There’s but one dreamer of all dreams.
The mind cannot perceive God’s logic since what is dreamt cannot know its Dreamer.
The only certainty is that of the infinity and eternity of consciousness where the mind find its true rest.

RS: So do we call to complete discarding of the mind and reason?

Magdi: It is sufficient not to take the movements of the mind to be your movements.
The recognition that you do not move frees you from the illusion.
Reasoning can help you to understand and free you from mistaking yourself to be the movements of the mind.

RS: but when you do need to think?…))

NK:  Thoughts will come to you regardless of your need to think or not to think.

RS: Of course thoughts will come, this is obvious. My point was about the need to at least sometimes exercise our thinking faculties, to solve ongoing tasks or problems. I notice that as much as religionists are falling into extremes of preordainment and eternal doom, likewise spiritual people, perhaps in opposition to those repressive attitudes, have developed a “religion of no-thinking”, as if this is something more “pure” and leading to betterment of one’s life. While it is unarguable that calming mind’s chatter can be beneficial, it by no way means that one should completely give up natural reasoning abilities.

Magdi: Practical, creative, contemplative thought is God given and we readily use it.
Thought is an intrinsic faculty to this experience and in many cases, thought facilitates our life. The thought that I am a person is the I-thought that is defective. It is defective since it is solely based on belief and hearsay and not on any evidence.
The erroneous I-thought is the cause of our misery and can be dropped.
When practical, creative, logical thought is infected with the me-belief, it goes astray and leads to havoc.

RS: I don’t see how thinking that I am a person is defective thought, IF it helps you (or doesn’t prevent from) to better your life and life of people around you. It only turns destructive when one focuses on himself and becomes sociopath.
I have seen many who believe they do exist, yet their lives are far from havoc, on the contrary, they are loved and appreciated by most people and are great contributors to society. I have also seen those who believe they don’t have a “me” (as their dogma teaches) yet this in no way moved them closer to being a valuable member of human species, and many of them have developed narcissistic and often, dare I say, parasitic way of life, having large number of followers, who are seeking for miracle solution of their life problems but in return giving them little consolation and often messing their minds even more than they were before. (Osho Rajnish comes to memory for this case). I am against creating ANY dogmas, in short. I believe, truth is undefinable as it is. We can operate only with what we have. Okkam’s razor sort of thing.

Magdi: That is a big ‘IF’… The belief that I am a person identifies me with a mortal body mind. Thus I is believed to be mortal. Once you adopt such a belief, fear is inevitable. Once fear is established, it is all downhill from there on. The people that you mention, who have been great contributors to society, have transcended their narrow me-belief and, to a large extent, they operate from a more global point of view. Yes, believing I am ‘no one’ and believing that I have no ‘me’, is still a belief system and not the clarity of understanding. Understanding is the result of inquiry and investigation and the result of adopting a new belief system that makes you feel good and that you are proud of. As you say, that is narcissism and not the real deal.

NK: The “me” game, the ego-driven lifestyle, is fun for a while, until it isn’t any more. If attachment to the body/mind breeds misery, despair, helplessness, and what not, then why is it such a bad thing to not hold on to such a belief system? All beliefs eventually meet their end because belief is a super-imposition on ultimate reality, and ultimate reality is beyond any structured belief or conceptual system. The “no me” is the closest the human intellect can come to grasping the ultimate truth, but at some stage of awareness ( for lack of a better term), that concept too is dropped away.