To encounter the world quietly

A new attitude towards thinking, part IV

Photo: Honoring a stupa with the Buddha’s relics: from the Metropolitan Museum exhibit of early Buddhist art, “Tree and Serpent.”

Of course the question arises of how thoughts can ever be still.

Our common place experience of thinking is that it’s an automatic machine that just goes on and on, a coffee mill that can't be turned off. It has a lot of caffeine in it; it's very active and it's always crushing everything that it encounters so that it can run the water of my awareness through it and extract meaning of one kind or another.

I assume, by doing this, that I impart meaning to what I encounter.

It never occurs to me to suspend my judgment on this matter and stop assuming that meaning begins in me and with me.

Perhaps meaning already exists and I’m just a recorder of it.

Perhaps meaning already exists first, in silence and stillness, rather than in what comes after, in action and in interaction.