Sometimes in terms of meditation, or non-attachment, the metaphor is used that one should remember looking at things like a child. People may mistakenly deduct, that the process of meditation tries to reverse thinking. This assumption is grounded in false, mechanistic thinking.

When thinking in mechanical terms, processes need to be reversible. Henri Poincare emphasised this point hi his 1893 treatise on mechanism and experience. However, what we experience as mind does not follow mechanistic premises. The mind is a series of constructions upon our experience that are not reversible. Thus the solution can not be to destruct the mind in a Hegelian fashion, but in Derrida’s terms, it has to be deconstructed, to transcend it.

So meditation can be framed as a process of deconstructing the mind so that from its observation a unitary, generalised perspective can emerge. This unitary perspective is no longer bound by many of the phenomena that it brackets and enables child-like vision, although all later constructions are there. They don’t interfere anymore, they have lost their pull. While the playful attitude of a child is necessary to make new constructions, all that have already been made from experience remain intact and accessible. More so, one would not be able to transcend the mind without having made these experience in the first place. So although thinking is a human trait that comes with many side effects, including negativity, it also paves the way to transcend itself.