Thoughtlessness and Fear
The thinker thinks his thoughts through habit, through repetition, through copying, which brings ignorance and sorrow. Is not habit thoughtlessness? Awareness creates order, but it never creates habit. Settled tendencies only bring about thoughtlessness. Why is one thoughtless? Because to think is painful, it creates disturbances, it brings opposition, it may cause one’s actions to go contrary to the established pattern. To think-feel extensionally, to become choicelessly aware may lead to unknown depths, and the mind rebels against the unknown; so it moves from the known to the known, from habit to habit, from pattern to pattern. Such a mind never abandons the known to discover the unknown. Realizing the pain of thought, the thinker becomes thoughtless through copying, through habit; being afraid to think, he creates patterns of thoughtlessness. As the thinker is afraid, his actions are born of fear, and then he regards his actions and tries to change them. The thinker is afraid of his own creations; but the deed is the doer, so the thinker is afraid of himself. The thinker is fear itself; the thinker is the cause of ignorance, of sorrow. The thinker may divide himself into many categories of thought, but the thought is still the thinker. The thinker and his efforts to be, to become, are the very cause of conflict and confusion.