Excerpt from Spiritual Enlightenment
The automatic thoughts that are creating the “mind” are what create your emotions. Both pleasant and unpleasant. Something happens externally, and your mind automatically reacts with a certain reel of thoughts. A person insults you, and the information is fed into the mind. The mind automatically reacts with thoughts that trigger anger in you. A person compliments you and the mind automatically reacts with thoughts that trigger a release of pleasure. The mind is constantly reacting to the outside world, and altering your emotions from a moment-to-moment basis. Your emotional state is constantly at the whim of the outside world. This is what is happening to you now.
Understand this statement. This is what is happening to you. Meaning somewhere beneath the mind, somewhere beneath the changing tides of your emotions is a deeper self. A self that does not change with each trigger from the outside world. A self deep beneath the surface that is witnessing the emotions taking place. The emotions that are happening to you.
Now, the question is who are you. If you are not the mind, and the mind is merely a process of thought, then who would you be with no mind. What would you be with no thought? There was a time before you learned the language in which you speak. In fact, there was a time before any language existed at all. Other animals exist in this world without thought, without language.
Imagine for a moment that you had no language. That you had no memories and associations with the world around you. Imagine looking at a rose with no mind. How the experience would brighten in comparison to the filter created by the mind.
Without thoughts, without language, the brain would not take away from the mystery of the rose’s existence by categorizing it and explaining it with the name of “rose”. It would not be bored with the flower that it had remembered seeing many times before. Imagine what it would be like to encounter the world around you with nothing happening within the body except for the wordless experience of its mystery and its beauty.
Our thoughts, our “knowledge” take away from our experience. Look at the moon without the mind. Without assuming to know anything about it. Look at the moon without language. As if you were the first man on earth, on the first night of your existence. The sight would create such deep emotions of mystery and splendor. However, you have become “smart”. Now the mind labels it immediately. That is the moon, a planet far away in the universe. What is a planet? What is the universe? Just labels we’ve given to something otherwise magnificent and inexplicable. The mind, a false sense of knowledge, takes away all of the questions and all of the appreciation of the magic that is in existence.
This is why we are bored. This is why we are always searching. This feeling of awe and the experience of the unknown is the emotion always seeking. In a new home, a new car, a new place, a new lover. Without the constant corruption and interruption of the mind, we could experience this life in its splendor and its mystery. Without the false idea that we have knowledge, and can explain away the phenomenon of the world around us.
Without the mind, this is who you are. You are experience. You are awareness. You are pure consciousness, using the brain and the body to sense the world.
This is who you were. You experienced the world through innocence. However along the way the brain has accumulated knowledge and voices. Nowhere along the way have you been told that those voices are not who you are, so you go on being tricked by the illusion. You have been going mad believing that these voices are you and that you cannot stop. It is like hearing an echo in a deep well and believing that it is the voice of a person. It is the same thing, it is through trickery and illusion that you have become identified with the mind. In the east, it was called tadatmya. To become identified with something that you are not.
You are not the mind, you are awareness. You are consiousness that is capable of using the brain for thought. When communication must happen, the mind can be used. When equations are to be solved, the mind can be used. This is the purpose. However, when there are no solutions to be made, no words to be spoken, the mind is not needed. In fact, the mind is just a disruption. Creating waves on what could be a perfectly serene surface. The mind was meant just to be a tool. Left uninterrupted, the mind will drain all the energy that otherwise would flow into bliss.
These words may penetrate you on an intellectual level, you might understand what it means for the mind to create suffering however it will take a deeper understanding to release the identity with the mind. You might or you might not have faith that this is phenomenon is true. If you have not experienced the bliss of no-mind then you will need faith.
You are faced with the task of re-experiencing the world as your true self. As awareness. You are looking to replace the mind with the true self as the master. The mind will struggle to remain in power. Along with faith, you will need to be convinced that the mind is not suited for the role of the master. To become the master you will need to see all the ways in which the mind leads you away from bliss.
