How to meet the question of unthinkable life?

Can there be life without thoughts?

Can it happen practically, not in a way of technique, not as an experience?

It’s a very old question. Old enough to build around it endless knowledge, strings of thoughts. The thoughts that describe the thoughtless and the question remains. You know it because you don’t need to look far. Wherever you are, whatever you do or don’t do, thoughts are there with you.

Here and there, thoughts bring up the question of a thoughtless life. Thought imagines this possibility, draws it in the mind, puts a tag to it, chases it, sees that it’s too unattainable, drops it, and goes back to the one thing it knows to do so well: thinking.

And you, I, meet that question without a question. The verbal question, “Can there be life without thoughts?”, is a bubble; it’s a box. To meet it without that bubble, just the air within, to let it explode and stay untouched. Do it and see.

The question is very clear. It’s also very relevant, and some will say most crucial for one’s life because surely all, without exception, suffering is the product of thinking. Unmet desires, chasing fears, all are made by the mechanism of imagination, of thinking.

When you look at the question with great honesty and simplicity, meaning very directly, you cannot move because the question presents the end.

A very, at first, delicate feeling, that may become more present and more concrete starts to point to the possibility that you, I, are not different from thoughts. You are made of the same fabric; you are the product of thoughts; you, as you know yourself, the “me”, the “I”, you.

And I say “feeling” knowing that it can be heard or understood as a reaction that is emotional or that is somewhat exciting or frightening, but none of that has to do with this feeling. When anything elusive is revealed as such, that feeling is there. It has to do with relief; you don’t need to pretend; you don’t need to sustain faked understanding. You can meet the thing directly.

And the way you meet such a question, “Can there be an unthinkable life?”, is that you cannot move in the mind if thoughts are watched carefully, and also if you do not participate in the exploration of thoughts.

You are there, watching, questioning, but you do not contribute to this. Your whole interest is to see what is there, what is here. And you see that the question of the unthinkable is met by thoughts, and the movement is to invent an answer to it, but your interest is in truth, not in invention. Your interest is in what is, not in what you want or in avoiding what you don’t want.

So that feeling consumes you. It satisfies, even though it’s very delicate, very unsensed, and very ‘from a far’, you might say. It’s far more authentic than the ridiculous ideas of thoughts. And it consumes you.

You allow it to speak, but a feeling such as that doesn’t speak with words. It plays a very delicate melody on the strings of your heart. And all of this, of course, is a very, very childish description. But maybe it will encourage you to drop all these nonsense attempts to unthink thought.

And as a thinker, which you are 24-7, meet the question of unthinkable life and look at it with the honesty that is kept only for that question. Because this honesty expects nothing.

Let the feeling consume you to the point of total surrender, but not surrender to a thought.

The thought, you, I, surrenders to the softness of the unthinkable that doesn’t speak with words.