Our best science and philosophy suggest very clearly that we don't know what thinking IS. If large ecologies are mind, what is thinking? If mountains think better than most human beings, how can we learn to think like a mountain?

The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Mountain Thinking

4—Introduction to Ecological Thinking—A Wisdom-Based Approach

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Auspicious interbeing to you and yours, my friends. Koinos Hermes, and a deep bow of gratitude and reverence to Sophia.

Last time we reflected on ecological thinking, we touched on something that might at first seem merely poetic: Thinking like a mountain.

We have often considered the notion that we need to integrate our thinking, so that we don’t create a duality between the head and the heart, reason and intuition, mind and body or mind and Nature. That means “thinking like a mountain” is not merely poetic, but also scientific.

Gregory Bateson had no interest in woo-woo speculations. And yet he realized that the world operates in such a way that we can speak rigorously about the idea of thinking like a mountain.

In the book, Angels Fear, Bateson writes the following:

“What has been said so far can be read as argument or evidence for the reality of very large mental systems, systems of ecological size and larger, within which the mentality of the single human being is a subsystem.”

That’s a wild thing for him to suggest. He means mountains and forests arise as mental systems. Such systems can even operate at planetary scale. And humans function as subsystems in larger ecologies of mind. Even the human being itself is an ecology, and our ego, our very sense of self in habitual experience, is a mere subsystem in the larger ecology of the psyche.

We should be clear that Bateson was ultimately a bit more conservative than even some scientists, let alone some of the mystical philosophers who have touched the wonders of larger ecologies of mind. Still, his views offer us a sense of wonder, and they will help us to bridge to the other theme of our contemplation: the myth of freedom.

So, as a way to lay some context for a concrete practice of thinking like a mountain and realizing true freedom, let’s consider some more of what Bateson has to say about large mental systems—systems of which we as individuals are only a small part, but also systems as large as a single human being, or a human romantic relationship, or a human family, or a human collaboration, maybe a human collaboration at a relatively large scale.

All human activity arises already interwoven into ecologies that go beyond the merely human, so each of us needs to think about large mental systems in a variety of ways. These things affect our lives, and we cannot learn to think the way Nature thinks—to think the way Nature works—unless we get a better sense of how interwovenness exhibits mind at scales much larger than our habitual consciousness.

Here are some more of Bateson’s reflections from Angels Fear—I’ll let you know when we get to the end:

“These large mental systems are characterized by, among other things, constraints on the transmission of information between their parts. Indeed, we can argue from the circumstance that some information should not reach some locations in large, organized systems to assert the real nature of these systems—to assert the existence of that whole whose integrity would be threatened by inappropriate communication. By the word “real” in this context, I mean simply that it is necessary for explanation to think in terms of organizations of this size, attributing to these systems the characteristics of mental process [as defined by the criteria we already discussed—n.p.]. But it is one thing to claim that this is necessary and not surprising and quite another to go on to say, however vaguely, what sort of mind such a vast organization might be. What characteristics would such minds expectably show? Are they, perhaps, the sort of thing that men have called gods?”

“What mental characteristics are to be expected in any large mental system or mind, the basic premises of whose character shall coincide with what we claim to know of cybernetics and systems theory? Starting from these premises, we surely cannot arrive at a lineal, billiard-ball materialism. But what sort of religion we shall develop is not clear. . . . Two things, however, are clear about any religion that might derive from cybernetics and systems theory, ecology and natural history. First, that in the asking of questions, there will be no limit to our hubris; and second, that there shall always be humility in our acceptance of answers. In these two characteristics we shall be in sharp contrast with most of the religions of the world. They show little humility in their espousal of answers but great fear about what questions they will ask.”

That’s the end of the passage. And it’s exciting to sense how Bateson invites us to go where angels fear to tread.

In our last contemplation of ecological thinking, we introduced the idea of thinking like a mountain, but this passage from Bateson as well as our general discussion of ecological thinking reveals to us that we may not actually know what thinking itself is. If mountains think, and if humans might think best by thinking the way mountains do—what is thinking itself?

