etymological similarities. Ur-sprüng-liches Denken is literally “primal-springing-up” thinking (similar to the pra- in prajñā) and vorstellendes Denken, often translated as “re-presentational thinking,” is literally “before-placing” thinking, which places one thing in front of something else. Like prajñā and vijñāna, ursprüngliches Denken is discontinuous with ordinary vorstellendes Denken: “The leap alone takes us into the neighborhood where thinking resides.”²⁶¹ And like prajñā, this leap is not the attainment of something new or adventitious but a “step back”:

Because there is something simple to be thought in this thinking it seems quite difficult to the representational thought that has been transmitted as philosophy. But the difficulty is not a matter of indulging in a special sort of profundity and of building complicated concepts; rather, it is concealed in the step back that lets thinking enter into a questioning that experiences — and lets the traditional opining of philosophy fall away.262

Philosophy faces the same difficulty with, and is likewise the obstacle to, the simplicity of prajñā. In order to experience either, the philosophizing intellect must be shattered.

As long as philosophy merely busies itself with continually obstructing the possibility of admittance into the matter for thinking, i.e., into the truth of Being, it stands safely beyond any danger of shattering against the hardness of that matter. Thus to “philosophize” about being shattered is separated by a chasm from a thinking that is shattered. If such thinking were to go fortunately for a man no misfortune would befall him. He would receive the only gift that can come to thinking from Being.²⁶³

As Mehta explains, such thinking is not the act of a supposedly independent agent called man directed toward or against some other entity distinct from him. I do not see how such thinking, “claimed by Being” and “an event of Being,” can be anything except nondual thinking as it has been described in this chapter. Heidegger terms the “standing in the lighting of Being” that occurs as a result of being claimed by Being “the ek-sistence of man.” What is Being? “The farthest and yet the nearest” because “man at first clings always and only to beings”; thus he “forgets the truth of Being in favor of the pressing throng of beings unthought in their essence.” Bur what is the relation between Being and man’s ek-sistence? “Being itself is the relation to the extent that It, as the location of the truth of Being and beings, gathers to itself and embraces ek-sistence in its existential, that is, ecstatic essence.”²⁶⁴ Later in the same essay, Heidegger expresses the same point more clearly:

Man is never first and foremost man on the hither side of the world, as a “subject,” whether this is taken as “I” or “We.” Nor is he ever simply a mere subject which always simultaneously is related to objects, so that his essence lies in the subject–object relation. Rather before all this, man in his essence is ek-sistent into the openness of Being, into the open region that lights the “between” within which a “relation” of subject to object can “be.”265

Heidegger concludes “Letter on Humanism” as follows:

The thinking that is to come is no longer philosophy, because it thinks more originally than metaphysics — a name identical to philosophy. However, the thinking that is to come can no longer, as Hegel demanded, set aside the name “love of [in the sense of “striving for . . .”, “pursuit of . . .”] wisdom” and become wisdom itself in the form of absolute knowledge. Thinking is on the descent to the poverty of its provisional essence. Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of Being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky.²⁶⁶

■ ■ ■ ■

To follow one star, only this. To think is to concentrate on one thought, motionless like a star in the heavens above the world.

— Heidegger

Heidegger’s way of thinking has been compared with the nondual thinking of prajñā, but we may develop the parallel further, for Heidegger’s “conclusions” have an affinity not only to nondual thinking but to subject–object nonduality generally. Most of Heidegger’s later work is a series of attempts to express the “thought” of nonduality, which we will identify within four of Heidegger’s most important essays: “On the Essence of Truth,” “Letter on Humanism,” “Gelassenheit” (“Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking”) and “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.” The context within which this “thought” occurs is different in each essay, but in every case there is the same central point, around which the meditation revolves. And in retrospect we can see premonitions of that thought even in Heidegger’s 1929 inaugural lecture “What Is Metaphysics?”

In a later postscript to “On the Essence of Truth” (first given as an address in 1930), Heidegger states that the Kehre (turning) occurs in it and evaluates its significance by claiming that “in its decisive steps . . . it accomplishes a change in the questioning that belongs to the overcoming of metaphysics.” Not only is all metaphysical subjectivity left behind and “the truth of Being sought as the ground of a transformed historical position,” but also “the movement of the lecture is such that it sets out to think from this other ground. The course of the questioning is intrinsically the way of a thinking which, instead of furnishing representations and concepts, experiences and tries itself as a transformation of its relatedness to Being.”267

Heidegger’s original intention in Being and Time had been to redo in part 2 the Dasein-analysis of part 1 from the perspective of Being itself. As we have seen, this failed because the approach of Being and Time was still metaphysical in its attempt to re-present what-is. Subjectivity is still implicit in conceiving of philosophy as an activity that man uses in order to grasp Being. In order to accomplish the intention of part 2, a turning away from this subjective conception of thinking was necessary. One must “think from this other ground” — that is, from the perspective of Being itself. What might be termed the “presubjective ground” of Being must be identified and “yielded to” in order for thinking to take place from or rather in that ground. That presubjective ground is first articulated in “On the Essence of Truth” and is the hinge upon which the essay turns.

