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Confused Zen Thinking

I had a strange thought yesterday.

But before I go on with it, I’ve come to realize that the act of thinking is a very peculiar kind of event. You’re taught — well maybe not you but I’ve had such lessons — that to live life “correctly”, that is to the fullest, you must live it in the moment. Not just carpe diem but seize the ever present interval of time you reside within. Yet the procedures of thought forever fail to give in to that standard. When you bother to think about something while it’s occurring, you’re thinking of a past or future component. Thinking about the now in the now is really just paying attention to an instance of time just past, or is about to. And if you think on thinking itself, you can’t really think of it in the absolute present — that is a moment is impossible to ponder as it’s going on, and the act of reflection cannot reflect upon itself as it happens. So to live in the moment, you have to give up on the idea of thinking about it. Kind of confusing, I know. I can’t put it across any clearer without pulling a muscle.

Here’s a deranged sort of math: thinking is both action and inaction. To do something is to do it — I guess that’s pretty obvious. On the opposite side, to think about it puts yourself in the position of not doing it. It’s true that thinking itself is a sort of doing, in that the brain is grinding away, if not in a visibly physical way (ignoring the drama of brow furling and index finger gnashing against temple), certainly a chemically demanding one. This has little to do with what you may be thinking on, however. You’ve certainly been in a situation where you’re working away on a project, or driving down the road, or talking with your friends, and suddenly you’re surprised that during the last few minutes or hours you were lost in thought on a subject having no relationship to what you were involved in throughout that time. To be able to do this must mean our brains, or at least those higher brain functions in charge of thinking, can be detached from anything that’s considered important in assuring our actions are handled soundly. Perhaps they’re not wired together at all. Something else is going on, and it’s leaving the process of thinking to it’s own devices.

You know the sensation you have right after you break a bone? Not the exact moment you break it, when there’s a fragmentary sliver of a second as lightening bolts of pain shoot from you. If you could translate that pain into energy it might light up the five boroughs of New York City for one one-hundredth of a second. That moment lasts so utterly briefly you end up forgetting what the pain felt like. No, I mean that moment, or the sensation of that moment, following it, when your body curls up instinctively into a protective fetus, and every possible useful thought is ripped right out of your head. That point when nothing but a ghostly apparition of pain is well masked by the immediate influx of endorphins coursing through your veins, and you end up relieved of all human traits. That’s a moment when someone could come up and kick you in the back, and you would have to be forgiven for failing to react. That is quite a sensation, isn’t it? But is it a thought, or is it an experience one can only reflect upon later, after the fact? I wish I had a good answer for that one. Honestly, I was I had any answer.

Now, about that strange thought I had yesterday… If only I could remember what it was. Seemed important there for a moment.