The Parable of the Thinker, Part 1

My soul is feasted as with marrow and fat, and my mouth praises thee with joyful lips, when I think of thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the watches of the night; for thou hast been my help, and in the shadow of thy wings I sing for joy.

-   Psalms 63:5-7

 

For as long as he could remember, James knew himself to be a thinker.

 

When he was a tiny child, James' parents thought he had a problem. They thought he couldn't stay focused, but the truth of it was that James was very focused. In fact, James had an incredible knack for being able to hold his thoughts solely on whatever he wanted. He never told anyone else about this skill. After all, what business was it of theirs?

 

He made sure that no one heard him when, as a toddler, he declared, "I am a thinker!"

 

James found that the more he thought just about one thing the more the rest of the world faded into the background. He could still hear and see and feel everything around him but that all became secondary to the object of his thoughts. The longer he concentrated on whatever he wanted the more he could disappear into the mental version of it. The world around him became less and less real while the world of his thoughts became more real.

 

James' mother took him to a doctor. "This boy has an attention deficit disorder," said the man. "His mind always wanders. He can't concentrate."

 

James heard him speaking but he didn't pay much attention. He was thinking about ice cream. In fact, he had been thinking about ice cream for several hours. The man's voice annoyed him somewhat but it was way off in the background somewhere and, ultimately, of little concern.

 

Ice cream, however, was everywhere.

 

One day, in the solitude of his bedroom, James proclaimed, "It is especially good to think about things." That very same day, James went to school and the teacher asked him a question but James did not know the answer.

James was thinking about tigers.

 

"You have to pay attention!" said the teacher. "Don't you want to do well in school? How will you ever get a job when you grow up?"

 

All James heard was the roar of the Tiger as it hurtled over him and pounced on the teacher.

 

Years went quickly by as James thought about things. In fact, the passing of time would become very distorted when he was engrossed in thought.  Minutes became hours, hours became days, days became weeks. "Time flies when you're having fun," he had heard someone once say.

 

Later in his life people tried to teach him all sorts of things like math, and history, and science. It was no use though; by this time, James had practiced a few basic expressions that made those around him just leave him alone.

 

"He's not very bright," they would occasionally say.

 

James heard them but didn't care. He was thinking about girls.

 

He thought about girls for a long long time. He didn't try to actually meet any girls, or talk to them. He just thought about them.

 

Some girls would say, "He's very quiet...and strange." Occasionally a few would even try to talk to him but James found he didn't like them very much. They wanted him to pay too much attention to them. They wanted to decide what he thought about. They actually wanted him to just think about them. This was definitely not something James wanted to do.

 

As he went to bed he would whisper, "It is good to control one's thoughts."

 

One day, though, James happened to hear something that sparked his curiosity. In class the teacher asked a girl who sat next to him a question. She stared blankly back at the teacher and said, "I'm sorry, I was thinking about something else."

 

James began to watch this girl and noticed that she was rarely paying attention to the world around her.

 

"Perhaps she is like me," he thought.

 

Her name was Joanna and, as it turned out, she was very much like James. She too preferred to think about things other than what was going on in the world around. James observed her for quite some time until finally he was satisfied that she was indeed like him.

 

"I will think about Joanna," he decided triumphantly.

 

Very soon he found himself thinking about her quite a lot indeed. In fact, she became the only thought that completely filled his mind, the single thought that took over and became everything inside of him. Quite simply, he couldn't stop thinking about her.

 

One day he worked up his nerve and spoke to her. She was aloof and non-responsive but James was persistent and eventually he convinced her that they were the same.

 

Much to James' joy, they began to date and, for a while, James was very happy and spent all day, every day, thinking about Joanna. He thought about what she would like, about what would make her happy, about what he could do for her. He honestly cared about nothing else in the world. She, in turn, thought about him as well. Finally, he concluded, he had found something worth thinking about in the real world.

 

Thinking about another person made James very content and happy.

 

James realized something else as well though, something he found very curious indeed and in the silence of his bedroom, when everyone else in the house was fast asleep, he spoke out loud. "Thinking by myself is good, but sharing my thoughts with someone else is even better!"

 

Sometimes, James even wished he could get directly inside of Joanna's mind, where he could see her thoughts firsthand, and actually become part of her thinking itself. How wonderfully intimate that would be!

 

Then, one day, Joanna informed James she had decided that they should break up. She told him, "I've been thinking about someone else."

 

James was devastated.

