Thinking is as uncomfortable as walking in the rain – Fernando Pessoa was right

Sometimes it’s good to recognize that a thought is just a thought.

Hello friends!

Fernando Pessoa was the greatest Portuguese-speaking poet. I lie. He was the greatest poet of all languages. Not just because he wrote his most torrid poems in French and English, but because his genius is unrivaled. Furthermore, he was not only a poet. He was several. The best known are Fernando Pessoa himself, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro.

I particularly like Álvaro de Campos, because he is the one who lived in our century (the 20th century). The one who is logical (a naval engineer), who has certain negative tendencies (“it is before opium that my soul is sick”) and who faces the world with the despair of someone who has realized that the universe is infinite and that we are hopelessly alone.

He is the guy who met Kant, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Napoleon, Hegel, among others, saw his greatness and realized that he had done nothing. “Apart from that, I have all the dreams of the world in me”… It is the person who watches the hours pass in front of a tobacconist… and despite everything, having thought and felt a lot, he finds himself lost and bitter.

Don’t we know many people like that? Perhaps we are also a little like that.

The curious thing is that Fernando Pessoa, himself and himself as Álvaro de Campos, knew something was missing. Amidst his supposed mediumship and incredible psychic sensitivity (he translated Blavatsky’s “The Voice of the Silence”), he knew he was missing something. Something very important. Your master, your guru, your Self.

One night the master came. When the disciple is ready, the master appears. The master appeared as Alberto Caeiro. It was March 8, 1914.

Thinking is uncomfortable like walking in the rain

After a lot of thinking and feeling like Álvaro de Campos, the mismatched thoughts and emotions had to give way to something bigger. However, contrary to what one might imagine, what is greater is what is simpler: bodily sensations and nature.

We usually don’t realize that thoughts (in images, sounds or letters on a paper or screen) are nothing. Or rather, they are just that: sounds and images. If I say “pen” you think of a pen but that doesn’t mean that the pen will miraculously appear in front of you. A pen is just any object. It could be another. But what about the big words like love, happiness, peace, justice?

For Fernando Pessoa’s master, all of this is just words. As in the poem “there is enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything”… the mystery is having someone who thinks about the mystery, since if there is, it is no longer a mystery…

Walking in the rain bothers you when you have to go somewhere and you will be wet for hours. You don’t want to get wet, so because you don’t want to, the rain bothers you.

It’s like thinking. Thinking bothers you when you don’t want to think. When it’s not useful, when it won’t add anything. When you want the thoughts to stop but you can’t. Or, the worst, which is to confuse the finger that points (the thought) with the object that is pointed…

In the second poem of Guardador de Rebanhos, the master poet says:

“And what I see every moment

It’s something I’ve never seen before,

And I know how to handle it very well…

I know how to have the essential step

What does a child have if, at birth,

Notice that he was born indeed…

I feel born every moment

For the eternal newness of the world”…

Mindfulness Psychology: The Essential Mindfulness

Being mindful requires training. Some, like Pessoa, managed to achieve this essential wonder – a perception of reality beyond words – and capture the beauty of life. Anyone who has closely followed a child’s growth cannot help but marvel at the process of language acquisition, the questions about why things happen, the interest in picking up, touching, smelling, running, crying…

When learning a foreign language, something similar arises. Because moon in German is masculine (Der Mond) and sun is masculine (Die Sonne)? Why is Holy Spirit in Hebrew feminine? Why are the words in that order in a sentence or spelled this way and not another? Anyway… it’s just words. The problem is that we see the world through of the words we use.

Every time I go to a conference, I find it funny how, suddenly, you enter another universe. For example, if you go to an event about Mindfulness, this word will be the most important. If you go to one about psychoanalysis, Freud will always be heard. This is obvious, of course. But it just means that there is a community there that seeks to use certain terms to describe certain realities. A test in which it was forbidden to use certain words and say something would be interesting…

But back to our subject. Silence. What you can see, hear, touch, smell, taste now🇧🇷

“For me to think about it is to close my eyes
And not think. Is to draw the curtains
From my window (but it has no curtains).

The mystery of things? I don’t know what a mystery is!
The only mystery is that there are those who think about the mystery.
Who is in the sun and closes his eyes,
Begins not to know what the sun is
And thinking about many things full of heat.
But open your eyes and see the sun,
And you can’t think of anything anymore,
Because sunlight is worth more than thoughts
Of all philosophers and of all poets.
Sunshine doesn’t know what to do
And that’s why it doesn’t make mistakes and is common and good “…

Conclusion

Thinking is good. Is important. It’s part. But in a culture that overvalues ​​thinking and chatter, being silent is threatening. Ever since “I think, therefore I am” there has been a pernicious association between thinking and being (perhaps since Heraclitus or even earlier). Anyway, this story is also just another thought. Like every thought, it will pass. And between one thought and another, silence is welcome.

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