One of my favorite scenes in the movie ‘It’s Complicated’ is the house party scene where the spectacular Meryl Streep as Jane Adler, the single mom of grown children and a successful chef, smokes pot for the first time in a long time. She sneaks into the powder room gushing and giggling from a psychedelic high, looks at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and in an instant, with the wildness and pretense drained out of her, wonders to herself in all seriousness, “Is this what I look like!”
I may not be quite there as Jane Alder in her precious state of absolute disillusionment, but I am starting to relate to it. Ever since the experience of my one-time, serendipitous separation from the mind, it feels like my mind is anticipating a potential extinction and hence hysterically counteracting by crowding the headspace on purpose with more thoughts than usual. Whenever I sit down to mind my mind, I notice a clutter of irrelevant thoughts, new thought popping up even before the previous thought is fleshed out, a swirling whirlwind of words and images like thought zombies piling and clambering on top of one another in a defunct race to nowhere, and I ask myself in sheer astonishment, “Is this how chaotic my mind really is?”
Oh, how I wish I could grab my mind by its collar and shake it until it settles down, but how am I supposed to do that when the mind is not even real?
The mind is not an entity. The mind is not the thinker of our thoughts, but itself simply a thought. The mind doesn’t perceive anything, rather it is perceived. The mind is simply an illusion and that is the singular, universal truth of all spiritual teachings of the world.
But this is a tough pill to swallow because our living experience doesn’t match that universal truth. We are real. The world we experience through our mind is real. Then how could it all be an illusion?
Most spiritual teachers elaborate their knowledge about the mind in the school of non-duality in a manner that feels inaccessible and unrelatable when viewed from a lay person’s perspective. We read their words with wide-eyed admiration, deem them quote-worthy, and hope to one day call their wisdom as our own, but that is how far we can go in terms of relating to someone else’s experience. When we hear a sweeping, one-dimensional claim about the mind being an illusion, such a statement, even though significant, usually leaves us puzzled as our personal experience of reality through the mind is in stark contrast to what’s stated.
But how clear-sighted are we about our “experience” that the truth about the mind should conflict with what we know? Have we understood the nature of our “experience” accurately enough to judge its legitimacy against the claims that the mind, through which those same experiences are known, is only an illusion?
Our experience of sensing, perceiving, thinking, remembering, and feeling, which is our first-hand interaction with reality, is our gauge of what is real. Right now, we sense the cold air on our skin and it feels very much real. But by Noam Chomsky’s wisdom, the way we know any experience at all is when we use language to reinterpret them to ourselves as thoughts. Any object that we give attention to, be it a sensation, memory, or words of reason, has a running monolog attached to it that we conditionally overlook. We never experience the raw, first-level experience as it happens but only the interpretation of it by our mind in the form of thoughts. We don’t sense the cold air on our skin. We only know the experience of sensing the cold air on our skin. We are not reading these words, but we are only knowing the experience of reading these words.
“All there is to experience is the knowing of it – in fact, not the knowing ‘of it’, because we never encounter an ‘it’ independent of knowing. All there is to ‘it’ is the experience of knowing. In other words, we never know anything other than knowing. Thus, the only substance present in experience is awareness. Awareness is not simply the ultimate reality of experience; it is the only reality of experience.”
Rupert Spira
The world is quite real, but the world that we know with our mind is just an adaptation of the original. Everything we interact with appears as a thought in our mind, but what we authentically experience is only the knowing of that thought and not the object that the thought represents.
If we can see this fundamental truth about our experience clearly, seeing the truth about the mind will become a lot easier.
“The description of the door is not the door, and when you get emotionally involved in the description you don’t see the door. This description might be a word or a scientific treatise or a strong emotional response; none of these is the door itself. The description is never the described.”
J. Krishnamurthy
