No Thought: Meditation’s Highest Achievement

It had been maybe eight years since I had begun regularly meditating. Surely, by this time, I thought, I should be experiencing no thought? My mind was full of chatter and, yes, I had learned not to follow the chatter, not to follow the thoughts, and bring my focus back, again and again, to my breathing. I had even learned to practice staring at a candle flame, making cross hatched lines every time I lost my focus.

There were a lot of lines on that page.

Then, one day, I realized that it was not how many times my focus wandered: it was that I always brought my focus back. Minds wander. Bring my focus back. Simple.

I never stared at another candle flame again.

The Best Meditator Ever

Still, I wanted the prize: I wanted to be the Best Meditator Ever. I wanted to achieve no thought. Like Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, I wanted what seemed, to me, anyway, the impossible.

And then, one day, it happened: I got there. No thought. Blankness. My mind shut the #$%@ up. At last.

My feeling of triumph was short-lived: I realized I had done this before.

Not in meditation. Not sitting cross-legged on the floor, my back against the couch. Not sitting on a Samadhi, the Samadhi on top of a cushion, in front of an altar. Not in a ballroom with 250 other meditators, learning the Best Type of Meditation Ever.

No. I had achieved no thought staring into space, sitting with my siblings and my parents at the dinner table. Or staring out the window in school, or staring at my computer screen at work, at a loss as to where to start on the next software user’s guide. (I used to be a technical writer.)

The “Duh Gene”

I’m thirteen years old. I’m staring into space. Maybe my mouth is hanging open. (I hope not!) Someone snaps their fingers in my face. “Earth to Fran,” they say, as if no one has ever said that before, as if they are unusually creative in their desire to bring my focus back to the subject at hand.

I used to stare. I was considered spacey. I’m one of seven children and some of us stared, some of us didn’t. Later in life, teaching meditation and intuition, one of my students said that, in their large family, some of them stared and some of them didn’t. They dubbed it the “Duh Gene.”

I loved it! That described it! I have the “Duh Gene.” I can stare into space and my mind kind of stops. It’s nice.

Deepak Chopra and a cow

No thought became more common for me. Not commonplace, just more common.

And then one day I was driving. This was the early days of a large, sprawling suburb of Denver that was a working cattle operation—even years after development began. I lived on the edge of the development. On one side of a wide, newly-poured swath of concrete parkway was a six-foot wooden privacy fence holding back backyards and houses, trampolines, and swingsets, patios and lawn furniture. On the other side of the parkway was ranchland. Barbed wire and scrub, sagebrush and buffalograss. And cattle. Beef cattle. Black ones and brown cattle.

I was listening to Deepak Chopra. He was talking about the nature of the Universe, how it was quantum and therefore held possibilities that could not be measured or predicted. Or something like that.

I took a little shortcut that ended at a fence and a left turn. I was driving right up to the last bit of ranchland.

But before I could turn left, my mind stopped.

Blankness

It stayed stopped. At first I thought it was Deepak Chopra. Blankness, no thought, that precious state I had been experiencing only occasionally, took over. I heard the recording but, somehow, all was quiet in my mind, anyway. My car slowed. Because I had taken my very clever little shortcut, there was no one in front of me or behind me.

Moments passed. And then it hit me. I was staring at a cow. At a single head of beef cattle. There was the grassland and the scrub and the barbed wire.

And there was the cow. Only the cow was on my side of the barbed wire. The cow was outside the fence, maybe 10 feet from all that brand new concrete.

I called Facilities Management

Once I realized what I was seeing—a cow that had escaped the fence—my mind began working again. I called the number for Facilities Management. I explained what I saw and where I was and then I drove on.

Before I got very far, I saw someone driving an old Volvo station wagon on the verge of grass between the parkway and the prairie, attempting to herd the cow and get it back to where it belonged.

No thought happens

In the moments after, I realized that no thought happens. It happens sometimes when I meditate but not always. It happens when I find myself staring out a window, having lost my focus but having gained a moment of peace. It happens—rarely—when what I am seeing makes no sense, like a cow on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence. But it isn’t an achievement. It cannot be conjured up. It doesn’t happen every time I meditate. It happens when my perspective gets big and wide and allows for a bit of awe.

It doesn’t matter that I can’t achieve these moments of no thought on command.

Just as our mind produces thoughts, so does it produce quiet. When we pause to pray or to meditate or to wonder or just to listen, we might invite these moments of quiet. And these moments of quiet are to be treasured.

Meditation

We can cultivate these moments of quiet. I do that by meditating. You might do that by meditating or you might do that by admiring a view or a piece of art or a having a hard enough workout that you enter that endorphin-fueled zone where everything becomes quiet. I don’t necessarily mean literally quiet but where the deep silence that is behind everything becomes more apparent.

And in that deep silence, in that vastness, you may find a connection with self. A connection with your deeper wisdom, with intuition.

Try it.