You think with thought.
You always have. You read this sentence with thought. You consider what it means with thought. You judge whether the consideration is going well with thought.
The instrument cannot turn around and see itself.
U.G. used a line that sounded violent when he said it and sounds violent now.
Thought is your enemy.
He did not mean that thoughts were bad. He meant something more difficult.
He meant that the entire apparatus you are using to find your way out of suffering is the apparatus producing the suffering.
Not the content of the thoughts.
The fact that thinking is happening at all.
You will resist this.
The resistance will arrive as a thought. But thinking is what makes us human. But surely some thoughts are useful. But how would I plan, work, love, navigate the day.
Notice that the resistance is itself a demonstration.
The instrument defends itself.
It has to. It has nothing else to do.
Sit for a moment and try not to think.
You will find you cannot.
Even the attempt is a thought. The noticing of the attempt is a thought. The disappointment when you fail is a thought.
There is no exit door inside the room.
This is the wall U.G. spent his life pointing at.
He did not say the wall could be climbed. He did not say there was a hidden door. He did not say a practice would dissolve it.
He said the wall was the only honest fact, and that pretending otherwise was the spiritual marketplace.
The marketplace sells you methods for getting around the wall.
Meditate, and the thoughts will slow. Inquire, and the thinker will dissolve. Watch without judgment, and the watching will reveal what is prior to thought.
Each of these is a thought.
Each of them is the wall describing the wall, while claiming to be the door.
Mind is a myth.
That was another of his lines.
He did not mean there was no thinking. He meant there was no thing called mind that contained the thinking, no central self running the operation, no place where it all added up.
Just thoughts. Arising. Falling. With no one inside them.
You will hear this and ask, then who is having them.
The asking is the next thought. The wanting an answer is the next thought. The frustration that the answer does not come is the next thought.
You can ride the question for years.
He did. For forty.
What broke for him, if anything broke, was not an answer.
What broke was the believing that an answer was possible.
The believing was the engine.
The engine ran on the conviction that thinking could reach what thinking was looking for.
When the conviction failed, the engine stopped.
He did not stop it. It stopped.
You cannot do this.
You cannot decide to stop believing that thought can reach what thought is looking for. The deciding is the believing in a new costume.
There is nothing for you to do.
This is the part the marketplace cannot sell.
What is left, then.
The thoughts still come.
The body still functions. The day still happens. The tea is poured, the email answered, the face met across the table.
U.G. did all of this for forty more years after the engine stopped.
He just did not believe the thoughts anymore.
Believing them, in his framing, was the violence.
Believing that the thought I am tired was the report of an inner state. Believing that the thought I should do better was a message from a true self. Believing that the thought I am close to something was a signal from a path.
Each belief was the enemy.
Not because beliefs are evil. Because they are the mechanism by which thought claims to be more than thought.
The thinker is the thought.
This line is also in cluster I, drawn from Krishnamurti, the other one, the one U.G. rejected.
U.G. would have agreed with the line and refused the gentleness around it.
There is no thinker. There is only the thought. The thought is producing the appearance of a thinker so that there will be someone for the next thought to happen to.
The whole interior life is this trick.
A series of thoughts, each one producing the illusion of a self that the next one will arrive in.
You have called the series me for so long that you cannot hear how strange the claim is.
This is not a metaphor.
You can look right now.
Find the thinker. Not the thought about the thinker. The thinker itself, the one supposedly having the thoughts.
You will find more thoughts.
You will find a vague sense of being someone, which is a feeling, which is a thought.
You will not find a thinker.
The instrument cannot turn around and see itself.
It can only produce more of itself, while claiming to have found something.
This is the prison.
It is also why no practice can free you from it. Every practice is a maneuver of the prisoner.
The prisoner cannot vote themselves out of the prison.
What you can do, U.G. would say, is stop pretending the prison is anything else.
Not as a practice. As a noticing.
The pretending is what makes the prison seem like a path.
When the pretending stops, the prison is still there, but it is no longer dressed up as your liberation.
Whether anything changes after that is not for the essay to promise.
U.G. lived. He talked. He drank his tea. He insisted he had no message.
He was, by every account, a man.
He just was not the man he had spent the first forty-nine years thinking he was.
You are not the one you have been thinking you are either.
There is no one to be that one.
There is only the thinking, and the thinking is the enemy not because it is evil but because it has been pretending to be you.
When the pretending is seen, the thinking continues.
Nothing dramatic happens.
The thoughts keep coming, and there is simply no one inside them claiming to be hurt by them.
That is the most that can be honestly said.
It is less than you came for.
It is also the only thing the essay can offer that is not a lie.
Sources: U.G. Krishnamurti, Thought is Your Enemy, Mind is a Myth, The Mystique of Enlightenment.