In it, Heidegger begins by questioning the conventional definition of truth, more precisely, the relation that obtains between a statement and the thing referred to. As long as the nature of this relation remains undetermined and is taken for granted, as Heidegger believes it has been, all discussion about the correspondence theory must lose its way. So Heidegger looks at this relation. What a statement states is about something presented to us, that is, something that is opposed to us as an object.

What stands opposed must traverse an open field of opposedness (Entgegen) and nevertheless must maintain its stand as a thing and show itself as something withstanding. This appearing of the thing in traversing a field of opposedness takes place in an open region, the openness of which is not first created by the presenting but rather is only entered into and taken over as a domain of relatedness.268

Here, for the first time, appears “the thought” that Heidegger restates again and again in his later essays, devising new contexts and vocabularies to express it, constantly circling around it as a moth around a flame. Translated into our nondualist terms, Heidegger says that the “openness” of the traversed region — the world of our surroundings, which each of us is most immediately “in” — is “not . . . created,” in that it is prior to our dualistic understanding of an object presented to a subject. Heidegger challenges the notion that consciousness is the attribute of a discrete subject observing a nonconscious external world. That usual dualistic understanding is only one historically determined interpretation of the “open region.” Here Heidegger goes beyond speculation about the nature of Being and for the first time tries to point directly to the presubjective ground that is Being.

The rest of “On the Essence of Truth” follows from this point. The correctness of a statement depends upon an “openness of comportment” in this open region, which allows Heidegger to locate the essence of truth in freedom — on “being free for what is opened up in an open region.” But man overlooks this openness and “clings to what is readily available and controllable even where ultimate matters are concerned.” Our mistake is that we “hold fast to what is offered by beings, as if they were open of and in themselves.”²⁶⁹ This is “the fall”: by clinging to particular beings as if they were self-existent, one misses the predualistic openness of Being that makes them possible.

The “Letter on Humanism” develops the implications of this insight by using it to reinterpret the Being and Time categories of Dasein, ek-sistence, “the fall,” authenticity, Being, and especially language and thinking. Humanism does not go deep enough to inquire into the nature of this opening, but tends to accept the given interpretation of the relation between Being and man. Dasein’s “being-there” now means our being thrown by Being into its illumined openness, and Dasein’s ek-sistence is our essential exposure to this disclosure of Being, into which we have been summoned. Dasein’s “fall” is failure to recognize this disclosure, oblivious to it in Dasein’s clinging to particular beings. Authenticity is fulfilling one’s essence by answering this “call of Being” and becoming “the shepherd of Being,” but modern man has fallen and hence is homeless.

The most radical shift in this essay is a new view of language and thinking, which are now understood to originate from this presubjective opening. We miss the essence of language if we treat it merely as a means of communication, as a tool that man possesses. Language is “the house of Being” within which man dwells as its caretaker rather than its owner. The new understanding of thinking parallels this: the presubjective opening of Being is also the source of all essential (ürsprungliches) thinking, as we have seen. These insights about language and thinking are the logical development of Heidegger’s earlier “thought” about the “open region” whose openness is not created in the dualistic relation but exists prior to it. Just as men generally miss the openness of Being by clinging and trying to possess particular beings as if “they were open in and of themselves “ so thinkers tend to do the same with their “own” thoughts, thus missing that presubjective opening from which thoughts arise. This realization negates all metaphysical system-building and led to the Way of nondual thinking discussed above. It is through such “essential thinking” that the thinker dwells in the “open region” of Being.

“Gelassenheit”270 begins by asking whether the question about man’s nature is in fact not a question about man, and (as in “Letter on Humanism”) the essay concludes that man’s nature is indeed determined in what is beyond man. The topic is again thinking but includes what we would normally call perception. Thinking is usually understood as “transcendental-horizontal re-presenting,” which, for example, places before us (“re-presents”) what is typical of a tree “as that view into which we look when one thing confronts us in the appearance of a tree.” But then both horizon and transcendence are experienced only in relation to what we re-present as objects opposing us.

What lets the horizon be what it is has not yet been encountered. . . . We say that we look into the horizon. Therefore the field of vision is something open, but its openness is not due to our looking. Likewise we do not place the appearance of objects, which the view within a field of vision offers us, into this openness . . . rather that comes out of this to meet us.

