A man desires to live. His mind transports his desires into dreaming. Mind is not a living being as you are. Mind you, you are not mind. In fact, the mind is not there only minding is. It is like a much advanced version of computer memory connected to random access memory to discern cognition. But it is not you. You start believing that you are thinking. In fact, you are in a constant state of dreaming. You don’t just dream during nights but your dreams continue during days as well without interruption. Your past makes copies to reflect the future to move you back and forth from one side to the other side of a pendulum in ideas, images, thoughts, visions, revelations. When you worry, remember you are enslaved. It is said that the mind is a great servant, but a very bad master.
Mind is a great thinker. It thinks of the unthinkable. It creates a future by thinking. You believe that you are creating a future to live in it. In fact, thinking is seeking the vision that you lack. A cockroach crawls using two tentacles as vision. It needs to touch tentacles constantly to find out a way to go. If it had eyes that could see everything around him, it would not use them. Mind is essentially born out of our inability to see and know the truth.
To see you need to have eyes but to think, you need to be blind. When you are driving on a road, there is a vast space that lies before you and you keep on pushing the accelerator. But, you don’t think whether there is a big wall in front of you and you may get hit because you can clearly see that it is not there. That’s the difference between thinking and seeing. It’s the difference between a blind philosopher finding a black cat in the dark room and a person who can see that the room is full of light and there is no cat. In India those who saw and knew we call them Buddha (the awakened), Darshnik (seer), Shravak (listener). We call it a process of seeing darshan or shraman and not philosophy. Philosophy comes from the words “philo” (meaning love) and sophy (meaning knowledge). In India we understand them as a blind man thinking about truth.
Mind is simply your absence. When you are there, your mind is not there. Someone asked Bhikku, “Between thinker and thought, who is real?” Bhikku replied, “One day a thinker wanted to meet his thoughts. The thought also wanted to meet its thinker. Thinker thought and thought. The thought thought to see its subject. In thinking about the thought, the thought disappeared and the thinker appeared. When the thinker appeared, he again yearned to meet the thought. The thought appeared but the thinker disappeared. This is the conundrum of life.”
Life is a mystery. It has to be lived. You should prepare yourself to live its wonders to be awestruck by them every moment to die into it to be born out of it. Knowledge becomes bane. Katha Upanishad calls it “avidya”, the knowledge that seems as knowledge but does not transform you. Science in that parlance is “avidya” but not exactly. You learned something but it did not transform you. Socrates says, “Knowledge is virtue.” He says if virtue has not emerged after gaining knowledge, it is false knowledge. It is like you are drinking from a cup of poison and the moment you realise you leave it. That’s transformation. But when you learn about light that does not enlighten you that’s philosophy. You can become a great scholar or a professor in a university with many papers to your credit but of no use.
Buddha said that when your house was on fire you didn’t think, you just jumped out of it. Everyone’s house is on fire, what are you thinking about it? Thinking makes life terrible. Life is to be lived as an experience, but you start thinking about it. This takes us away from experiencing the experience. Life is not a thought. Thinker itself is a thought. An experience is not a thought. Experience cannot be defined because it is the experiencing that is experienced. Because definition is never defined. When you close your eyes and feel deep bliss swarming inside you, you can either be it or lose the bliss by defining it. Therefore, it is said that every spoken word is a lie. But we keep on making definitions bigger than the experience and keep avowing them.
It so happened, once Bhikku was engaged in a relief camp after the earthquake in 2001. One morning a TV crew woke him up and asked him what he was doing in the camp? Bhikku replied, “I woke up and went to see a child who had fallen off yesterday and he was hurt on head.” “No”, said the anchor. “Not that I mean to ask, you have made this beautiful habitat for traumatised people so what are you doing?” Bhikku said, “I am taking care of people who need to be cared for.” The anchor again said, “Not that way, you have set up this camp you are having 1,000 inmates and for how long and for how many people you have helped.” Bhikku replied, “I don’t know; if it is for you to see and ask that’s your job, not mine.”
Steven Pinker and Daniel Kahneman — two great thinkers of the modern world –have written beautiful books on mind. In How Mind Works, Pinker proves the case in favour of superiority of the human mind and intelligence vis-à-vis an AI mind to be a distant dream. Their thoughts are intertwined with experiments. In Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman writes about the same narrating self and the experiencing self and his obvious findings. In depths and layers of consciousness, the mind is made of known and it builds a future of known because it has no experience of the unknown. Better would it be if scientists along with their experiments include souls who have experienced the ultimate flowering where experience, experienced and experiencer are lost into the fourth state; mystic master J. Krishnamurthy calls it “observer is the observed”.
You are conscious. Something in you is beyond consciousness. Do an experiment. Like today you decide that you won’t eat a particular food that’s now being cooked because it does not taste well. As your army general, your mind will lead itself into the battle of not eating that food because it tastes hell. But suddenly when you pick up a plate and devour the food that you avowed to loathe not to eat. You will find your mind has disappeared. You are slipped into no mind condition. Mind exists in patterns, if you start breaking them it would melt.
You tell your mind that you are a very unreliable person. Not to rely on you. Not to avow on you. And you learn to trust. Trust yourself. Trust will grow, it will become compassion and love. Feed street dogs, birds, ants. Plant saplings at home. Help people in need. Learn to give, don’t think you are making heavenly investment but be full of compassion. Start with small things. You are eating. Trust in the food that it will lend you great health. Close your eyes, chew it slowly and immerse into the taste. You are sitting. Just sit totally. Don’t sit with the anxiety of having to go or to do something. Just sit totally. Stroll slowly, stroll without motive. Listen to music. Be lost into it. Mind will take a walk.