Freedom Beyond Thought

By Jim Piekarski

This book is aimed at those interested in Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta and enlightenment, who have a serious desire to understand and realize their True Nature. It explores the characteristics and limits of thought and the ego. To realize one's True Nature, it is helpful to understand the ego and it's limitations and contrast this with the unbounded Buddha Nature. The main source of psychological difficulty is misunderstanding who we are. We mistakenly identify with the ego, which is a construction of thought, and which suffers from the same limitations of thought. The goal of this book is to help seekers clearly discriminate between what is ego and what is our True Essence or Buddha Nature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543990362

Book preview

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 9781543990362

Table of Contents

Chapter 1       Thought: Our Most Dangerous Tool

Chapter 2       Thought is Useful but Conditions Us

Chapter 3       Naming, Separation, and Wholeness

Chapter 4       Relativity and Duality

Chapter 5       Is Thought True?

Chapter 6       Thought’s Qualities

Chapter 7       Permanency, Stories, and Reification

Chapter 8       Self as Concept

Chapter 9       Concepts and Awareness

Chapter 10       Spiritual Techniques

Chapter 11       Purification

Chapter 12       The Sudden and Gradual Approaches

Chapter 13       Direct Realization of Awareness

Chapter 14       The Two Worlds

Foreword

I would like to thank the many spiritual teachers that have taught me in person, through their writings or through videos. It is extremely unlikely that I could have progressed this far on my spiritual journey without their help and clarification. I would also like to thank Cynthia Ten-Eyck for going over this manuscript and helping to make it more readable. I would also like to thank the committed group of people at Venice Mindfulness Meditation and Blue Lotus Meditation Center for dialoguing with me and helping me to refine my understanding.

Introduction

The problem of human existence has engaged philosophers and religious people for millennia. Volumes have been written about how to improve the human condition, whether these are self-help books, political tracts, or spiritual texts. Very few of these efforts address the basic problem of human existence. Why do we suffer? Why are we cruel, greedy, and uncaring? However, a growing movement in the world addresses this problem directly. After years of study, meditation, and contemplation many, including myself, have concluded that the problem lies in not knowing ourselves for who we actually are. Very few people have any inkling of their True Nature.

Finding our True Nature is the gateway to freedom. Once found, it is a never-ending source of joy and peace in our lives. It is also the basis of great love and wisdom. However, most people do not understand the importance of realizing their true Self. Historically, only great spiritual and intuitive people were aware of the importance of uncovering this gem hidden within themselves. People had little education, and most did not have access to guidance that could point their True Nature out to them. The challenges of just surviving were so constant that spending time exploring these questions seemed impossible. But times have changed. Many people are recognizing their True Nature, and our global society makes it much easier to access the teachings of these people.

There are two basic worlds of experience available to human beings. One is the world of thought, and the other is a world that is beyond thought and offers us true happiness. Historically, there have been numerous names for these two worlds. The thought world has been deemed maya by the Hindus because it is the world of illusion. They contrasted this with moksha, which means the liberation from illusion—enlightenment. Buddhists use the terms samsara, meaning delusion, and nirvana, meaning freedom from delusion. Some Christian philosophers contrast the animal soul with all its coarseness with the spiritual soul, our inherent connection to God. Other, more modern Christians refer to Christ consciousness as opposed to our normal, misguided consciousness. In modern terminology, we can name these two the worlds of thought and of awareness.

A general goal of this book is to translate historically profound spiritual teachings into language that is more in line with modern psychological and philosophical concepts. Hopefully, this will free the reader from terminology that is too foreign and from religious ideas that have no overlap with modern science.

The world of samsara or delusion is dependent on two factors. The first one is thought. There is a fundamental flaw in our relationship to thought that is responsible for our suffering and our lack of awareness. In the first part of the book we will explore how our limited understanding of our thinking process underlies our individual, social, and political problems.

In the second part of the book, we will see how our misunderstandings about thought give rise to the false self. Our mistaken assumption about who we are is the kingpin that keeps us from being happy and free of suffering.

The third part of the book focuses on our True Nature. It is challenging to discover our True Nature because all our habits of thinking point away from this realization. We are deeply conditioned by thought and its creation, the false self. Hopefully by exploring the reality behind the thought process and the false self, it will free the reader to see their own True Nature and realize the freedom that is the essence of every human being.

Chapter 1       Thought: Our Most Dangerous Tool

If you could only teach one thing: moving beyond thought, cessation of thought as the basis for your life.  Eckart Tolle in Becoming a Teacher of Presence, audio presentation.

The advent of toolmaking was a turning point in human evolution. Fashioning clubs, spears, pottery, and farming implements set humans on a new course of evolutionary experience. Ultimately the development of tools gave humans the capacity to spend less time on the onerous task of feeding and sheltering themselves. This tool-making capacity and the development of language are two of the ways that science distinguishes man from animals and humans from pre-humans.

