Tag: Mind

The Ending of Inquiry as an Intellectual Movement – Vimala Thakar

You see for yourself that every movement of the mind of the mind, the ‘Me’, the ‘I’ is mechanistic – whether it moves in the direction of society, of politics, of economics or in the direction of sex – the movement is mechanistic. You understand that the mental movement now is irrelevant. The perception, the observation brings the ‘I’ consciousness to this point: that my movement corrupted by the content, is bound to be mechanistic, is bound to refer to concepts and is bound to create a new measurement to measure the divine. My movement can be only relevant on the conceptual level but it is irrelevant for further inquiry.

The inquiry as a movement of the ‘I’ has served its purpose. It has seen its own limitations and therefore it stops. The relaxation of the mental effort, the relaxation of the mental movement as a fact has to happen within. Because of the inner urge to learn and to live – which is a non-rational, non-calculated urge – because of that urge the ‘ I’ consciousness is now willing, is now inclined to stop moving.

Up til now, the inquiry was with the help of an effort, now the inquiry will enter the dimension of effortlessness. Silence is effortlessness. Silence is effortless alertness. So the ‘I’ consciousness says ‘I am not going to observe. My observation brought me to the fact of the mechanistic nature of my movement, so I stop.’ Does the stopping take place in your life? The integrity and the genuineness of inquiry requires this questioning of oneself. Have we ever allowed that movement to stop, to discontinue? Not when you are sitting in your room but when you are moving through relationships. Has one ever experimented with the present absolutely, defenselessly? “Defenselessly” means without the defence of the past. The past is a kind of defense, and its movement is like security.

Now the psyche is filled with Silence, not filled with thoughts, concepts, ideas, theories and conclusions. You know, all that is gone. Now the emptiness of consciousness is filled with Silence. One says it is filled with silence because silence is an energy. If you had heard the speaker some time ago you might have heard the words “energy gets stimulated in silence, the new energy of Intelligence gets stimulated in silence.” No! As it was pointed out earlier, the speaker is growing, is learning. Life is infinite and till the last breath the learning shall continue so there may be changes in expression. I say silence is energy.

The moment you allow your movement, the movement of the Ego to discontinue, not out of any tension, pressure, but out of understanding, then relaxation takes place. If that relaxation takes place, then the emptiness of consciousness is filled with Silence. That energy is uncorrupted, unmutilated, unfragmented, unindividuated. Now observation or perception takes place out of the emptiness of consciousness, out of that silence. The energy of silence perceives through the eyes. The energy of silence listens through the ears. That energy is not an indentity like ‘Me’, the ‘Ego’. If fills your whole being. There is an observation without the observer.

Observation without the observer is the state of wholeness of perception and wholeness of responses.

Inquiry moved from the theoretical to the practical, where it was still a movement of the ‘I’ consciousness. That movement has stopped – again a quantum jump. Now observation becomes a movement of the spontaneity. When the cool breeze that comes and soothes your body and relaxes you completely, is there someone who is blowing the breeze towards you? It’s a movement of the breeze, it’s natural. So observation as a dimension of your whole life becomes a movement of the spontaneity, of that wholeness.

Inquiry as a movement of the mind has stopped. You see if the state of observation, the dimension of observation is allowed to open up in your being then inquiry as an intellectual movement, as a mental movement, as a movement of investigation by the ‘I’ consciousness, exploration by the ‘I’ consciousness has ended.

-Vimala Thakar

From What Is Meditation? 1998 Vimal Prakashan Trust

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Imaginative mental activity is the enemy of Satori – Hubert Benoit

According to Zen, man is of the nature of Buddha; he is perfect, nothing is lacking in him. But he does not realize this because he is caught in his entanglements of his mental representations. Everything happens as though a screen were woven between himself and Reality by his imaginative activity functioning in the dualistic mode.

Imaginative mental activity is useful at the beginning of man’s life, as long as the human machine is not completed, as long as the abstract intellect is not fully developed; it constitutes, during the first period, a compensation without which man could not tolerate his limited condition. Once the human machine is entirely developed, the imagination, while still retaining the utility of which we have just spoken, becomes more and more harmful; it brings about in fact a wastage of energy which otherwise would accumulate in the interior of the being until the crystallization of intuitive non-dualistic knowledge (satori).

-Hubert Benoit

from Zen and the Psychology of Transformation: The Supreme Doctrine

Going Inside Means Staying Home

When we say to go inside, it is really a misnomer. First, there is no going. Second, there is neither an inside nor an outside.
What we are really indicating is to stop going. Normally, we are constantly projecting. When a thought crosses our space, we project ourselves onto that thought and run with it.

Once we break that association, we are able to see a thought appear and at the same time there is space, and we are aware that we are not that thought. It is an appearance. By staying home, the thought scampers off to find another suitor.

The “practice” consists of this remembering and breaking the habit, the automaton that is our usual way of being. This in turn frees up energy that is normally consumed constantly. It also keeps from wearing out the mental mechanism which is not designed to be running constantly. Then, when it is needed for daily functions, it is fresh, rested, and ready to respond.

