Observing the mind is an extreme sport. It is not easy to peek into the mind’s pandora’s box when your left hand strains to wrest it open while the right hand resolves to jam the lid shut. The mind wants to find the truth, but the mind also doesn’t want to show all its cards. We strive to watch the movements of the mind so we could shed the layers and shatter illusions, but when the questioner also happens to be the questioned, all we get in return is a Russian-level resistance and a dog and pony show for distraction.
All said, we continue to juggle our life to make room for silence. We flow with our breaths and watch our thoughts. We acquire new skills every step of the way to learn the nature of the mind, hoping to slay it one day. And slay we will, the Seeker Whisperers of the world assure us, if we are willing to do the one thing the mind resists the most –
“Don’t start from logic; start from experience.”
Rupert Spira
Logic says the mind is a subjective phenomenon that reveals itself in human faculties like thinking, remembering, perceiving, reasoning, and understanding. It is the emergent property of the brain, a mental reservoir for our memories and perceptions that works in tandem with sensations of the body and electrical firings of the brain. It is the behavioral software to the neural hardware, the seat of our identity and intelligence that serves as the basis for all our human interactions.
But go by experience and the explanation gets exponentially simple. The mind is not a mental entity that holds all our thoughts, recollections, images, perceptions, etc. According to Spira, what we call our mind is simply our current thought. Whatever object, thought, or sensation has our attention right this moment is ‘the mind’.
“Apart from thoughts, there is no such thing as mind.”
Ramana Maharshi
This may sound too simple, even unfairly dismissive of an all-in-one entity like the mind, but if we can turn down the surrounding noise and slow ourselves to the present moment, the teaching will start to make sense.
Everything that we perceive of ourselves and of the world comes through our mind into our experience in the form of a thought. If reality is that which we can know first hand and if what we consider as real is only that which is in our direct experience, then it is also true that what comes into our direct experience always comes only in the now.
There is always only ‘the now’. The past events happened in ‘its’ now as will the future happenings in its. When we recall a memory from the past or fabricate an event from the future, we are only experiencing an imagined thought that arises in our now. We cannot go back to a past moment and re-experience it. We can only imagine it as a thought in the present.
Let’s say you ate a sandwich earlier. When you think of what you ate for lunch, the current thought, “What did I eat for lunch?” arises in your experience. The mind will momentarily dip into the understanding of awareness and will come back with the answer, “I ate a sandwich”. The actual event of eating a sandwich is no longer present in our experience, but what we have is only the recollection of that event as the current thought “I ate a sandwich”. Let’s say another thought spontaneously appears that the mind informs us as, “It was a tomato panini sandwich”. Subsequently, the third thought would be, “Tomorrow I should probably try a roasted veggie sandwich”.
Thoughts arise spontaneously one at a time. The mind, which is a current thought, latches on to another thought, then another, and then another, and intertwines all of them into one continuous story. This as such is not the problem, but the grand illusion comes forth only when in that process, the mind imagines itself to be the knower of those thoughts – “I can recollect eating a sandwich. Therefore, I have always been present” and claims to be the thinker of thoughts instead of itself being just a thought.
The mind tricks us into believing that it has a continuing presence through thought, after thought, after thought, and with that one clean con, it has invented time – the past and the future, all while standing in a single now. The mind is not an exclusive mental entity that performs the function of the thinker and the doer of our lives. The mind is just one thought. The current thought, whatever that thought is. Yet, the mind being the superior salesman that it is, has sold us on its existence and led us to believe in its continued presence as an observer and chooser of our thoughts, decisions, and actions.
Life happens spontaneously in the silence of now. Thoughts arise spontaneously and inform us of life in retrospect. If one such thought in the name of “the mind” decides to commandeer the ship and claim to be the captain who runs the whole show, who is the true “I” that is always there watching the mind play its deliberate game?
“The mind may accept or deny that you are Awareness, but either way it can’t really understand. It cannot comprehend. Thought cannot comprehend what is beyond thought.”
Adyashanti