We seem to suffer from an implicitly and inherently transcendent orientation toward mind. We think mind is something that “I” “do”. So the word “thinking” for us refers to something done by the “I,” by the egocentric self. Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am.” Bateson, Buddha, and the mountain all reply to him: Think again, my friend.

But all of us have to think again. We all imagine this “I think” and this “I am,” and we somehow need to find a way out of the trap it puts us in.

This supposed “I” that thinks is not the whole of ourselves. Once we begin to see ourselves as an ecology, and once we relax and release into the notion that mind is imminent in ecologies—that it doesn’t ride above them—then we can shift.

Our culture seduces us into fancying that we are above the ecology of our own mind, and above the ecologies of the world we share, and that doesn’t make any sense. We are these ecologies, not something separate.

And what that means is that we start to approach one of the most beautiful teachings from the Buddhist tradition. There is a vast literature in Chinese philosophy that works with the Li principle, and even the word for physics incorporates this principle (as “wuli”), as do Sino-Japanese words for logic and psychology. Dōgen, following the Indian sage Bodhidharma, uses 道理 —literally “the way of reason”—to define meditation.

Bodhidharma says there are two ways to practice philosophy: Practice with the mind, and practice with the body. Practice with the mind is called “the way of reason,” and this practice is defined as—meditation. Why?

One way to get at why involves sensing that whatever we mean by “reason” has to become transcended yet not defiled—a kind of synthesis of apparent opposites. In a famous passage, Dōgen describes a spiritual common law case (koan) that goes like this:

Once, when the Great Master Hung-dao of Yueh shah was sitting [in meditation], a monk asked him, “What are you thinking, [sitting there] so fixedly?”

The master answered, “I’m thinking of not thinking.”

The monk asked, “How do you think of not thinking?”

We have to avoid overintellectualizing cases of spiritual common law, but if we approach with care, we can work with these concepts as follows: “Thinking”—in this passage—means habitual mind and its conscious purposes, which we follow without really seeing what they are; “not thinking” means an interruption of this, a preliminary rupture that marks the beginning of a spiritual/philosophical life; and “nonthinking” means the nondualistic functioning of a better way of knowing, which cannot be called “thinking” in the normal sense, since the “thinker,” the limited ego, has been forgotten. Dōgen uses this to introduce the practice of meditation:

“Once you have regulated your posture, take a breath and exhale fully. Swing to the left and right. Sitting fixedly, think of not thinking. How do you think of not thinking? Nonthinking. This is the essential art of zazen. Zazen is not the practice of meditation: it is just the reality gate of ease and joy. It is the practice and verification of ultimate awakeness. The fundamental point of wisdom realized, baskets and cages cannot get to it.” (adapted from Bielefeldt, 181)

Note, Dōgen indicates that he is not talking about “meditation” in the sense of something cut off from life. He is talking about a threshold, a bardo, an entrance to the joyfulness of reality.

We want to make clear that a holistic sense of reason has to do with patterning in nature that we can access or enter or participate in with a meditative mind. Isn’t that already a beautiful shift to think that nature’s way of reasoning has to do with patterning—patterning we participate in with a meditative mind?

Even relatively accomplished philosophers will teach meditation as silence in contrast to thinking. Of course, meditation teachers will say, “Just because your mind isn’t quiet doesn’t mean you aren’t meditating.”

Even if your mind makes a lot of noise, that can still be very good meditation. Because one way to look at meditation is to become intimate with our own mind, to become familiar with our own mind.

When we notice the noise, then we have really accomplished something, and that is a very good meditation. Just to sit and notice all the noise, that does so much for us.

Nevertheless, we would lie to you, as teachers of meditation, if we said, “The mind will never become silent. You will always have a bunch of noise in your mind.” That’s not true.

And we would lie to you if we didn’t say, “Well, eventually, silence will come.” Eventually. No rush. No failure in the meantime.

