Does an enlightened person lose the ability to rationalize and reason? How could they not if they lose the voice in their head, no-mind? Am I confusing thought with thinking?

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Thought is rather easy to stop, anybody can learn how to do it. The activity that you practice that helps you do that is called meditation. You sit quietly and do various things to help you stop the running inner monologue of thought.

Eventually though enough meditation you discover that the mind is just constantly running in circles and not really doing anything useful. The next step is to try to get to the source of the circle running so that you can stop it.

You can find a few of these things, at first they’re things like past events you’re holding on to, psychologies that just aren’t working, and you can stop certain sources of mental chaos.

Eventually after you do this enough, you discover an inner technique that allows you to release identification in “real time.” Over time and practice this allows you to achieve ever deeper ‘pools’ of calm, where nothing really impinges on your consciousness and anything that does can be ‘disidentified with’ as soon as you recognize what’s happening.

The feeling of disidentification eventually turns negative in the spiritual process known as the Dark Night. It takes various forms and it’s not something you only go through once. It recurs throughout your life. In Dark Nights, the spiritual process doesn’t seem to work anymore but what’s happening underneath is that the subconscious is kind of ‘reorganizing’ itself.

It’s a lifelong process, releasing identification. The Buddhists hold that at the end of your multiple lifetimes, you stop all existence. I don’t buy into this, I think there’s a phenomenon we can point to and articulate that is enlightenment while still present on Earth.

I believe I possess this quality, something called nonduality. It’s not total cessation of thought, but rather the cessation of the process of identification. I have a body, I have a mind, but I am neither of those things. The complex of body / mind / ego can be abstracted over as self. I have a self, but I am not my self.

For me, thought arises spontaneously, and I can quell it any time I wish and just bask in the rich void of nothingness. The problem with thought isn’t so much that it’s there, but rather most people don’t meditate so they never learn how to stop it and have a quiet moment. They’re constantly being jerked back and forth between fears, worries, desires, and angers.

When something makes me angry, I can choose to stop being angry if I wish, or I can meditate on the source of the anger. Beginning meditators usually want to charge at the dream of not having a self at all, not ever getting angry at anything or whatever. I think that’s silly, we were born with bodies and brains and emotions and there’s no reason not to enjoy them. For me, negative states of mind are to be enjoyed.