There is no thinker behind the thought.
Thought itself is the thinker.¹

A visual consciousness is aware of a blue computer screen, a beer bottle next to it on one side, and a dark lamp on the other: beyond that, everything is blurry. An aural consciousness is aware of Bob Marley and the Wailers. An olfactory consciousness is aware of the aroma of a spice candle. A tactile consciousness is aware of plastic keys on fingertips, rough shirt on skin, hat on head, weight on ass. A gustative consciousness is aware of a soulful smoke and bitter ale. A manas² consciousness is aware of a dancing field of elemental balls.

According to Buddhist tradition, that is what I am up to write now. But there is something not right there. Buddhism seems to maintain that the sense of continuous presence that occurs within some consciousness is caused by something called cetana, which is translated into English as volition. It is what the Buddha called karma: “O bhikkhus [monks], it is volition (cetana) that I call karma. Having willed, one acts, through body, speech, and mind.”³ The volitional action carries the intentional consciousness from one moment of time to another. This intentional consciousness exists through time; that is, without movement, it does not exist. This differs from the other consciousnesses because the others are the awareness of sensations caused by material interaction⁴. The intentional consciousness, however, seems to be the awareness of the interaction of these other consciousnesses. It is this last consciousness that has been incorrectly identified as the Self, the Soul, the “I”, etc. by other philosophies and religions.

The controversy between these other philosophies and religions and Buddhism seems to be not that such a consciousness exists, but that such a consciousness continues to exist without change to its essential components. Buddhism maintains that there is no Self; other philosophies and religions accept some notion of the idea. In most, it can be envisioned as the biological equivalent of Euclid’s point. Both of these concepts are, in some sense, correct; that is, the notion of the Self seems reasonable, but it isn’t necessary.

The next question has to be, “Necessary for what?”

The notion of the Self isn’t necessary to satisfy the desire for a true identity. The concept of a true identity can be maintained without the presence of a permanent Self, provided a concept of evolution is accepted in its place. All that is asked is that there is an agreement on the fact that, given time, Order can come from Chaos.⁵ If this agreement is made, then the notion of the permanent Self can be replaced by a true identity that is constantly evolving.

There are several implications here. One is that a dead person’s true identity for itself is equal to the identity at the moment of death; at the same time, it is equal to the entire sum of momentary identities as they existed in a specific span of time, namely, from birth to death. Another is that a person’s true identity for another person (or groups of persons, as institutions or history) is equal to the identity as it existed in the last interaction between persons; at the same time, it is equal to the sum of those moments where it interacted with the same other person.

While there are still others, a third, more specialized, implication is that there is such a thing as an author; it’s just that the author is not the writer. The writer is the one who writes, the one who, literally, acts with intention upon the keyboard. The writer presses the buttons. It is the decision maker. It is constantly undergoing the same decision: to act or not to act.⁶ The author is the construction of those decision in which the writer did act. The difference, then, is the sum of those instances when the writer did not act.

The upshot of this is that the writer, then, cannot be held responsible for the writings of the author. The two are not the same individuals. At the same time, the writer cannot be held responsible for the existence of the author. The writer is the current manifestation of an evolving entity and the decisions it would make at a past time are not necessarily the decisions it would make at a present time. The writer now is not the same individual as the writer then.

While both of these statements seem controversial, especially as they pertain to the concept of criminal responsibility, they are not necessarily so.⁷ The desire to maintain a consistent, unchangeable identity is the desire to hold individuals responsible for their decisions. But in the universe of writing, there seems to be a fundamental acceptance of the right to free speech.⁸ The ontological implication for this universe is that the moment in which a writer makes a decision is a free moment, free from outside (influence): it exists beyond the law of cause and effect; it may be motivated by, but it is not the deterministic outcome of. The experience of writing, then, is the experience of freedom, the experience of making decisions without regard⁹, the experience of walking the Noble Eightfold Path.

The effect of writing, that is, the presence of the author, is a direct result of this experience. Its relation to the original experience, however, is analogous to the pictures brought home from a vacation. The words only capture a snapshot of the meaning. The relation of the author to the writer then is the relation of all of a life’s pictures to a life. Its no less wrong to write than it is to take a picture of the Grand Canyon. Of course, you gotta wonder, “Who the hell thought it was wrong to write?” And I gotta say, “That’s a damn good question.”

And then I gotta walk away, because I’m already 375 words late.

“Wait, where are you going?”

“I ain’t going nowhere. Cause there ain’t no one here but us aggregates.”

If you remove the thought,
no thinker can be found.¹⁰

Footnotes

1. Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 26. ♠
2. “Manas (‘mind’): the lower mind, which is bound to the senses and yields information (vijnana) rather than wisdom (jnana, vidya),” George Feuerstein, “200 Key Sanskrit Terms,” YogaJournal.com, 7 November 2005: http://www.yogajournal.com/newtoyoga/159.cfm. ♠
3. Rahula, 22. ♠
4. Rahula, 20-22. For those who wonder about the material interaction in manas consciousness, The manas senses the interaction of ideas [mind objects]. These mind objects are treated as matter in Buddhism. “The manas is considered a sense faculty or organ, like the eye or ear” (22). ♠
5. This fact should only be seen in controversy with the second law of thermodynamics, not the Book of Genesis. ♠
6. A formalization that should not be confused with its more famous brother. ♠
7. They are controversial, for instance, if one accepts retribution as the proper response to crime instead of education and rehabilitation. ♠
8. The universe of writing is not the universe of reading, nor the universe of physical interaction. ♠
9. regard: a visual metaphor, suggesting that making a decision without regard is like making decisions blind to the world around you, in other words, an irresponsible decision; but this implies that the primary responsibility is to what the world accepts, and not to the Truth that arises in the five aggregates; that is, that responsibility is toward the thirst for social acceptance and not toward the Noble Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. ♠
10. Rahula, 26. ♠