Here again is “the thought.” “On the Essence of Truth” said that the openness of the open region is not created by the presenting of some object to us; here we are told that the openness is also not due to our looking. Again, this is the central point around which the conversation turns. The horizon can now be understood as only the side facing us of an openness that surrounds us. That openness is termed “an enchanted region,” a “regioning,” and finally “that-which-regions” (die Gegnet). This region is more than just some “place”: while resting in itself, it gathers each thing into its “re-sheltering abiding.” Nonwilling thinking becomes meaningful as a presubjective thinking in which willing has been renounced in favor of a “waiting” that releases oneself from all transcendental-horizontal re-presenting into the openness of this Gegnet and in so doing lets die Gegnet “reign purely as such.” This waiting is not waiting for “releasement” but is releasement, for it is not the subject that is responsible for this waiting but die Gegnet itself. So “the nature of thinking lies in the regioning of releasement by that-which-regions,” hence the nature of thinking is indeed determined through something other than itself.

“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” discusses the two questions suggested by the title. Philosophy has entered its final stage because it is equivalent to metaphysics, and “metaphysical thinking, starting from what is present, represents it in its essence and thus exhibits it as grounded by its ground.”271 In other words metaphysics, in its search for the ground of what is present, does not let a tree in bloom present itself to us but always re-presents it, to cite the example that Heidegger uses in What Is Called Thinking?

When we think through what this is, that a tree in bloom presents itself to us so that we can come and stand face to face with it, the thing that matters first and foremost, and finally, is not to drop the tree in bloom, but for once let it stand where it stands. Why do we say ‘finally’? Because to this day, thought has never let the tree stand where it stands.

The presence of what is present is not finally and also something we face, rather it comes before. Prior to all else it stands before us, only we do not see it because we stand within it. It is what really comes before us.272

Yet another kind of thinking besides metaphysics is possible. Two recent attempts to return to “the things themselves,” those of Hegel and Husserl, were still subjective heirs to the dualistic legacy of Descartes. Heidegger reflects on what remains “unthought” in their methods. In Hegel’s speculative dialectic, philosophy presents itself by appearing of itself and for itself. Such an appearance must occur in some light, for only through brightness can what shines show itself. But that brightness depends upon something open and free which “grants to the movement of speculative thinking the passage through what it thinks. This logic provides the opportunity, albeit a rather strained one, to approach “the thought” again. Heidegger calls “this openness that grants a possible letting-appear” the “opening” (Lichtung) and then makes — and remakes — his point:

Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness.

In the Greek language, one is not speaking about the action of seeing, about videre, but about that which gleams and radiates. But it can radiate only if openness has already been granted. The beam of light does not first create the opening, openness, it only traverses it.

We have already reflected upon the fact that the path of thinking . . . needs the opening. But in that opening rests possible radiance, that is, the possible presencing of presence itself.273

Heidegger uses this point to redefine aletheia: no longer understood as truth, it is now that opening which first grants the possibility of truth. He concludes by defining “the task of thinking.” Metaphysics asks about this Being (i.e., the ground) of beings, but “does not ask about Being as Being, that is, . . . how there can be presence as such. There is presence only when opening is dominant.” To “think this opening” is the future task for thought.

It comes as no surprise that the same point is fundamental to Heidegger’s interpretation of the history of philosophy: that the Greek concepts of physis and hypokeimenon (“that which lies before”) embodied some naive understanding of this “thought,” later lost when they were transformed into technē and the self-conscious subiectum, respectively. Less obvious is the fact that in retrospect we can see anticipations of Heidegger’s “thought” — not a rudimentary form, but its birth pangs — in his 1929 inaugural lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” The new perspective in Heidegger’s later works was not due merely to an abstract philosophical insight, the result of objective reflection. The change is more profound than just a new style of thinking. Heidegger implied later that his thinking had been “shattered,” and “What Is Metaphysics?” seems to be a record of this transition to a new way of being.

The lecture is concerned with a particular metaphysical question: the nature of transcendence, taken to be identical to the problem of Nothingness. Science is concerned with investigating the various types of beings and, taking the objectivity of these beings for granted, “wants to know nothing of the nothing.” But the Nothing is revealed in the fundamental mood of anxiety, in which our preoccupation with grasping objects fades away. This Nothing, although it is “the complete negation of the totality of beings,” is not an annihilation but a “slipping away of the whole,” which includes oneself — that is, one’s own subjectivity. In this receding, things do not disappear but turn toward us and close in on us because we can get no hold on them. We “hover” in an anxiety that is yet “a kind of bewildered calm” which brings us “for the first time before beings as such.” Dasein means “being held out into the nothing” and this being “already beyond beings as a whole” is what Heidegger calls our transcendence. “Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.”274

