"Luminous" Thinking

 Today, we had a very long one day retreat at the centre, and I stayed with the huatou throughout. I kept remembering Gilbert's words: stay with the method, stay in the present moment. When we got to the repentance part of the retreat, I was still on the meditation method, because in my heart I believe that the main thing to repent of is the belief in a subject/object.
  I think in the afternoon, I started to lose a bit of energy, and I practiced Silent Illumination for a while. In the afternoon practice, I started with the sensation of the body, and then I connected all the phenomena to this idea of 'just sitting'. I found that overall, this practice was quite effective because it can often lead to a kind of vividness or brightness in thinking. I am not attaching to thoughts but at the same time, I am not sitting in a dark cave either. This brightness doesn't come from any particular color or object, but it seems to come from a way of being that takes everything to be part of one's being. This is simply the practice of mindfulness, looking at the things around me with the brightness of unattached awareness and attention.
    One of the things I learned from this retreat is that one doesn't need to 'zone out' from thinking when one meditates. At the same time, the 'thinking' that happens in meditation is different in nature from consciousness. With consciousness, there is a function which continues to join thoughts together in space and time, which then creates a subject. When there is no subject or object duality, the thoughts seem crisper and more luminous because I am not adding new thoughts to them.  I have to admit that I don't experience this very often, but every now and then I will get a glimpse of what this is, and I sense the beauty of it. The thoughts cease to cause suffering because they are not being constantly ground into previous memories or other thoughts. They are seen just as they are arising and if not needed they can be put down.