 

"How can you be so cold and indifferent?" he asked. "I thought I meant something to you?" Even as he finished his sentence he could see that Joanna was already far away in her mind, thinking about some stranger, or perhaps some exotic foreign place...or ice cream.

 

Although he tried very hard for quite some time, no matter what he did, he could not get Joanna to think about him anymore. Eventually he had to give up. He still thought about her but he knew she was not thinking about him. James spent many hours wishing he could somehow make Joanna think about him again.

 

"I cannot control Joanna's thoughts," he finally had to admit to himself.  "Having someone think about me felt wonderful, but having someone stop thinking about me and forget me feels horrible. Even if I could make Joanna think about me again though, it wouldn't be the same. She'd have to want to think about me of her own free will. Otherwise, what would be the point? From now on, I will only be concerned with my own thoughts since those are the only thoughts I can control."

 

This plan made him feel better, like he was once again in charge of things, but as time went by, he was shocked to find that his wonderful concentration seemed to be deteriorating. Try as he might, the thought of Joanna always returned and began to crowd out other thoughts. If he thought of a baseball game, Joanna would be pitching. If he thought of a tiger, Joanna would show up to hunt it. If he thought of ice cream, it would taste like Joanna had tasted when he'd kissed her. Constantly, at all times and on all days, he struggled with his thoughts but the idea of Joanna, somewhere out there, not thinking about him, just wouldn't go away. The strain began to take its toll on James.

 

"Maybe I have been wasting my time all along," he said one day. "Perhaps it is time to live in the real world. At least out there it is highly unlikely that I will ever see Joanna again."

 

This was, in fact, true because Joanna had already moved very far away from where James lived.

 

"If she has taken up residence in my mind," he concluded, "then I must move out here into the world!"

 

So, for the first time in his life, James began to pay strict attention to the world around him. This led James to think, also for the first time, about his career (or lack thereof). "I must make something of myself...but what can I do?" he asked himself. "What am I good at?"

 

The truth was that James was not very good at anything in particular...except thinking. That's all he had ever done. He was a very talented thinker but, no matter how hard he looked, he could not find an employer looking precisely for this skill.

 

"I'm an excellent thinker," he would tell them in his interviews.

 

"Yes, but what kind of experience do you have?" they would answer.

 

James quickly became discouraged and his gift for thinking started to slip more and more out of his control. Although he still thought about Joanna, he now also began to think about another thing that he had never really thought about before. He now thought about the past.

 

"Why did I waste all that time thinking about ice cream?" he would ask himself late at night. "Why didn't I pay attention to what everyone was trying to teach me?"

 

When he had thought about ice cream as a child he could practically taste it in his mouth. Thinking about the past was similar in that it too seemed very real to him, but he couldn't control it. The past was already over; it was decided. He could review it but he couldn't change it to his liking. He could eat any flavor of ice cream he wanted in his mind, but he still couldn't go back and change the past. His thoughts of the past were definitely not under his control.

 

He tried thinking about the future instead and although he could craft his thoughts about this to some degree, he found that it offered him no real comfort. Maybe if he had the same kind of control he once had over his thoughts it might have worked but now the future, with its limitless possibilities, only caused him anxiety. All his speculations would quickly become tainted with encounters with Joanna or more failed interviews. It now seemed that since he had begun to live in the external world, his mind intended to make it very clear to him that he did not have control over the future either.

 

"Not having control is very bad," he thought grimacing, "but thinking about the fact that I have no control is even worse." That was how James began what would turn out to be the worst train of thought he had ever initiated. Without realizing the danger he began to think about his own thinking.

 

Here's how it happened:

 

He thought, "I hate the things I thought to do in the past."

 

Another thought quickly followed.

 

"I hate the way I have always been thinking."

 

And finally he simply thought, "I hate thinking."

 

This made James feel very sad, although he did not really understand why. You see, without knowing it James had gotten himself into a serious pickle. As a tiny child he had known he was a thinker. Later on, he told himself that thinking itself was good...especially good. To make matters worse, he had then concluded that controlling his own thoughts was the best thing to do. Now, he was deciding that he hated thinking and consequently James began to hate himself. He didn't specifically think, "I hate myself", but even though he was unaware of the underlying chain of connection, the connection was most assuredly there.

 

As his depression worsened he began to search for someone to blame.

 

"I wasn't born this way!" he thought. "Who gave me the idea that I was a thinker in the first place? Who made me like this?"

