There’s a school of thought that says that all our troubles come from thinking. If only we could learn to stop thinking, trying to figure things out, and just be with things as they arise and pass away, then we’d be okay.

But that wasn’t the Buddha’s approach. When you look at all the suttas in the Canon, all the rules in the Vinaya: Those didn’t come from someone who didn’t think. They came from someone who thought a lot and knew how to think.

One of the first lessons in learning how to think is learning how to dethink. This doesn’t mean to stop thinking. It means questioning your thoughts.

It was Dōgen who said that that was the definition of Zen: dethinking thinking—the kind of thinking that takes your other thoughts apart. We do that because we have a lot of problems that come from our habitual ways of thinking. Trying to solve them within those habitual ways of thinking simply leads to more problems.

In cases like that, you have to ask yourself, “What are the assumptions that underlie your habits?” For most of us, this is a pretty murky area. We haven’t stopped to examine our assumptions.

Dōgen, when he was talking about dethinking thinking, basically said, “Start with something basic: When you’re sitting here, you have your awareness, you have your body. Is the body in the awareness, or is the awareness in the body?”

That’s taking “just sitting” as your question, as your problem to think through. You start with asking, “Well, what do you assume?” Then you ask yourself, “What if the assumption isn’t right? What happens if you question the assumption? What happens if you try the opposite assumption? What would that be?” This is where we get into the field called metaphysics.

The word metaphysics literally means “before physics.” It comes from Aristotle. He was interested in explaining the sciences, and the science he started with was physics. But before physics, he wanted to be very clear about what his assumptions were. So he started his lectures with metaphysics: the assumptions behind his physics.

But it turns out that his assumptions were actually based on biology—the idea that there are classes of animals. Within those classes, you have species, and then you have individuals. If you know something about the general class, then you can deduce something about the individual. Aristotle decided that you have to approach all the sciences from that framework.

Well, it turns out the world is not structured that way, but for a long time, those assumptions ruled the West. It was only through breaking through them, questioning those assumptions, that people began to make new discoveries.

So that’s a good lesson to keep in mind.

Try to be clear about what your assumptions are when you’re talking to yourself. Say you’re critical of something going on inside your mind. Well, what are you assuming? When you start getting critical of things outside, what are you assuming?

I think I’ve told you the story of the Buddhist scholar who said he could understand that the Buddha learned equanimity in his awakening. But the idea that he found the deathless, and went to total unbinding after his death, didn’t make any sense. “How can you know something that’s totally unconditioned? After all, we’re conditioned beings.”

So I asked him, “How do you know we’re conditioned beings? Isn’t that an assumption?” It may be scientific, but then science makes a lot of assumptions. The sciences nowadays seem to be less clear about their assumptions than Aristotle was about his.

The Buddha himself didn’t start with an assumption about what we are. He started with a problem: There is suffering. So what is the suffering? What’s causing it? Can it be brought to an end?

As he explored that issue, he discovered that it opened up a lot of unexpected things in his mind. He found that it was possible to experience something outside of space, outside of time. As he said, there’s no coming, no going, no standing in place, no here, no there, no between the two—none of the activities that define time, none of the relationships that define space. Having had that experience, then he had to come back and rearrange his thinking.

The question came up the other day, “What was the Buddha doing during those seven weeks after his awakening?” All we’re told is that he experienced the bliss of awakening, but part of that bliss may have been realizing that he was in a position to sort through all of his assumptions, to throw out the ones that didn’t make any sense anymore based on what he had learned, and to see what was left.

He did have to think his way along his path. He tried different paths. In each case, he developed conviction, persistence, mindfulness, concentration, and discernment appropriate to that particular path. When the path didn’t work, he had to ask himself, “Well, why?” That required some thinking, because that was going to determine what his next path was going to be.

But then, as for what kind of thinking was actually right, and what kind of thinking was actually wrong—that was confirmed in his awakening experience. Which is why when he taught the path, the first factor is not right knowledge. It’s right view. In other words, you adopt certain opinions that are going to be useful on the path. They get confirmed with awakening, but in the meantime you have to have some opinions and operating assumptions to direct your actions and keep them on the path.

