A student in a workshop asked, "What's the difference between writing practice and journaling? I write in a journal every morning when I wake up."

　　I nodded. I am often asked this. I told her that journal writing has a fascination with the self, with emotion and situation. It stops there. Writing practice lets that and every-thing else run through us; in writing practice, we don't attach to any of it. We are aware that the underbelly of writing is non-writing. Journal writing seems to be about thought, about rumination and self-analysis. One of the rules of writing practice is, Don't think. We want to get below discursive thought to the place where mind—not your mind or my mind but mind itself—is original, fresh. It's not you thinking. Thoughts just arise impersonally from the bottom of our minds. That is the nature of mind—it creates thoughts. It creates them without our controlling them or thinking them. If you don't believe me, try to sit comfortably and still without

　　thoughts for five minutes and just watch your breath coming in and out of your nose. I bet you can't do it. I bet thoughts arise. Writing practice knows this, knows we are not our thoughts, but lets the thoughts, visions, emotions run through us and puts them on the page. Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind. For this reason, writing practice is a priori to any other kind of writing you might do. And because it is unattached, you can move from writing practice right over into a short story, a novel, an essay. There are times in someone's journaling when they do touch writing practice, that disembodied, flying place, but it is not the basic nature of journaling.

　　The first time I heard Katagiri Roshi speak—he was fifty-one years old then, in the United States about ten years, still learning English—he said, "I have been reading your Des-cartes. Very interesting. 'I think; therefore, I am.' He forgot to mention the other part. I'm sure he knew; he just forgot to mention, 'I don't think; therefore, I'm not.' "

　　There it was! Western mind blew up in my face. Later, Katagiri also said, "I am; therefore, I think." It is the nature of a human being, like having a heartbeat and a breath. Thoughts really happen involuntarily. In biology class in high school, I learned about all the involuntary organs, but they forgot to mention—maybe they didn't know—that the brain continues to have thoughts whether we will them or not. We are not in control of thoughts arising, but behind those thoughts there is no one.

　　At the back of every word we write is no word. Only because no word exists is there space enough to write some word. So when we write about our feelings and perceptions, it is writing practice when we also touch the place where there are no feelings, no perceptions, there is no you, no person doing any writing. In other words you disappear, you become one with

　　your words, not separate, and when you put your pen down, the you who was writing is gone.

　　This is why I do not call my notebooks journals. They are simply blank pages I fill.