You can enjoy success every step of the way. But eventually, yes, the mind establishes itself in silence, or we could say the mind reveals silence as indigenous to itself, so we don’t have to manufacture it.

But some teachers of meditation will say things like this: “Silence is more productive of wisdom and clarity than thinking is.” You will see this kind of attitude, that we only have to engage in thinking when it’s “necessary”—whatever that means.

We think when “necessary,” and the rest of the time the mind can be silent.

But you see how this becomes an implicitly transcendent view of thinking. Thinking is something I do above myself somehow.

Whereas if we had the right view of thinking, we would realize that in meditation, when we arrive at that silence, we have arrived at thinking—pure thinking without any thought in it, without the habitual patterns of thought trapped in ignorance, grasping, and aversion.

After all, What else is wisdom but the most skillful and graceful thinking?

What a shift, to relate to our life this way. When we arrive at that silence, we arrive at thinking. In a way, we arrived at thinking for the first time. To walk mindfully, with presence and awareness but without habitual thought—that requires thinking, without any doing.

And as the sense of “I think” begins to relax, as egocentric habits of thought relax into silence, then actual thinking comes to the fore, the fuller energy, capacity, and potential of the mind begins to reveals itself, and we begin to recognize with even greater clarity all the times in our lives when, essentially, the best thinking we did happened all by itself, underneath all the noise of our habitual mind. We find a clarity and a sacred ordering emerging in place of the disorder, discoordination, and dullness that characterize habitual thought.

So we can say that what habitual mind does is thought. It’s a repetition. And it’s a kind of encumbered, incoherent, and discoordinated version of something which in its liberated expression does not create a duality between silence and sound, does not create a duality between knower and known, and does not imply a false transcendence, but emerges as something synchronistic, well-ordered, luminous, and clear. It has the characteristics of wildness.

And so really shifting into thinking like a mountain means we have to get to the silence and stability of a mountain, as well as the wisdom and wildness of a mountain. We have to establish ourselves, eventually, in a kind of silence, clarity, spaciousness, and spontaneous presence and responsiveness.

And we have to recognize how subtle that transcendent view of mind is. Again, by transcendent, we mean a view that sees thinking somehow separate from the wholeness, as somehow over and above the wholeness and beyond the wildness.

If we are ecologies, then thinking is immanent, totally interwoven in the ecologies. It cannot sit on top of them, and it of necessity has the character of wildness and creative responsiveness.

That means aspects of thinking are simply not part of our habitual conscious experience, the experience of the egocentric habits, with all their reactivity, ignorance, grasping, and aversion.

When we enter into that wild silence, we allow the holistic thinking to truly function. And it will deliver what it needs to into the relative working space that we call consciousness.

But of course we will, in the process, be, become more awake and aware. And so that sense of even what consciousness is begins to shift. The sense of what the “I” is begins to shift.

We begin to enter into our own vastness, and that also nourishes us because we find that we’re not separate from the mountain. We belong to each other, and so the stability of the mountain becomes our stability. The life of the mountain becomes our life.

And once that expansiveness gets broad and deep enough, we arrive at real fearlessness because we have nothing to fear. We truly, truly have nothing to fear.

We also would arrive at true freedom, which is also a characteristic of wildness. And that can feel surprisingly frightening because of how that freedom would go together with interwovenness. As with our uncritical views about thinking, our uncritical views about freedom involve a transcendence. We imagine freedom means transcending life, and we think the ego becomes free.

In the dominant culture—and especially in the U.S.—we find a lot of obsession with freedom. The U.S. sees itself as the land of the free and the home of the brave. We have just considered how true fearlessness exists only as a spiritual realization, not a political one. But freedom, too, exists only as a spiritual realization.

We may fancy ourselves free when we can do whatever we like. Freedom comes down to a sort of monetary proposition, or a declaration of will. We may have little money, but we consider it an act of freedom, courage, and independence when we leave a job we hate.

In some sense, that seems a useful frame of reference. We really do have more freedom than we may realize.

