On Thinking

What a reflexive problem it is to talk or think about thinking where the very mechanism of investigation is thinking itself. Can thought investigate itself? In any investigation there will be a subject and an object. The subject carries out the investigation on the object. Usually there is a clear demarcation or separation between the two. This independence between the subject and the object allows the subject to operate upon the object in a non self referential manner. This allows for objectivity. Yes, subjectivity creeps in due to identification with the object in any manner. Here identification need not be positive but can have shades ranging from pure hatred to intense liking. This subjectivity is prejudice. Prejudice is conclusion without information or investigation. This is the realm of like and dislike, love and hate, seeking and avoiding, egress and ingress. This is conditioning. Conditioning inherited perhaps genetically. I am not sure. There is a huge nature versus nurture debate in the field of psychology. The nature school of thought believes that a child is born with certain temperament, a certain personality, certain likes and dislikes all of which he is predisposed to right from the moment of birth. The school of nurture debates that a child is a clean slate and his early interaction with mother, father and other care givers where he or she is passionately loved and taken care of or in a most horrifying specter imaginable is ignored, neglected, abused by its very parents. A precious little living thing struggling for survival in an inimical environment of the making of the very forces that engendered it. The nurture school further discredits the nature school by contending that this condition occurs in the very first few days and months of an infant's life thus reducing the time frame surmised that is enough to condition the child. This short time period in which the conditioning can take place could be seen as genetic traits by the uninitiated is their argument. This nature versus nurture debate is just a transformation of the religious debate between reincarnation and lack thereof. Because if one investigates where temperament in a child would come from one hypothesizes previous lives, samskaras and karma. Some argue that conditioning is passed on through genes but then the honest question is how come the occurrence of children with personality traits diametrically opposed to their parents' is statistically very high to be dismissed as mere chance. But we digress, for matter at hand, we can state with confidence that this conditioning exists. How does this conditioning manifest itself? This conditioning manifests itself as thought - whether unconscious or conscious. Likes, dislikes, love, hate all being functions of thought.

This conditioning prevents us from purely looking at the object as it is. Our conditioning imbues the object with characteristics it does not inherently possess. Since the thought about the object is conditioned it is incapable of looking at the object as it is. Now, the thought can say that I am conditioned and try to move away from that conditioning but that movement of thought to a different place is within the realm of conditioning because it has to move some place. I will not be conditioned itself is a conditioned state because you will create a map or a territory of your conditioning and try to step out of it. But this map or territory itself is a projection of your own conditioning.

So can thought look at itself unconditionally and drop the conditioning? No, it is the same movement. It is still a movement within the field of thought.

But there is a state of mind beyond thought where thought comes to naught and nature reveals itself. It's been like this for eternity but we just could not look.