-purushottama

This is from the collection of stories, essays, poems and insights that is compiled to form the book From Lemurs to Lamas: Confessions of a Bodhisattva. Order the book Here.

 

Exhausting the Mind – Jean Klein

The following is a question posed to Jean Klein at Delphi, Greece.

When we say that we must come to the end of the mind, that we must exhaust the mind, is it a necessary process, something which must happen, or is it possible to have an insight without the mind being exhausted? And secondly, is this process itself a meditation, or does meditation begin at the end of the mind?

When the mind goes to its end – and it goes to its end when it thinks of the unthinkable – we can call it meditation, because in thinking the unthinkable, we are silent. Our thinking no longer starts from thinking, it starts from silence. When the mind comes to the end of its potentiality, it is a relaxed mind. This means that when there is something to think, it thinks, and the rest of the time it is in non-thinking, that is, a natural state of relaxed, non-directed attention. If we do not come to the end of the thinking mind, we will be bound to it, so that even when there are moments when there is nothing to think, we are still in the mind and live in constant agitation. The relaxed mind functions in discontinuity. Only when it functions like this can we be aware of the continuity behind all functioning. The continuity is timeless meditation. It is this presence which gives life and reality to all appearing. Any other so-called meditation you might do has no flavor. But really, meditation is praying, praying without someone who prays or is prayed to. Real praying is thanking for the joy of being. It is expressed at every moment. Experiences like joy, transcendence, peace and holiness, are all expressions borrowed from the mind. But the meditation we are talking about here is without any qualification. Its only quality is that it is without qualifications. It is the extinction of everything that could be a state.

As long as the mind is not exhausted, it will still be an obstacle to any real insight. Because the uninformed mind, that is, the mind which does not know its limits, will continue to try to understand what is beyond it. It will be driven by will or unconscious reflex, in the old patterns of becoming and attaining. The mind will still be looking for freedom, but in trying to attain it, it goes further away from it. Because there is no way to go to freedom, for there is nobody to go to it. When the mind remains in the reflex that there is something to attain, something to become, something to achieve, it cannot come to the only useful perspective for the mind, the perspective of living in not-knowing. When the mind abides in not-knowing, when it is, at every moment, open to the unknown, it is a tool of higher reasoning. Any other use of the mind is a nuisance.

The important thing is to realize that what we are looking for is the looker, is our presence. To achieve something in the phenomenal realm we must, of course, refer to something we already know. But regarding that which can never be an object, we can never go away from it. We must come to the organic memory of the body. This is important, because through this organic memory we will come to the absolutely relaxed state, where we have all our energy in our hand, so to speak. In this relaxed state the body and the mind come more or less together. There is no more duality. As we have said before, the relaxed body is dynamic, not passive. Passive relaxation is still in duality. It is not integrated because there is still emphasis on the object, relaxation.

Even in a relaxed state, the mind automatically creates pictures, or thoughts. How can we exhaust the mind?

These are residues, and these residues must also come to their exhaustion. When we let them come to their exhaustion, we have a forefeeling of the “I am.” Don’t go into the images or thoughts of these residues. Some teachers say to observe them, listen to them, but don’t go in, don’t follow them. My experience is that we must not observe or listen or follow them because the moment we look at them we feed them by creating a witness to them. Take your stand in the void, the “I am.” From here, you ignore them. But I think that when you become aware of the body, not the concept body but the feeling body, and you are at one with the feeling, in this becoming aware of the true body feeling, the residues of images and words and language have no more power. You are, of course, still in subject-object relation, the perceiver and the perceived body feeling, but there comes a moment where there is only the “I am.”

When we are living in our tactile, global body, we are no longer in our foreheads. Generally, we live in our foreheads, and this localization prevents all global sensation. When we remain in our foreheads, we are in the hands of the devil. So we must become free from the brain. In the beginning there may be some difficulty to be free from the brain, because it is partly activated by the taking and grasping of the eyes, which are very connected with the brain. It is important, therefore, to consciously relax the eyes, to sense the hollows of our eyes, their heaviness. When this part is sensitive, there is a deep relaxation in the brain. Some scientists don’t believe we can sense our brain, but they are studying medicine in a superficial way. We can sense and change our brain. For when the brain becomes relaxed, we feel ourselves no longer localized in the thinking factory of the forehead, but we feel ourselves behind, in the upper cervical vertebrae. When we feel ourselves behind, in our neck, we can no longer see from the point of view of the indivudual which projects individual objects. Because the individual is a thought construct which comes from the frontal area. From behind there is no longer any concretization. There is only a vague cloud of objectivity. Then this subtle localization behind the neck dissolves down into the heart, and the heart is the last door, the last expansion. Finally, we become free also from the heart. We become emptiness, emptiness without border and without center. We are the universe, and the universe is us.

But I would say, take note of all this and immediately forget it.

-Jean Klein

From Open to the Unknown – Third Millennium Publications, 1992.

Here you can read more from Jean Klein.