At the same time, we get driven largely by the longing for a freedom to do whatever we want, because we have all the money we need to empower us. Money provides an immediate sense of freedom from material concerns. When we have no money, we can feel trapped in a job, a relationship, a whole life situation. If our car breaks, we ourselves can feel broken if we have no money to fix it, and yet we rely on that car to get by in our day-to-day existence.

The culture has arranged itself in such a way that money allows us to buy a relative freedom that has a meaning in this context.

But when we sit down to meditate, this sense of freedom reveals itself as an abstraction and as a delusion. How can we consider ourselves free with such a chaotic mind? We have no real clarity and stability of mind, and instead we discover we have a mind filled with noise, unable to perceive the true nature of ourselves or our world.

The title of this contemplation is, “The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Mountain Thinking”. I don’t mean that we have a myth of freedom in the dominant culture. In fact, we have a delusion of freedom, and we need a myth to correct that delusion.

Sometimes we use the word “myth” in a pejorative sense. The phrase “the myth of freedom” could mean something like, “the falsehood of freedom”. But we will refer to notions of freedom in the dominant culture as delusions, and we will think of myth in its positive denotation.

In the positive sense, mythology helps to organize our experience and potentiate us to our fuller capacities. Myths make use of archetypal images that prime the psyche to transcend the limitations we have imposed on it.

We lack a mythology of freedom, and that’s why we find ourselves so trapped in delusions about freedom. We do have stories that support the delusions, such as the Horatio Alger story. These stories serve as a warning that no mythology has a full immunity to spiritual materialism. That warning holds even more strongly for a fragmented and fragmenting set of stories that don’t really count as an authentic mythology.

The delusions of a culture will naturally try to tap into the energies of the psyche and manipulate them, so that means our stories tap into mythological currents, but never achieve a proper mythology, because they limit us and cut us off from spiritual and ecological realities, rather than helping us realize our fullest potentials in attunement with spiritual and ecological realities.

If we integrate mythopoetic vision with critical thinking, it can empower us. We need the magic of the archetypal energies and the synchronicities they can unleash.

We find a simple yet empowering example of a good mythology of freedom in the story of Buddha. We won’t go into all the details of that mythology and its wondrously, beautifully, incredibly elaborated philosophy, but we can at least bring to mind the image of Buddha, sitting under that cosmic tree of awakening, sitting at the very axis of our world, and arriving at true freedom.

Although we have to admit that we do not know the freedom Buddha realize, we certainly do realize a kind of pointlessness to a lot of our thinking, and we can recognize how unfree our habitual and effectively compulsive patterns of thought make us. Our habitual patterns of thought have a samsaric quality, a repetitive bondage-like quality. We get bound by it.

That differs from the relative dance we need between liberation and constraint. That’s a separate issue.

In this bondage of thought, we get caught up, really, trapped, constrained, and fragmented even by habitual patterns of misguided thought. It’s like a mirror image of the patterning of nature, which is nature’s thinking. We get caught up in noise, of course, but even the noise is not fully noise in the technical sense.

The noisy mind involves limited and limiting patterns of reactivity, judgment, aggression, craving, clinging, manipulation and control.

That’s why so many spiritual teachers will emphasize the uselessness of thought. And we find a very important truth in saying that we can’t think ourselves into liberation.

But we also have to recognize that liberation doesn’t mean we become zombies. Liberation doesn’t mean the end of thinking. Instead, it means the beginning of thinking—the beginning of skillful, creative, holistic thinking, vitalizing thinking, life-enhancing thinking,

synchronistic thinking, Sophianic thinking.

Liberation means the end of encumbered patterns of thought, especially the elaborations of thought referred to in the Pali language as papanca. When we cut off papanca, when we cut off our cycles of habitual ignorance, we enter into original thinking, the primordial thinking of Nature, the thinking of the wild.

At that moment, our thinking becomes the thinking of wisdom, love, and beauty. It becomes the synchronicity of heart, mind, body, world, and cosmos. It becomes part of how the world holds itself together and furthers itself along.

