There's thinking...

And then there is thinking about thinking...

And then there's thinking about thinking as a stream of thoughts...

Think about it...

Here goes a thought...  Here goes another...  And so it goes...  On and on and on...

Consciousness has been compared to a river: like a river, mind flows, from one thought to another, incessantly, irrevocably...

Here's one of the thoughts that Buddhism built its psychological salvation on: "there has never been a thought that didn't go away."

Hmm...

No need to try to not think about what I don't want to think about! No need to resist the thoughts that I am already having! No need to push the thoughts I don't like out! No need to do anything but stay and watch the thoughts go... After all, if it's true that there's never been a thought that didn't go away, why do the river's work? The river knows how to flow...

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

What if... what if I let go of every thought except this one? What if all I think is the thought that "there's never been a thought that didn't go away?"  What would that be like?!

So, here I'd sit, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, watching thoughts pass, thinking "there's never been a thought that didn't go away."   If you could do that, what would life be like?

Swami Vivekananda, in writing about Dattatreya, the author of Advahuta Gita, a Vedanta text, wrote: people like that "care for nothing, they feel nothing done to the body, care not for heat, cold, danger, or anything. They sit still <...> and though red-hot coals burn the body, they feel them not."

Such people are sometimes called "non-returners" - having left the stream of consciousness, having found a place in the shade of the meta-cognitive distance, on the bank of this babbling brook of consciousness, they never re-enter the river of the experience. They think of thoughts as thoughts, and, thus, remain un-touched by the never-ceasing evanescence of their mind-states...

Is that possible?

Journalist Malcolm Brown witnessed one such "non-returner" in 1963 when a Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc performed an act of self-immolation. The man sat down, poured gasoline over himself and lit himself up. What's amazing - to me - is not the cause, not even the decision, but what happened after... Nothing happened: the man sat, in a lotus position, while burning alive. The skin of his face coagulating in flames... Dying... Burning alive...

Thich - a real, historically-documented non-returner... He didn't return because he never left the place of his here-and-now presence.... even with a river of pain-lava flowing through his mind...

How's that possible?

It is.

Imagine you had a chance to ask Thich this very question: "How is this possible? How are you able to just sit while you are on fire?"

My guess, Thich would've asked in return: "What fire?"

"There's never been a thought that didn't go away..."

In this myriad of fleeting thoughts, this one thought just might help you keep your mind cool when you feel like your life is on fire.

But here's the main point: if this is humanely possible, what else is possible?