The Buddha teaches you the basic principles, as in the Wings to Awakening, which he left that behind as his basic teaching.

Really get to know those well, and think them through: Why is it that in some of the lists you have discernment coming first, and then virtue, then concentration, and in others you start out with virtue, then concentration, then discernment—or mindfulness, discernment, then leading to concentration? What’s going on there?

And what patterns are consistent? You’ll find that one pattern is always consistent—that mindfulness comes before concentration.

In some cases, the relationship going from mindfulness to concentration seems to be automatic, although in the factors for awakening there are steps in between. You start with right mindfulness, and then the factors in the list show how you use discernment and effort to develop right mindfulness into right concentration. So you think about that, and then you try to put these things into practice.

The Canon lists three kinds of discernment: There’s the discernment that comes from listening, which would include reading. Then there’s the discernment that comes from thinking, and then the discernment that comes from developing, i.e., developing qualities in the mind—and you need all three.

The first two inform your idea of what you’re going to be doing. Ajaan Lee makes the point that when you’re sitting down here to meditate, you put the first two aside, and you focus totally on, say, the object of your concentration. But as you go through the day, there will have to be times when you have to think.

When things are not going well in your meditation, you don’t just sit there and say, “Well, I’ll just accept the fact that they’re not going well.” You’ve got to figure them out: “What’s going wrong?” So you have to ask yourself: What are your assumptions about what’s going on? What are your assumptions about your mind? What are your assumptions about the path? Are they right? What would happen if you changed those assumptions?

If you don’t know what your assumptions are, make up a couple of assumptions and then experiment with them.

There was a thinker in the European Enlightenment named Diderot, who wrote a lot of books. The people who study Diderot are always presented with the problem that the different books he wrote sometimes are extremely contradictory. So what’s going on? Was he simply changing his mind an awful lot? Did he not know how to be consistent?

It turns out that he was engaging in thought experiments. Suppose you assume x: What would follow from x? He explored that. Then hat would follow from y? He explored that. He was looking; he was searching. And that’s a lot of what we have to do.

When you’re trying to figure things out, you have to ask yourself, “The problem may be something that I’m assuming that I haven’t articulated to myself. So what are my assumptions?”

When you can pinpoint something that seems like an assumption, ask yourself, “What would happen if I assumed the opposite?” Or something that says in your mind that “This is really important?” What if it’s not important? What if something else is important?

One of the big problems in the history of Buddhist thought is the idea that we first have to figure out what reality is, and then we figure out how we act within reality. But the Buddha’s approach was different. He took action as the basis, and then issues about the rest of reality would fall under that.

Or, like the question of whether dependent co-arising happens across lifetimes: Is it happening in the world, or is it happening just in the mind? Actually, it turns out that “the mind” and “the world” are happening in dependent co-arising.

When you switch things around like that, explore the implications. Maybe you’ll learn something that might be useful in the path, that will help you to figure out, when you’re coming across an impasse, “What’s the problem?” And if those aren’t the particular answers, well, figure out what is.

Question your assumptions. Dethink your thinking. Take it apart. Take it apart in a way that allows you to see: What are you assuming?

That’s the kind of thinking that solves problems. Then when you think you’ve got a good possible solution, you put it into practice; see what works. That’s bhāvanāmaya-paññā: the discernment that comes from developing.

You can’t just meditate without thinking, because a lot of discernment comes from figuring things out: where your attachments are, why you’re attached.

Those five steps the Buddha lays out to figure out: What’s the origination of the problem—where does it come from within the mind? How does the problem stop? How does it start up again? And why do you dig it up again—what’s the allure? Can you see the drawbacks?

That line of inquiry requires both developing qualities of the mind, and thinking through, because sometimes the mind will say, “I’m attracted to this because of x.” Well, are you really attracted to that because of x, or is the mind just lying to itself?

You question things, you try to figure them out by questioning your assumptions—dethinking your thinking. It’s an important part of the path.