How would you be able to feel liberated if you did not have internal representations of what liberation meant to you? How would you be able to think?

How familiar are you with Eastern Wisdom?


In Zen, the goal is to empty your mind. In essence, to stop thinking, to cease internal sensory representations. This makes you a Super-Man. In Zen and the Art of Archery, the Zen Archery Master aims his bow at the target fires once...bull's eye, fires again, bull's eye, splits the first arrow, fires again, splits the second arrow. The kicker? He's firing in total darkness. Not a snowball's chance in hell he could do this if he were thinking or calculating. True story too.

"Stop thinking and talking and there is nothing you will not be able to know."

In Zen, the enlightened person depicts himself as an empty circle.


Well, that might all sound a bit hokey to someone who's not into this stuff. Fair enough. Let's be immanent.

The experience is much more easily had when one feels a sense or urgency. Ex. You wake up late and have 20 minutes get to work...you're not thinking, you're flying! Or if a paper is due in 1 hour...LIGHT SPEED!!! no time for thinking...just haven't got the 'luxury'.

If the ego is a traffic cop, we're arresting that cop. He doesn't need to examine every peice of information that flies by. He's got the day off.

There is something to be said for, Urgency, though. I've always had this internal oscillation between Relaxed Non-thinking and Tense Non-thinking. I can become a caffeinated, surging Tony Robbins at the drop of a hat. The relaxed path is much more difficult, seems impossible at times.

"Intuition is a suspension of logic due to impatience." --Rita Mae Brown

See? Even Ms. Brown agrees.
Logic = traffic cop
Impatience = urgency
Intuition = pre-conscious processing/ultra-efficient genius


There's also the Flow experience I know you're familiar with, where we challenge ourselves with just the right amount of difficulty to occupy our entire minds. Dr. Mihaly writes that people have the experience of "fading away" and losing a sense of time. The subjects further describe these flow experiences as the most fulfilling times of their lives. A mini-enlightenment!

Esoteric Enlightenment,
Urgency,
Complex Activities,

All of which are clearly examples of an absence of internal sensory representations.


I know one thing: When I am my spiritual best, I'm not thinking. I disappear. It's like God is moving through me.

Yet, I am clearly processing information. I hear no voices in my head. I see no pictures, yet I can be so totally engaged in a heated argument, acting like an olympian intellectual, when I am normally quite inarticulate and bungling in a thinking state.

I personally feel that this whole thinking thing is recursive...indiciative of a fall from nature's plan...a malfunction. We should do away with it completely. Whether you're an entrepeneur, a Renaissance Man, a war-mongering general, a gardener, a yogi master, a computer gamer, you know, whatever your thing is. Whatever games you choose to play in this life. Play them intensely.