Intentionally not thinking

A new attitude towards thinking, part III

Photo: Praying Mantis in my garden. These absolutely exquisite insects can’t be beat for their strange and elegant beauty.

Thinking begins in stillness. It begins in quiet. It begins in darkness.

The kind of thinking that can truly inform (inwardly form) my life is a thinking of emptiness that receives, not a vessel filled with thought.

I can poise myself on the edge of each moment with nothing in me.

Nothing, by the way, includes all my memories, but they’re in a little box that doesn’t need to be opened except when absolutely necessary. Most of the time, it isn't necessary except for the most habitual and mechanical things (I need to remember how to turn on the lights, for example) and I can just leave the little box alone and say to myself, "Gee, I wonder what will come next?"

There are many stories about this kind of thinking, exactly this kind of thinking, in Zen Buddhism. It's worth becoming familiar with the stories in that boy of literature in order to at least touch that. But the point is that I’m not a Zen Buddhist here, no, not at all. I’m an ordinary person in an ordinary life, not a monk; and so in order for this kind of thinking to be effective I have to learn how, in my ordinary life, to exist in this new way—

which consists of intentionally not thinking.

Now, this may seem strange. I can't even think about it, because already I would be wrong.

So how do I go about intentionally not thinking?