VBT – Meditation 4.3
Nature Of Thought
In the Pause there are No Thoughts, only Emptiness.
So if we understand the Nature Of Thought it will be easy for us to understand Pause.
Your thoughts have no roots; they have no home, just like clouds they wander. So you need not fight them, you need not be against them, you need not even try to stop thought.
This should become a deep understanding in you because whenever a person becomes interested in meditation, he starts trying to stop thinking. And if you try to stop thoughts they will never be stopped because the very effort to stop is a thought, the very effort to meditate is a thought, the very effort to attain buddhahood is a thought. And how can you stop one thought from another thought? How can you stop your mind by creating another mind? Then you will be clinging to the other. And this will go on and on, ad nauseam; then there is no end to it.
Don’t fight – because who will fight? Who are you? Just a thought, so don’t make yourself a battleground of one thought fighting another. Rather, be a witness, just watching thoughts floating. They stop but not by your stopping. They stop by your becoming more aware, not by any effort on your part to stop them. No, they never stop, they resist. Try and you will find out; try to stop a thought and the thought will persist. Thoughts are very stubborn, adamant; they are hatha yogis, they persist. You throw them out and they will come back a million and one times. You will get tired, but they will not get tired.
When thoughts cease, who are you? An utter emptiness, nothingness, no-thingness. It is because of this that Buddha has used a strange word. Nobody has ever done such a concept before, or since. The mystics have always used the word “self” for the interior-most core of your being. Buddha uses the word “no-self.” And I perfectly agree with him. He is far more accurate, closer to truth. To use the word “self” – even if you use it with a capital “S,” does not make much difference. It continues to give you the sense of the ego. And with a capital “S,” it may give you an even bigger ego.
Buddha does not use the words atma, atta – “self”. He uses just the opposite words: “no-self” – anatma, anatta. He says that when mind ceases, there is no self left. You have become universal, you have overflowed the boundaries of the ego. You are pure space, uncontaminated by anything. You are just a mirror reflecting nothing.
Only nothingness can be infinite; somethingness is bound to be finite. Only out of nothingness is an infinite expanse of life, existence, possible – not out of somethingness. God is not somebody: He is nobody or, more correctly, nobodiness. God is not something: he is nothing or, even more correctly, no-thingness. He is a creative void.
Never for a single moment think that nothingness is a negative state, an absence, no. Nothingness is simply no-thingness. Things disappear, only the ultimate substance remains. Forms disappear, only the formless remains. Definitions disappear, the undefined remains.
The awakening of a buddha is total. In that total awakening there is a luminous awareness surrounded by a positive nothingness. It is not empty, it is overfull. Things have disappeared… and what has remained is inexpressible. We try to express it as blissfulness, as ecstasy, as eternal joy, but these are just faraway echoes of the real thing.
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