Lore of the wise says that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear, and when the student is truly ready, the teacher will disappear. Wit of the self wonders if the teacher neither appears nor disappears, but rather sneaks up on you, unawares and unbeckoned when you are least in the zone. Even more bizarre is the possibility that the teacher is never actually a teacher, but a random flicker of insight, a vague apparition of clarity, or a phantasmic moment of realization that pops up out of nowhere and demands to be reckoned with whether you are ready or not.
During a casual family drive around our neighborhood recently, I wondered out loud what the famous building nestled beyond the wooded expanse that we had just passed by was called, to which after a brief pause my son enthusiastically replied, “Fermilab”. Between the time the question escaped my lips and my ears heard the reply, something novel happened that I am still wrapping my head around because, in hindsight, I am certain that this will go down as the single most significant event in my spiritual pursuit.
Immediately after I spoke the question and before my mind freaked out over a possible memory loss and set the brain off on a neural breadcrumb trail to find the answer, there was a brief two-heartbeat window where I witnessed an absolute blankness. I was staring at nothing. I registered nothing, yet I was completely present and watching.
It is not the usual hyperbolic expression “my mind went blank” used in places surrounding a fight-or-flight scenario or a tip-of-the-tongue brain fog where one is unable to retrieve or recall facts. My mind actually flatlined for two seconds. There was no thinking process, images, or words in that short instant. But as soon as I realized that strangeness, my mind immediately jumped back in with a frantic search for the answer, heard the “Fermilab” response from the backseat, cross-referenced the reply, confirmed, and moved on as if nothing happened and here I am a week later looking back at that moment and going, “Excuse Me! What just happened?!!”
Interestingly, this experience comes around the same time I have been overindulging in Ruper Spira’s teachings for my every spiritual quandary, because listening to him separate the fabric of our knowing fiber by fiber with his spot-on analogies and meticulous guidance on direct experience is all that one needs to revise the bearings and view the metaphysical maze anew. Not to overstate the timing, but my own mind pulling that sweet little stunt right around the same time I am neck-deep in Spira’s teachings to figure out the whole methodical disassembling of the mind seems suspiciously like a fortuitous push from some random nonteacher to help me wade through the nebulous landscape called the mind.
Generally, we think of our mind as an aspect of the brain that holds our thoughts and memories, the location where we analyze the sensory and cognitive inputs and process events to make sense of and interact with the world. Our every objective experience – seeing, perceiving, sensing, imagining, feeling, thinking, and understanding – is known through the mind. That is why deep sleep is such a mystery to us because when our mind is not there, even in the form of dreams, the world simply ceases to exist. If so, then in the brief window of my experience where I had no thoughts and no mind, how did I still “know” that I had no thoughts and no mind? How did I continue to see and perceive the mind’s absence when the mind is meant to be the processor of such activities? If it was Awareness that knew the “knowing” in the absence of the mind and had been the knower all along, what does that say about the nature of the mind as the “knowing”, “processing” entity?
Spira’s explanation for this enigma goes like this –
“Imagine someone tells us a joke. We hear the punch line, there is a short delay, we get the joke and we laugh. What is actually happening? When do we actually understand the joke? First we hear the joke and think about it; that is a thought in the mind. Then there is the understanding of the joke, and finally laughter.
The understanding of the joke takes place, by definition, after the end of the joke and before the laughter. If we look closely at this moment of understanding, it is a timeless, non-objective moment. The line of thinking about the joke has come to an end and the formulation of the understanding, which is also a line of thinking, has not yet begun. In that timeless, non-objective moment, what we call understanding takes place.
In fact, understanding always takes place outside the mind. A line of questioning or reasoning may precede it and a line of thought may formulate it, but in between, when the mind is not present, understanding takes place.”
Understanding, for that matter, any kind of “knowing” always happens in awareness and never in the mind. In the window of my experience during which I witnessed the “knowing”, the mind paused long enough for the knowing that is ever-present to show itself naturally; but in normal scenarios, that knowing is not allowed the chance to show, because the mind keeps itself front and center, continuous and consistent. The constant flux of the mind makes it appear as if it is the “doer” but it is not the real doer, rather only a reporter, a pseudo who takes credit for someone else’s work. As Spira puts it, the mind is the clown that takes the bow at the end of the show, while awareness is the actual performer all through the act.
“You have never “done” anything. Because the mind has conceived itself to be an individual it conceives itself as the “thinker” and also the “actor” or “doer.” Yet it is not anyone. The mind is not a thing or an entity but a process, the thinking process. It is simply a process that is happening automatically, in the same way the heart is beating automatically.”
Galen Sharpe
My mind lit the first fuse to blow itself up, both literally and figuratively, and I hope it paid attention long enough to hear the ‘BOOM!’
