Method 85 · VBT · Reps Centering §85 · Book of Secrets, discourse 57
Thinking no thing will limited-self unlimit.
Mind is the inner body: flesh is the outer layer, mind the inner. Body drops at death; mind you carry through every death — all past animal, human, gendered minds are still with you, because ‘you are so attached that even death cannot separate you.’ Only meditation achieves the separation that death cannot. Hence: ‘meditation is a greater death, a deeper surgery than death itself.’
Thought is a barrier, not a bridge: when you talk to existence, you miss it. The rock, the tree, the sky all exist in silence — that is the only universal language. Two minds silent together become one (‘two zeros cannot be two; they become a bigger zero — one’). Every word you use with a beloved keeps you poles apart.
The koan-mechanism — total failure is the breakthrough: you cannot think ‘no thing’ as a thought-object; the very attempt is self-defeating. The Zen master gives the seeker the unsolvable koan (find your original face before birth). For months the seeker brings answers; the master says No each time. One day the seeker comes with nothing — no answer, no face, no mind. The master says: ‘Now I see the original face.’ The exhaustion of thinking IS the entry.
Any thought limits, even a beautiful one: being a Hindu, a Christian, holding a golden idea — all are prisons. ‘A beautiful prison is still a prison.’ Thought is always for-and-against; it cannot be total. Only no-thought is total.
The abyss must be passed through: deep in this meditation a point arrives where infinite emptiness opens and you feel you are dying — ‘the innermost is being shattered.’ Most meditators flee back and cling to the body. This point must not be escaped. You return resurrected: the old identity with the mind is gone; you can use mind and body as instruments, no longer one with them.
Q&A nuance — false passivity, the feverish alarm: when you enter non-doing (thinking nothing), feverish alertness decreases and you feel you are losing grip, becoming dead. This alarm is the mind’s last defence. What decreases is unhealthy tension, not real awareness. Wait. A balance point arrives where fever has gone and you rest in your own nature.
Q&A nuance — concentration vs. meditation: feverish concentration forces energy to one point, tires you, and conditions you (creates sanskar — impressions that scar). Passive total awareness is inclusive: the car passes, the child laughs, the prayer continues — no conflict, nothing scars. ‘If one can be passively aware, he passes through the world but the world never passes through him’ (Bokuju crossing the stream: water touched his feet, not him — he was just witnessing).
Where it reappears
variantBuddhism (Zen — Rinzai) · Koan introspection (kanna-zen) on a breakthrough/first-barrier koan — the Mu koan or 'What was your original face before your parents were born?'Same essential gesture: hand the mind a task it cannot complete by thinking. Method 85 sets the impossible object 'no-thing' (which cannot be made a thought-object); Rinzai sets the impossible question (Mu — literally 'nothing' — or the pre-birth original face, i.e. the self before any limited identity). Same mechanism: the discursive mind brings answer after answer, each is refused, until it exhausts itself and arrives with nothing — no answer, no face, no mind — and that total failure IS the entry; the text gives this exact dokusan dynamic ('Now I see the original face') as its own illustration. Same locus: the thinking faculty itself, collapsing under a demand it structurally cannot meet. Same aim: no-mind (mushin). The 'abyss that must be passed through — the innermost being shattered, fleeing it is the trap, return resurrected and able to USE mind as instrument' maps precisely onto the Rinzai Great Death (daishi) followed by kensho and the free functioning of mind. Classed as variant, not strict equivalent, only because the bare sutra is a solo meditation on 'no-thing' whereas Rinzai delivers the impossible object as a teacher-set paradoxical question with a structured refusal/verification dynamic — a minor procedural twist on an otherwise identical method. The Mu koan, whose content is itself 'nothing,' is the case closest to outright identity.
equivalentZen (Chan) Buddhism · Koan introspection (sitting with an unanswerable question until conceptual mind collapses; absorbs Zen's 'Great Death')Corrected from draft's 83. VBT 85 ('Thinking no thing will limited-self unlimit') IS the koan method described in full: its gist names 'the koan-mechanism — total failure is the breakthrough... The Zen master gives the seeker the unsolvable koan (find your original face before birth)... One day the seeker comes with nothing... The master says: Now I see the original face. The exhaustion of thinking IS the entry.' VBT 85 also contains the abyss where 'you feel you are dying... You return resurrected' — i.e. Zen's Great Death (大死), so no separate death-contemplation entry is warranted. VBT 83 is only koan-shaped (a noting-the-gap practice); 85 is the literal, complete match.
equivalentTaoism (Daoist meditation) · Zuowang (坐忘 — Sitting and Forgetting)GENUINE. Zuowang progressively drops body, perception, knowledge and all distinctions until the self dissolves into Tao. VBT 85 'thinking no thing will limited-self unlimit' = deliberately ceasing all thought (no-mind) so the limited self expands into the unlimited ground. Same mechanism (intentional forgetting/no-mind, the 'koan-failure' exhaustion of thinking) and same destination (self dissolves into the ground). Catalogue 85 even frames meditation as 'a greater death than death' that separates you from mind — matching Zuowang's letting-go of the conditioned self.
equivalentJainism (Preksha) and Quaker silent worship · Centering down (active settling into interior stillness)GENUINE. VBT 85 ('Thinking no thing will limited-self unlimit') names both the destination (no-mind) and the mechanism (passive non-doing, not fighting thoughts). Its Q&A nuance is the exact internal arc of centering down: 'when you enter non-doing, feverish alertness decreases and you feel you are losing grip... this alarm is the mind's last defence. Wait. A balance point arrives where fever has gone and you rest in your own nature.' Quakers describe the same settling through initial restlessness into the gathered stillness.