What Heidegger here presents philosophically seems to be a description of the difficult process of losing his subjectivity (in the Cartesian sense) and letting in or surrendering himself to the presubjective “opening” of Being, which at this point is experienced incompletely as a numbing Nothingness. While he denies any dualism between Nothing and beings (“the Nothing does not merely serve as the counterpart of beings; rather it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such”), yet some such dualism is implicit, in this lecture because there is not yet a clear understanding of Being as simply the opening for the un-represented “presencing” of those beings. Hence this experience is, as we can see in retrospect, transitional. So are the categories used to express this experience: for example, the terms “metaphysics” and “transcendence,” both of which are subsequently rejected. Here man is necessarily metaphysical because of the transcendence of beings in Nothingness. In terms of the later Heidegger, this transcendence is metaphysical in a pejorative sense because there is still the representational attempt to “ground” beings — in this case, in their Nothingness. The re-presented tree in bloom recedes and closes in on Heidegger because he can get no hold on it, but he has not yet realized how the subjective tendency to grasp and re-present is all that separates him from the Being he seeks. Later Heidegger realizes that there is no metaphysical need to transcend the presencing of a tree in bloom, and then that anxious Nothing becomes the abiding opening within which all presencing radiates.

■ ■ ■ ■

So perhaps we should take William Barrett’s story seriously: “A German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of D. T. Suzuki’s books; ‘If I understand this man correctly,’ Heidegger remarked, ‘this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.’”275 But if there is such similarity between the paths of Heidegger and the nondualist Asian philosophies, where do they differ? For differ they clearly do. Heidegger, if not a philosopher, is still a “thinker,” which the Zen student is not. I think that both affirm a paradox which might be called “the thinking of no-thinking.” But they emphasize different aspects of it. The meditative traditions emphasize the no-thinking, Heidegger the thinking. In meditation, one is concerned to dwell in the silent, empty source from which thoughts spring; as thoughts arise, one ignores them and lets them go. Heidegger is interested in the thoughts arising from that source — although not stopping with any particular thoughts by freezing them into a system, but staying in the “draft of thinking” itself. The question that remains is whether Heidegger himself went into the draft far enough to reach that tranquility where no wind ever blows. Did he “step back” far enough for his thinking to be completely shattered? Did it ever descend into the poverty of truly simple saying?

A monk earnestly asked Jōshū, “I have just entered this monastery. I beg you, master, please instruct me.” Jōshū asked: “Have you eaten your rice porridge yet?” “Yes, I have.” “Then wash your bowls.” The monk realized something.²⁷⁶

■ ■ ■ ■

How satisfactory can a theory be that purports to show why all theories must be unsatisfactory? Like Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, have we climbed up a ladder which must now be kicked out from beneath us? Or, to use the more appropriate Zen koan, how do we keep going when we have reached the top of a hundred-foot pole?²⁷⁷ Not that we are in any danger of becoming Cretan liars. The problem here is not semantic but soteriological. If the view of nondual thinking developed in this chapter is true, then everything written herein is subrated to thought-linked-in-a-series vijñāna and condemned as the primary obstacle to the realization of prajñā. This means that any theory of nonduality, if it is to retain the prescriptive aspect of the nondualist philosophies, must be paradoxical and self-negating. As in the Prajñāpāramitā, what one hand offers, the other takes back. We cannot avoid the Mādhyamika distinction between two levels of truth, and all philosophy is on the lower. The only way to experience the higher is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

In Suzuki’s terms, all this chapter is vijñāna vainly attempting to comprehend prajñā, the source underlying it. Like Heidegger in Being and Time, we have dualistically tried to “grasp” what nondual thinking is. What is unique to thinking about the nature of thinking is that what is to be grasped and what is to grasp it are the same thing — yet another type of “nonduality.” This makes thinking both the easiest thing to comprehend and the most difficult. In the usual sense it becomes impossible, just as the hand cannot grasp itself and the eye cannot see itself.

Hsüan-tse told Master Fa-yen that when he was with his first teacher, he learned that to seek for Buddhahood would be just as if Ping-ting T’ung-tsu were to ask for fire. He explained that Ping-ting T’ung-tzu was the god of fire; this god’s asking for fire would be like being oneself a Buddha and seeking Buddha. Fa-yen remarked that his understanding was completely off the track. Hsüan-tse was extremely offended and left the temple. But when he came back to the master and asked for another statement, to Hsüan-tse’s surprise the Master said, “Ping-ting T’ung-tzu asks for fire.” This immediately awakened Hsüan-tse.278

The monk was “correct” the first time, but this “fact” had to be experienced fully, not just grasped as something conceptually true. To miss this truth by an inch is to be off by a thousand miles, just as all philosophizing about being shattered against the hardness of this matter is separated by a chasm from thinking that has been shattered. The question about the nature of nondual thinking must finally be answered on a different level than that of other questions. As Heidegger said in response to a related question, “if the answer could be given it would consist in a transformation of thinking, not in a propositional statement about a matter at stake.”²⁷⁹