Of Thought and Judgment

I think about a lot of things all day long. My thoughts are a continuous stream of memories and reflections - an unceasing torrent of imaginative wanderings. I suppose by Decartes' rationale that this is a good thing because such experiences demonstrate that I am alive. However, the weight of these thoughts are as such that it is sometimes difficult to enjoy myself. One very obnoxious comic named Doug Stanhope did a segment called "Carnival Head" on one of his albums (No Refunds) in which he describes the times he's tried to go to sleep without the aid of alcohol or other drugs while lying in a motel room alone:

"I have a brain that just won't shut the fuck up... 1 AM, 2 AM... That's when the carnival inside my head starts... There's always music playing in there that sucks... 'We didn't start the fire!' Hmm... There must be something that rhymes with orange... Then, my ex-wife gets in there: 'You never took me to the Botanical Gardens!'"

I often can't sleep either, and for me such an observation hit the nail on the head with its intimation of such obsessive thoughts. Lately, I've been listening more to such mainstream New Agers like Eckhart Tolle, and even though I don't particularly like the increasing commercialism that seems to be becoming more evident in his organization's thought stream, I really like what he has to say. In his book The Power of Now, he says "The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly—you usually don't use it at all. It uses you" (page 13). Like most of the other such observations in his book, that insight has been around for centuries, but he has found a really down-to-earth way to express it which people have really responded to. Thoughts become fueled by our emotional reactions to them and perpetuate themselves thus. It's almost as though they have a life of their own, and that, too, has been said many times before. Tolle goes on to say in one of his talks that "all thought is judgment," and I think that's a profound statement.

In the Tarot, the suit of Swords represents the power of thought. To do its job, a blade separates one thing from another by cutting. The mind by nature is inquisitive, and the whole process of making sense of something is based on the determination of how one thing is not like another. That's the bedrock of science - drawing the line between the rational and the irrational. But spend too much time trying to make things fit and put them into the right boxes and you have become irrational yourself and have lost sight of the elusive truth. The sword cuts both ways.

The realization of an empty space within is essential for spiritual growth. Lao-tse said it best: "We turn clay to make a vessel, but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends." What do you think Jesus meant when he said "unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"? A child is pure because he or she does not have a lot of hard-wired preconceived ideas about things just yet. He or she hasn't really learned how to hate - that would involve some serious judgment. In order to hate, you have to have enough of a developed sense of self to say "How could they do this to me!" A child can become utterly fascinated by a bug crawling along some rocks because the mind that's observing the bug is not saying to itself "oh, it's just a bug," classifying it, and stowing it away with all the other boxed up memories in the Memory Closet. The child's mind is grooving to the experience of bugness.