What’s the difference —Thinking and Knowing?

Please describe the taste of an orange, the smell of rotting flesh, the feel of a feather brushing your skin, what fear looks like, the experience of giving birth, or the sound of rushing water. And use words for these descriptions. 

Do the words capture each of these experiences? Not even close, yet undoubtedly you know all of these experientially. Nothing in life, as experienced, is the same as how these same experiences are described. Our thoughts and words are always abstractions representing something but not the thing itself. You wouldn’t be satisfied eating an ephemeral thought of an orange, or stuffing a piece of paper into your mouth upon which you wrote the word “orange.” Ideas and expressions about experiences, as good as the words can ever be, are poor and unsatisfying substitutes for something real.

A long time ago a Chinese sage by the name of Lao Tzu said in The Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things. Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.”

“The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.” What can’t ever be named is beyond language and is itself the source of everything. What might this unnamed Tao be? Think clearly about non-thought. If you can grasp it then it won’t be it. A thought called “non-thought” is conceptual and remains just another thought. Grasping is about intellectual understanding but knowing is experiential. To know the one who detects either thought or the absence is to truly know yourself—The nameless.

When enough is enough? And the tragedy of perfection.

The surface and the deep

The idea of life as a journey has merit and deserves thoughtful consideration. A journey begins and proceeds step by step: one step begins, ends, and is followed by the next, which likewise leads to the next until the journey ends. 

Each moment proceeds in the same fashion. With foresight, patience, and endurance achievement is possible. The great tragedy is expecting perfection with each and every step. In a way each step is perfect; it is enough (for that moment).

The Buddha said, “There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.”  The starting has much to say about the motivation to go at all. Many have no hope. Others become complacent with their bird in hand. Some expect magic of the divine, and still, others lack confidence and fear the risk of the unknown.

It is indeed somewhat terrifying to leap into the unknown when all seems well; when we have ours and others don’t. It is human nature (unfortunately) to take the unexpected treasure we’ve found and run, leaving others to find their own. However, if we are the one who lives in misery and have not yet found that treasure, the story is different. Then the motivation changes from satisfaction to a desire for the hidden treasure others have found, and we have not. 

For most of human history the masses have lived in misery without ever having leaped into the great sea of the unknown; the sea where “things” morph into “no-things:” the only realm where true satisfaction exists, ultimate wisdom and truth reside. The two realms of things and no-things coexist, one upon the other, yet the misery of conditional life remains the province of the known, where truth is a variable bouncing like a ball on the waves of that great ocean. Beneath; deep beneath the waves of adversity is the calm, the tranquil, the root of all that exists above.

“All mortal things have a beginning, and an ending.” Each step, each moment, every-thing; All things are enough; all things are perfect, and yet all things exist together, resting upon the deep of a nothing, which is no mere nothing; It is everything.

Stuff

To a significant extent, our lives have become defined by “stuff.” The presumption is that the more stuff we possess, the better off we are. That presumption compels us to spend years and vast amounts of money preparing to one day become sufficiently prosperous to buy lots more stuff. 

For some, this day comes, we buy more stuff and discover that the stuff we valued from a distance does not deliver what we anticipated. But like a poker game, we reason that we have too much invested in withdrawing from the game. If our lives are not defined by our acquisitions, what else might work? We don’t know. 

By the time we reach this imaginary pot of gold (and discover the non-pay off), we may think it is too late to change course, so we hunker down and accept a life of emptiness which we try to fill up with minutia, trying desperately to convince ourselves that the diminishing value of our stuff is good enough.

The Buddhist perspective on this dilemma is instructive and begins by understanding the reasons for this compulsive rush to oblivion. The quest to fathom the basis of this flaw starts with recognizing both the nature of stuff and the source from which it arises. “Stuff” could be called “things.” If you look up the definition, you will learn that a thing is an object, an entity, something abstract, or an artifact. In other words, stuff or a thing is something, which can be perceived and measured. It appears to be concrete and containing inherently self-sufficient attributes. And this being the case, we imagine that we can accumulate and retain things, which will bring meaning into our lives.

However, we soon learn that things don’t last, and even if they would, we become disenchanted and bored. So we must constantly upgrade to the new and improved version, which must then once again be upgraded. Why? Because, we reason, surely, the next version will fill the emptiness. The old stuff didn’t, but surely the new stuff will. 

The Buddhist solution is to learn from this pattern of despair, not by repeating the same losing behavior but rather by understanding the difference between things and no-things. Anything and everything must have a source to exist at all. 

Ordinarily, when we contemplate the idea of “nothing,” we think of non-existence. However, there is another way of considering “nothing”—no-thing (not a thing; not an object; not fleeting). In other words, the opposite of objective: lasting and substantial.
And what might be non-objective, lasting, and substantial? If we can fathom this, perhaps we can change our losing behavior and begin building a life of meaning rather than despair and pretense. 

Curiously, our own language points to the solution. In grammar school, we learn the difference between a subject and an object. “I see you” implies there is a subject “I,” which sees “you,” an object. However, the conundrum of that statement is that the objective part of a person is the same thing as the subjective part. But what we learn in living is that the objective part of us, just like the objective part of anything, constantly changes, gets decrepit, and erodes. 

Only we can’t trade in our objective body for a new and improved model. And the flip side of this awareness is that the subjective side of us never ages; it lasts and is substantial, yet remains imperceptible. Are we to conclude that our true, substantial nature, albeit unseen, doesn’t exist? Such a notion is ludicrous. We have become lured into an illogical notion that life is singularly defined by stuff (including our objective nature), which constantly passes away yet ignore the non-objective source from which the stuff arises.