Because evolution thought us into being. We don’t want to give up the process that thought us into being. We want to give up its encumbered expressions.

We can get trapped in patterns of thought and in a whole style of thought that is itself suffering, and that cannot heal our suffering. It’s a very nuanced thing because of the shift we would need to make to arrive at ecological thinking, holistic spiritual thinking, Sophianic thinking. It definitely differs from our habitual patterns of thought.

However, even habitual patterns of thought can seem like genius thinking to us.

Because people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, they manifested a lot of thought that we view as intelligent and even creative. But those patterns of thought, as seductive as they can seem to us, as impressive as they can seem to us, they differ from the thinking of nature, the thinking indigenous to the soul, the thinking of wisdom, love, and beauty, the thinking of the great mystery, the thinking of the divine.

That thinking and the thinking of many seemingly intelligent people are not the same thing. Ultimately, they’re not completely different either. So the subtlety has a lot of depth to it. Because it’s not as if we can do something different from what we are.

It just has to do with how encumbered or how liberated the expression of what we are is as it comes through us.

The important note here is not to give up on thinking, but to let go of all those patterns of thought that go together with our suffering and the suffering of the world.

And we want to open up to the possibility that we find the real thinking in silence. And of course we also fall into it all the time because it’s indigenous to the soul. And that’s how we get some of our best ideas. But we also get the negative consequences of some of those best ideas.

That relates to the difference between ecological thinking and genius thinking as we so often see it. One person recently claimed that Elon Musk, on balance, was a positive influence in the world. He used the term “net positive,” as we sometimes use when calculating. We say, “What is my net profit.”

We can’t really think about life that way. But even if we could, should we think of Elon Musk as a net positive? I’m not sure he is.

In any case, the person recognized some of the problem in saying this, and he acknowledged that when we speak of a net positive, we have to get down to the nitty gritty and ask, “Well, what are the downsides? What are the harms he might create on the way to doing something that overall we would agree is positive?”

Now, I don’t necessarily agree that it’s positive. But it does seem that Elon Musk sees himself as saving the world, and I think a lot of other people think that with Tesla and with the EV revolution, the electric vehicle revolution, that somehow he’s going to save us.

But I don’t think so, because all of that stuff comes from the same style of thought that has got us into the problem. And this shows us how important ecological thinking is, because it means a shift in the style of thought altogether.

And so I would say Elon Musk’s action is the world a net negative. We’re not evaluating him as a sentient being, but just his action in the world. And it seems like a net negative.

We will find out in time, but the idea here is that he creates more negative consequences than he does positive ones.

When we fall for the metaphor of power, we think he has a lot of power because he has a lot of money and has done these big interventions. But we have embedded ourselves in that web of meaning, which is a very destructive kind of meaning.

In that web of meaning, a web of metaphors about power, in that web, people who have that supposed power think they are being rational and are saying, “If you’re going to make a cake, you’ve got to break a few eggs.”

That’s the thinking of the mad scientist, or the power-hungry politician, or whatever. That’s why we have to get out of these metaphors of power. We have to ask, “What’s the flow of meaning here?”

And again, in meditation, we find it. We find the source of the flow of meaning.

We don’t beat ourselves up because we haven’t arrived at silence yet. It’s okay.

But when we recognize that lack of silence, it can remind us, “Hey, maybe I need to relax a little bit, not rush into anything, because I don’t have a whole lot of silence in my life, I don’t have a lot of freedom in my life, and that means I don’t have as much quality thinking as I need and the world needs, and probably any thinking I do happens in spite of myself right now. And I can consider myself very lucky to the extent that this thinking keeps me alive, but I know that nothing goes without consequences.”

And so we can try to think in spite of ourselves, but there will be consequences, and we want to find a way to shift out of that. We want to find our way to the same kind of thinking that created us, the thinking of Nature, the thinking of mountains and rivers, forests and bees, whales and dolphins, horses, wolves, and deer.

We’re going to need more contemplation into all these things, but it’s a good time for a break. If you have questions send them in through dangerouswisdom.org. We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.