Not A Thing, Not Not-A-Thing
I loved your piece on Form and Emptiness. It is clear and compelling.
Last year I published a short book — designed for newer meditators.
“Don’t Wake Up! It Will Ruin Everything” was crafted with gentle irony to help introduce younger meditators to concepts like Impermanence and Karma. And the book even has cartoons. The sixth and final chapter of the book engages with the question of what is Awake Mind. I was reminded of that chapter as I read Form and Emptiness. For fun and in case anyone wants a glimpse…that sample is included below. “Don’t Wake Up! It Will Ruin Everything” can be found in print and e-formats on Amazon.
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Awake Mind
If you want to stay asleep, to continue enjoying your dreams, then do everything you can to avoid waking up your mind. You know what your thoughts and memories are. They are right. Your thoughts completely and accurately reflect reality. Your memory is accurate and beyond question. Thinking about your mind like it was a computer is a useful metaphor even though your mind is not actually like a computer and nothing is hardwired there or stored as electrical charges in the same way computer data is.
Your mind is a thing. It holds thoughts and memories like data. You think about something and find it in your mind. You search your memories and find a totally accurate reflection of what happened. These thoughts and memories are available to you, just like the data on your computer is available to you whenever you want. When you don’t want a memory, it just goes back to the data bank and stays there. To use an even older metaphor, your memory waits, like a library book waiting on a shelf, for you to reopen it sometime in the future. Your memory, like a library book always stays the same. Recalling and repeating the memory has no effect on it.
Change only happens when new and better information is added. It’s like an upgrade to my computer’s operating system or a new edition of a familiar book in the library. Change in my mind, my thoughts, my opinions, or my memory is never about things being different than they were before. To use a familiar example, I’ve always preferred the intensity of chocolate to other flavors of ice cream. My brief dalliance with the subtlety of lemon sorbet was a mistake that I soon corrected. Chocolate is my favorite. Just as my ice cream flavor has not changed, neither have my thoughts about life, my political opinions, or my childhood memories.
It’s not important that no one has ever been able to define or adequately explain mind. No one I know denies having a mind. That should be good enough. Why worry that this experience called mind appears to constantly change like the weather? Is it important that sometimes my thoughts are peaceful and then at other times I fly off into a rant or rage? Why should what happens with my senses have any important effect on mind. Twelve hours of playing Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare has nothing to do with my feeling simultaneously drained of energy and ready to rage. My mind and my senses have nothing to do with each other. Mind is its own thing and that thing is at the essence of me.

A sixth, dangerous truth to be understood upon awakening is that having a mind is more of an act than a thing. In fact Mind is not a thing. It is an open, dynamic process.
One of the dangers of practicing meditation is that we begin to notice that our thoughts, memories, and emotions are constantly changing. One part of meditating is to become aware of this process. We notice that a thought about when meditation will be over and we can have lunch, seemingly from nowhere. This waiting-for-lunch-thought hangs out for a while and then is replaced by the thought of what we will have for lunch. The menu thought is then replaced by our memory of being disappointed by what we had for breakfast. This process of thoughts flows endlessly by as we meditate and observe. It is like an unending river. We sit and watch the waters of thought, memory, emotion, and sensation flow by. The waters are constantly changing but we always just call them river. Equally we call the flow of thought-memory-emotion-sensation mind.
A second dangerous insight that comes from meditating is that we might begin to think about water pollution in the river of our thoughts, feelings, opinions and sensation. Mind doesn’t just float away. It continues to flow past us like a river that moves in a great circle. Whatever we throw into our minds eventually flows past again in one form or another. If our mind at all resembles a computer, then this acronym from the earliest days of modern programming applies: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. When we practice thinking thoughts of hatred and anger, our mind grows constantly more angry. If we practice being calm and kind, peace grows in our mind.
The most dangerous insight that comes from meditating is that we might notice that there is brightness to being awake. We have the capability to know, to sense, to remember, to dream. This bright capability is all around, beneath, beyond the mere content of our thoughts. We might begin to think that having a mind is more about this capability than it is about the ever changing content of our thoughts, memories, and opinions.
If you want to keep it simple and be at ease, if you don’t want to have to take responsibility for your mind or have a sharper understanding of what mind is, avoid waking up. Do not meditate. Meditation is somewhat like system maintenance on your personal hard-drive. Paying attention to how your senses impact mind is too much work. Noticing that every thought you ever had before this one has disappeared, well that’s simply depressing. It is much better to just think of mind as a computer with the best possible programs. You can upgrade when you want to. There is never a need to wake up, clean the cache, delete duplicate or outdated programs, or remove cookies. Everything is fine. Never change your password. Just click on unearned wealth + happiness and everything will be perfect.
