A Finger Pointing at the Moon is not the Moon

Part I

A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

I contemplate this image quite often. It speaks to the difference between our ideas about things, conceptual knowledge, and our direct experience of them. Like many wisdom teachings it's somewhat enigmatic and not easy to keep in mind

Throughout history philosophers have recognized two ways of knowing - what can be learned from the mind's engagement with ideas, the about of things, and what can be learned directly from experience.

The practice of meditation highlights the difference between these ways of knowing. Knowing about meditation includes descriptions of practices, traditions that teach them and the history and philosophy of those traditions - but they are all ideas about meditation. They point at something but are not the something being pointed at. It's a pointing finger but not the moon.

The word 'about' is worth keeping in mind here because it's a marker for conceptualization, being in our thoughts and stories rather than in felt experience.

Some years ago I mentioned to a friend that I was taking a class in Buddhist teachings on mind and practice. My friend cautioned me to keep in mind that "there's the 'thing' and the thing about the 'thing,' and classes are about the 'thing." When I asked what he meant he said that meditation is essential to learn how to relax thought and develop clarity but that teachings were about those practices. The abouts could refer to a framework for the practice ('view,') the mechanics of practice (how to do it) or anything else. I shouldn't forget, he said, that any idea I might have about a practice is not the experience of actually doing it. And if I find my inner voice busy validating what I'm doing I can be pretty certain that I'm not meditating.

I struggle with my inner voice in meditation. It's a thought-whisperer that comments on what I'm doing rather than just letting me do it. It advises me about my practice, assesses whether I'm doing it correctly and even encourages me. Yet when my mind does quiet down, even for 20 minutes or so, the whisperer recedes into the background.

Meditation is just one activity where conceptual knowing, the abouts of experience, can be observed. When I pay close attention I can see how I get pulled out of experience by thought all the time. It's ubiquitous and there's an automaticity to it. What starts out as experience ends up as discursive thought manifested in word-images and stored away in memory.

Over the past few years this has been most apparent to me while watching sunsets on the Big Island of Hawaii. I would find myself at the water's edge with a late afternoon foamy surf at my feet and an enormous mottled orange ball sinking into the distant horizon. Then in a flash, seemingly within milliseconds, my inner voice, the whisperer, would begin commenting on the experience... remember this sunset...take a photo...you already have many…when the sun goes down maybe have a mai tai at beach bar…maybe eat there…stop this chatter… pay attention, the sun's almost down...you've fallen out of experience…you're not supposed to be upset with yourself…all this thought is tedious...

Eventually, rather than trying to suppress unwanted thoughts, I learned to relax into them, sharing the experience with the whisperer, so to speak. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. There just doesn't seem to be a limit on the mind’s need to chatter, to comment and make suggestions that impinge on my ability to direct and hold my attention.

None of this is to say that we could get by without thinking. There's much for us to think about that's necessary and useful. We couldn't manage our lives without thinking about things all the time. But when thought bleeds into rumination it's no longer useful. There's no benefit to churning the same thoughts over and over again.

Yet churning thoughts seems to be what we're doing much of the time. According to Chatgpt, "multiple studies and sources suggest that 90-95% of our thoughts are repetitive, meaning they are essentially the same thoughts we had the previous day or earlier in the same day.”

When we realize how much of our lives are lost to rumination, including all the stories we tell ourselves about how things are, we're more inclined to practices like meditation- and that's what brought me to it. I wanted to interrupt the cycle of repetitive thought, mostly about the past or future, or solving some problem.

Not surprisingly, rumination is accompanied by negative emotions like anger, fear, aversion or anxiety. They can leave us feeling helpless, uncertain, lacking self- confidence or worried that the unexpected is lurking just around the corner.

Of course, most people aren't monitoring their attention this way so they're unaware of being distracted by thought. Besides, they take their inner voice narrating experience for granted- it's just part of who they are. Nothing to be concerned about, right?

It depends on whether you want to live in direct experience or in thoughts about it. I suspect most people would claim that they already are

living in felt experience. It simply doesn't occur to them that when they're lost in thought they've been pulled out of it.

Thoughts like dreams are fantasies in the sense that they're not 'real.' They just pop into our minds like clouds passing in the sky. Yet for many thoughts about experience, fantasy or not, are more compelling than the underlying experiences themselves. I have in mind millions of Instagrammers for whom the most important part of any experience is sharing a photo of it. The experience seems to matter less than placing themselves in an enticing setting for show and tell. Apparently, whatever satisfaction there is from that comes from getting 'likes.'

But the more profound consequence of living in thought is that experience is presented as 'problems to be solved.' Mind maps experience like it was an obstacle course. That's why many of us feel so anxious. Thought gives rise to endless problems which we may or may not be able to solve. This way of knowing, the about of things, conceptualization, perpetuates a cycle of problems which impose on our well being. In a very real sense, we’ve been captured by our own thoughts.

There's an old Buddhist adage, "No thoughts, no problems." It's a reminder that many of our problems come from identifying with thoughts, taking them to be real. And when thought is accompanied by emotions, like anger, guilt, envy and shame, they compound each other to undermine our sense of equanimity.

Maybe if we lived closer to direct experience, closer to the natural world, rather than in the abouts of it we'd have much less stress and anxiety. Yet it wasn't always this way. It wasn't so long ago that humans weren't constantly processing information about things because there wasn't much to be processed. It's often noted that in a single day modern humans acquire the equivalent amount of information that people obtained in an entire lifetime 1,000 years ago (Perplexity)

In Part 2 of this post I intend to look at two events in human development that I believe greatly contributed to our living in the abouts of experience, pointing at the moon: the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the beginning of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. Both were instrumental in how conceptualization came to eclipse subjective experience as the most reliable source of knowledge.