 

First, James began to feel angry toward his parents. Surely they'd had something to do with the development of his personality. Why hadn't they stepped in and done something to help him way back when he was a tiny child? Hadn't they seen what was happening? Then James remembered how he had never told anyone about his thinking, how he had purposefully developed ways to hide what was truly going on in his mind, and how his mother had taken him to the doctor. Yes, James could clearly see that his parents were not to blame. He had done everything possible to hide his true condition from them.

 

Next, James considered all the teachers he had ever had. Shouldn't they have been able to advise him? Shouldn't they have been able to see that he was getting himself into trouble?

 

"Someone must have seen what was happening," he thought.

 

This didn't work either. James now remembered all the people who had tried to get him to think about his career. He had never listened to any of them.

 

Of course, James also thought about Joanna.

 

"If Joanna hadn't left me I would still be happy," he thought. "I would be happy thinking about her and none of these other thoughts would be plaguing me!"

 

This strategy didn't work very well either because James could now see how tenuous his dependency on Joanna had been. Anything could have happened to separate them. Perhaps if Joanna had stayed he would have been happy for a little while longer but it was inevitable that it would have ended at some point and he'd be in the same fix. He was at a loss.

 

"Something is definitely not right anymore," James thought with disgust, "and nothing seems to be helping. How can I get everything to come out for my good?"

 

He thought some more.

 

"If only I had never met Joanna at all. I was always happy before she came into the picture. I hate her for coming into my life. It was because of her that the way I think changed in the first place. I wish she had just left me alone!"

 

Even this thought failed to help James feel better. Even if it was true he knew that he was the one who had approached Joanna in the first place. She hadn't been interested in him but he'd kept pursuing her until she'd relented. Surely, it was all his own fault. He was to blame for initiating the events that changed his way of thinking. That was the only real problem. It wasn't anything in the world around him. It was him. It was his very mind that had been infected somehow. He wanted nothing more than to cease thinking entirely.

 

James began to investigate the world around him for help.

 

"There has to be someone out there somewhere who feels like I do," he thought, "someone who can understand what I am going through."

 

He tried to explain his thinking problem to a few people but they didn't seem to really understand.

 

"You're still thinking about Joanna," they would say. "You need to move on. You've got to get your mind on other things."

 

"This isn't even about Joanna!" James would protest. "It's me now. I'm different somehow. Getting my mind on other things is precisely the problem. I don't want my mind to be on anything at all!"

 

This kind of talk seemed to greatly bother the few people James thought he could talk to and they didn't want to discuss it anymore. He could tell they thought he meant he wanted to die. James quickly gave up on explaining his problem to the people he knew.

 

James began to read a lot, partly to try to find an answer to his problem and partly to escape the depressing thoughts that continued to surface in his mind. By this point, it seemed he needed to bombard himself with constant stimuli in order to control the subjects of his thoughts at all. He was never happy. He jumped from subject to subject in his mind, book to television to book to worrying about not having a job, back to television, on and on, always searching for something new to think about, something that might make him feel better. Things were indeed very different from when he had been a young child and had been able to focus his mind so easily.

 

This sort of struggle continued for a relatively long time until, one day, James gave up trying to shift blame or divert his attention endlessly from one topic to the next. Finally he just surrendered.

 

"I'm done," he thought quite simply one day upon waking from sleep. "I give up. I have nothing left to try."

 

Oddly this thought made James feel happy. It seemed like it should have made him even sadder but it didn't. It was nice to finally stop struggling. James sat very still in the silence of his room and took a deep breath.

 

Next to his bed was a pile of books someone had given him. Looking around his quiet bedroom now he happened to notice the top book. The title of it caught his attention.

 

Nothing Works

 

He picked it up and read the blurb on the back. The book was about meditation. The subject matter seemed appropriate and James found the author's style quite agreeable. The premise of the book ran something like this: the way to happiness is to practice focusing your mind solely on one thing until you gain mastery over your thoughts. Then your thoughts can then be directed at nothingness. Eventually, by meditating on nothingness, one will find true freedom from all the suffering and misery of life.

 

It seemed like a good idea to James.

 

In fact, it seemed like the very answer he had been looking for. His goal should surely be to think specifically about nothing. After all, he had spent his whole life thinking about something. In the distant past he had focused on one thing for hours inside his thoughts; he had been so much happier then, as the book described, but he had never progressed in the external world around him. Now that he thought about the external world so much, he never felt at peace inside. According to this book, although he had started off on the right path, although he had become an expert at focusing his thoughts on one thing, he had never gone to the next step. He had never made the one thing he focused his thoughts on "nothing".

 

It was time to purposefully think about nothingness.