Life is made out of actions, the path is made out of actions, and because your thinking is a certain kind of action, you’ve got to learn how to put it to good use as part of the path to the end of suffering.

"Direct your thinking specifically to making the mind still. In other words, you don’t try simply to stop thinking altogether, because that doesn’t work. You have to do something that seems a little bit paradoxical: You’re going to think about bringing the mind to stillness, or think about bringing it to a point where it doesn’t have to think. That recognizes steps in the process. Like that old paradox, you have to have a desire to put an end to desire before you can actually get to the end of desire, because life is a constant process of desiring and acting.

People tend to lose sight of this, especially when they try to turn the Buddha’s teachings into a philosophy or a philosophical system whose purpose is to step back and take a look at the way the world is and draw a map of the world. Now, the Buddha did draw maps, but instead of, say, drawing a whole set of plans for how the house is built, he simply drew a map to where the exits are. Part of the Buddha’s map to the exits is realizing that life is made out of actions, the path is made out of actions, and because your thinking is a certain kind of action, you’ve got to learn how to put it to good use as part of the path to the end of suffering."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Descartes’ Error"

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