Underlying our tool-making ability and language is our capacity to think. Making and using tools depends on our ability to discriminate among materials and imagine how they could be used. This capacity to think has become increasingly sophisticated over millennia; now we live in societies that would have been unimaginable to someone living two or three thousand years ago.

What defines a thing as a tool is its usefulness. If it is not useful, it is not a tool. With use comes the possibility of misuse, and every tool ever invented has the capacity to be misused.

The tool that is most useful and universal in our lives is thought. Thought is the ultra-tool—the most useful because it underlies the development of all other tools. Like all other tools, thought can be misused. Its capacity for misuse and its universality make it the most dangerous tool of all. The problems that stem from our misuse of thought may lead to our own extinction through war, climate change, overpopulation, or other means. Despite its creative and practical uses, danger lies in thought’s capacity to condition and mislead us. Because we are so easily awed by the products of our thinking, it’s easy for us to overlook the serious problems and limitations that come with its use. We think constantly throughout every day—a frequency of use far more than any other tool. Yet most people have never seriously evaluated their own thinking.

The household tool that leads to the greatest number of serious injuries is the table saw. Not a chain saw or a nail gun—tools that appear on the surface to be more dangerous. A table saw is basically a flat, metal table with a 10-inch saw blade sticking up from below its surface. It is designed to make fairly precise cuts in wooden boards. It is dangerous because to make precise cuts the user’s hands must be very close to the spinning blade. It is easy, in a moment of inattention, to suffer a serious injury. The table saw is analogous to our use of thought. It is more dangerous than it looks, and working so intimately with it increases our vulnerability to its dangers.

It is vital that we attend to thought and find its proper place as a tool. For most people thought has lost its proper place. It is no longer just a tool – it has become our master, and is directly implicated in all the suffering, confusion, and conflict of humankind. We can easily see the destructiveness of thought in the fields of religion and politics. Extreme ideological positions in these areas are responsible for millions of deaths per decade. Some notable examples of ideological extremes are: Pol Pot killing millions of his own people because he believed in the elimination of those who were intellectual or highly educated; Hitler killing millions he saw as racially impure; the Catholic Church torturing and killing thousands in the Inquisition who did not share their religious dogma. There are many examples from history, but all these examples have a common thread—people with power cherished their ideology more than they did human life.

Our misuse of thought on a personal level is one of the main causes of mental health problems. Psychiatric problems have distorted thinking as one of their major components. Even psychiatric diagnoses with a physiological basis exhibit symptoms of thought distortion.

One of the most helpful innovations in the field of psychotherapy is cognitive therapy. This therapy works by helping us question and change thoughts that are untrue or distorted. People who suffer from depression tend to have many negative beliefs about themselves, others, and life. Therapy focuses on recognizing and changing these beliefs. This can be as effective or more effective in relieving depression than medication. It is actually better than medication for most people, because it also teaches a valuable skill, and it frees people from reliance on medication with its side effects and expense.

Even more impressive than its impact on depression is cognitive therapy’s success with anxiety. Almost all anxiety is accompanied by catastrophic thinking about future events. Teaching people to recognize these thoughts, question their veracity, and ultimately change them can lead to surprisingly effective results in overcoming anxiety disorders.

In psychotherapy there is some recognition of how distorted thinking can wreak havoc with our mental health. This is not true in other areas like politics and religion, where there is less awareness of how dangerous ideological thinking can be. Distorted thinking can create serious difficulties in all areas of endeavor.

Because of its dangerousness, when you buy a table saw, it is accompanied by an owner’s manual. The manual orients you to the saw, its dimensions, its proper uses, and hazards to your safety. Shop classes in high school, technical training schools, and apprentice programs for budding carpenters can instill an understanding of the saw’s proper uses and hazards.

No manual exists for the tool of thought. There do exist, particularly in college, courses that teach logic, scientific inquiry, and abstract thinking. Although these teachings are important, they offer a limited understanding of how thought operates or its dangers. Most of us learn to think by learning from and copying others. We end up wielding the world’s most dangerous weapon with hardly any understanding of what we are doing. No wonder we are so easily manipulated by political and religious propaganda and by our own distorted thinking. It is impossible for us to find lasting happiness personally or socially without understanding thought and returning it to its proper place as a tool. Right now, unfortunately, thought too often acts as a tyrant.

Thought is an unusual tool because it is the only tool that we invest with belief. We believe our thoughts because we rarely take the time to question them. But the potential for thought to be misleading goes beyond the truth or falsity of any individual thought. Thought, in general, is seriously limited in its truth value. In the following chapters we will discuss how much thought can be considered to be true and how it falls short in expressing truth.

Problems and limitations of thought are not typically recognized in our culture unless the problem becomes extreme; for instance, we may diagnose someone with a thought disorder if they exhibit paranoia, or we may call a person who is unduly influenced by a social group brainwashed. In contrast, people are appreciated for their thoughtfulness or admired for being able to think things through. Being able to wield the tool of thought appropriately is indeed laudable, but many people lack this skill or only exhibit it occasionally.