There’s an aliveness you can’t capture with thought. You can talk around it. You can build frameworks about it. You can even get very convincing about it.
And still, thought can’t touch what you already know is here.
So I’m going to give you a few koans you can actually use—not as philosophy, not as a debate, not as a new set of beliefs. Use them like instruments. Use them like a microscope. Let them turn you back toward what is already right now, before the mind organizes anything.
There’s an Aliveness Thought Can’t Ascertain
There’s an aliveness that simply cannot be ascertained by thought.
There’s a depth to experience that is not definable by any kind of category or description, and no specific view or viewpoint captures it. This is primary to all viewpoints.
In the mind—with thought, with concepts—there’s always structure. And maybe that’s the brilliance of thought: there’s always a structure. There’s always a context. There’s always a symbolic framework, a “context window,” to put it in AI terms.
And there’s also something I’m pointing to all the time that is not that. It doesn’t have a framework. It’s actually too free to be bound by a framework.
It’s not like a personal freedom. It’s like the most fundamental fabric of experience itself is freedom, and this is available to everyone. This is your birthright.
You can’t capture this fundamental freedom like with a butterfly net. It would be like trying to capture the air.
You can’t receive it as if you hadn’t had it before. It’s not that kind of thing.
You can’t find it because it hasn’t ever been absent.
Use These Pointers as Koans
So any of these pointers I use, you can utilize them as a koan.
What has never been absent?
Now use that as a kind of microscope, as an instrument of investigation into your own experience right now. Turn that inward or outward or wherever it naturally goes. Maybe it goes somewhere that’s not inward or outward.
Here’s another:
What is it that cannot be fabricated?
That’s a really good one.
You can use this type of question at any stage of realization. You can use it regardless of your understanding, regardless of your background. What matters is that you trust it’s pointing you to truth.
Or a better way of saying it: you trust that the truth is here, even if it feels inaccessible in the moment.
And of course, the big cosmic joke is: there’s no such thing as inaccessible. There’s no such thing as not having access. That is the weirdest, strangest part about this whole deal.
But it still has to be navigated, because otherwise you can take a thought to be what I’m pointing to easily.
What Can’t Be Structured by Thought?
So try this:
What is it that a thought cannot structure?
Or, said more cleanly:
What is it that is free from the need to be structured?
What is it that’s free of the need to be defined by, contained by, held by a structure?
Here’s another:
What is it that needs no context?
What is it that has no context?
How to Sit With One Question
Any one of these—spend some time with it.
I’m going quickly here, but you can really take time and sit with one of these.
Begin meditation or close your eyes and sit. Ask the question and let it take you or lead you. Don’t analyze anything.
You don’t even have to reintroduce the question unless you get really lost in thought. Otherwise, ask it once and let it point.
What Are You Before One Thought?
Here’s another:
What are you before your mind creates one single thought?
I mean that right now, and at the beginning of your relative physical life.
What are you before the mind creates one thought?
Or just look out into this oblivion, this emptiness.
And then ask:
Where Is the Seeing?
Where is the seeing? Where is the actual seeing?
Your mind can divide this up: there’s an eye, an eyeball, a lens. There’s light. There’s a flower. Light travels from the flower to the eyeball.
None of that explains where the seeing is.
So really look.
Where is the seeing?
This is a fascinating question if you don’t get fascinated with thought. If you get into thought with it, it becomes a scientific question, philosophical, metaphysical. That’s interesting in one sense.
That’s not the kind of interesting I’m interested in.
So ask directly:
Is the seeing there?
Is the seeing here?
Is the seeing somewhere in between?
And then notice what happens when you realize all those are thoughts.
The subject is a thought: the me, the I, the brain, the visual center—thought.
The object is a thought too: the flower, the picture, the sky, the car—those objects of seeing. They’re symbols. Placeholders.
And whatever activity seems to link subject and object is also a thought.
When you see that, ask again:
Where is the seeing?
There’s only one place you can go, and it’s not a place.
And you didn’t go anywhere. You didn’t leave. You didn’t arrive.
Where is the seeing?
I could say something like “the seeing sees the seeing,” but that’s unnecessarily complicated. It’s just a way of helping to break the spell of conceptuality.
So again:
Where is it? Where is the seeing?
Maybe you say, “Oh, there is no seeing.” Some negation. Some neti-neti move. Radical advaita: no world, no seeing.
Okay—but what is right in front of your face then?
There’s seeing.
Where is it?
When I say “right in front of your face,” I’m talking conventionally. But in the seeing—or if you want to say in the seen—where is it?
You can’t deny it. You can’t say it’s not there.
But you certainly can’t say it’s somewhere.
You can’t say it’s a subject. You can’t say it’s an object. You can’t say it’s a mechanism.
Those are all thoughts.
And yet, here it is: brilliant, vivid, powerful, alive, intimate.
Everything.
Nothing is left out of the seeing. Nothing is unseen.
So keep working with that.
Where is the seeing?