When Thinking Reached Its Limit

 

2. When Thinking Reached Its Limit — 2022

From Searching for Answers to Investigating Silence

By 2022, the question that had emerged strongly in the previous year was still with me:

Who am I?

I had encountered many possible answers.

The Self.

Pure consciousness.

Awareness.

The witness.

Something beyond the body and mind.

Different teachers and traditions used different language, and I continued reading and exploring them.

But gradually I encountered a different problem.

Perhaps I was trying to solve a question about the mind entirely through the same mind.

The Investigator Is Part of the Problem

My natural tendency is analytical.

When I encounter a difficult problem, I examine it.

I divide it into smaller problems.

I compare possibilities.

I search for contradictions.

I try to construct a logically consistent explanation.

This approach works extraordinarily well in mathematics, science and engineering.

So naturally I applied it to myself.

Who am I?

I am not merely my body because I can observe the body.

Am I my thoughts?

But I can observe thoughts appearing and disappearing.

Am I my emotions?

Those change continuously too.

Am I memory?

Personality?

Consciousness?

The observer?

Each possible answer generated another question.

And something peculiar became apparent.

The instrument conducting the investigation was itself part of what was being investigated.

Thought was trying to understand the thinker.

An Infinite Regression

This began to resemble a recursive problem.

Suppose I say:

“I am observing my thoughts.”

Then who is this “I”?

Perhaps there is an observer behind thought.

But if I become aware of that observer, what is aware of the observer?

Do I now need another observer behind the first observer?

And another behind that?

The investigation can continue indefinitely.

My analytical mind could generate increasingly sophisticated models, but every model still existed as another thought.

Eventually, toward the end of 2022, I wrote:

“Intellectual mind can never find ‘who am I’... mathematically impossible. However, silent mind can.”

Today I would be more cautious about the second part of that statement.

Does silent mind really find who I am?

What exactly would “find” mean?

And who would be doing the finding?

Those questions came later.

But in 2022 this realization represented an important change in direction.

For the first time, I was seriously questioning whether more thinking could solve the problem.

Knowledge About Something Is Not the Thing

There is an obvious distinction that is surprisingly easy to miss.

Knowing everything about water is not the same as drinking water.

Reading about fear is not the same as observing fear while it is happening.

Studying descriptions of silence is not silence.

And knowing what Ramana Maharshi or Buddha or Krishnamurti said about consciousness does not mean that I have directly seen what they were describing.

This sounds simple.

But spiritually it has enormous consequences.

I could accumulate thousands of pages of knowledge about meditation while remaining almost completely unaware of what my own mind was doing from moment to moment.

I began to see that spiritual knowledge could itself become another form of mental activity.

The search for freedom from thought could become thousands of thoughts about freedom from thought.

Silence Became Interesting

This changed my relationship with silence.

Earlier, silence had been something desirable.

A quiet mind seemed peaceful.

Meditation could reduce mental noise.

But now silence began to have another meaning.

Could silence be a way of investigating?

Normally an event occurs and thought immediately enters.

Something is seen.

It is named.

Memory responds.

Comparison begins.

Judgment follows.

Like.

Dislike.

Good.

Bad.

Me.

Mine.

I want this.

I don't want this.

Within moments, the original event has become surrounded by psychological commentary.

What happens if that commentary becomes quiet?

Not forcibly suppressed.

Not defeated.

Simply quiet.

Can something then be seen more directly?

Not Stopping Thought by Force

There is an important difficulty here.

The moment I say:

“I must stop thinking,”

another thought has already appeared.

And that thought has appointed itself the controller of all the other thoughts.

One part of the mind is now fighting another part of the mind.

That can create temporary concentration.

It can also create conflict.

The question therefore gradually became subtler.

Instead of:

How can I force the mind to become silent?

I became interested in:

What happens when thought naturally becomes quiet?

Could I simply notice thoughts without following every one of them?

Could awareness itself change the movement of thought?

I did not yet have a complete answer.

But the direction of the investigation was changing.

Self-Inquiry Changed Meaning

“Who am I?” initially sounded like a question requiring an answer.

Perhaps:

I am consciousness.

Or:

I am the Self.

Or:

I am awareness.

But another possibility began emerging.

Perhaps “Who am I?” was not meant to be answered with another sentence.

Perhaps the value of the question was in what happened when I looked.

A thought appears.

Is that me?

A memory appears.

Is that me?

An emotion appears.

Is that me?

A sensation appears.

Is that me?

Then the thought appears:

“I am observing all these.”

Is that me?

Instead of accepting the first available spiritual answer, inquiry could continue.

At this stage I still believed that perhaps somewhere behind all these changing phenomena I would discover something fundamental.

The idea of a deeper Self remained attractive to me.

But the method was becoming more experiential.

The Role of Teachers Began to Change

I continued reading spiritual teachers.

They remained important.

But slowly their role began changing.

Previously I was often looking to them for answers.

Increasingly I began treating their words as suggestions for experiments.

If Krishnamurti said to observe without judgment:

Can I actually do that?

If Ramana asked “Who am I?”:

What happens if I really investigate it rather than repeat an answer?

If meditation traditions spoke about silence:

What is silence in my own direct experience?

This was a small but important shift:

Teaching → hypothesis → investigation.

A teacher could point somewhere.

But I had to look.

The Analytical Mind Was Not the Enemy

It would be easy to interpret this period as a rejection of intellect.

That was not what happened.

My analytical mind had brought me to the boundary.

In fact, analysis itself helped reveal its own limitation.

Reason could identify contradictions.

It could detect assumptions.

It could compare philosophical claims.

It could ask whether an explanation actually followed from an experience.

But perhaps thought could not step outside itself and discover some final thinker standing behind thought.

The analytical mind therefore remained valuable.

It simply might not be the only instrument available.

That realization became particularly important for someone like me because analysis had been one of my strongest tools throughout life.

I was beginning to experiment with another tool:

silent observation.

A New Kind of Investigation

Something fundamental had therefore changed between the beginning of my journey and the end of 2022.

Initially my movement was roughly:

Question → search → teaching → explanation.

Now another possibility was appearing:

Question → silence → observation → remain with what is actually seen.

This did not immediately give me answers.

In some ways it did the opposite.

Questions became more open.

But I was beginning to become less uncomfortable with that.

Perhaps uncertainty was not necessarily ignorance.

Sometimes prematurely answering a question prevents deeper investigation.

Where 2022 Left Me

At the end of 2022 I had certainly not solved the question:

Who am I?

But my relationship with the question had changed.

I was becoming less interested in finding the right sentence.

I was becoming more interested in observing the machinery that produced sentences.

Thought.

Memory.

Perception.

Interpretation.

The sense of an observer.

And the silence that sometimes appeared when this machinery became quiet.

I still carried many assumptions from the spiritual traditions I had studied.

I still suspected that silence might reveal some deeper reality.

I still thought there might be something fundamental behind the changing mind.

Those assumptions would themselves eventually have to be investigated.

But first something else was about to become very important.

If the mind participates in constructing everything I experience, then:

How much of the world I experience is the world itself, and how much is created by the mind?

That question would become central to my investigation in 2023.

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Next: The Mind-Created Universe — 2023

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