The Life Of The Mind
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The life in “life” as we see and live it is in our mind only; it’s totally recycled material; our yesterdays form our today’s and our tomorrows. In our mind. I repeat: “ in our mind.” That’s because the only place where things seem to repeat themselves is there. In reality, in truth, in fact, nothing ever repeats. The moment – this, here, now, is in fact all and everything that actually is.
In fact, things actually happen all of a sudden, don’t they? ( Like just now, the type font size on my laptop suddenly changed! ) We’re busy making plans while life gets on with all those surprises! Even as we look back over our shoulder, life is forging this Now in which we rarely find our self. It’s moving on – not toward a “future” freighted with a “past” but within itself. Life is only alive and living in this moment. It is being. All the rest of what we think is life is just that – our thoughts about it. Do we feel old? That’s what you think! There’s no “old” – for “new” is born in every moment; it dies instantly, only to be reborn anew. There’s only life regenerating itself. As Nirmala says: “ Being doesn’t need to recycle.”
So if that’s true (and let’s for the moment assume it is) then what does that do to our story, our sense of self with its past and it’s future?
Clearing a space
To begin, it’s useful to clear a space, to make room not in our mind, but in our deepest recognition. And to do that we have to stop doing. Just stop. Just for this moment, Stop believing thoughts as reliable and true; stop believing feelings as important and real. For those thoughts and feelings we believe are true – are “me” – belong to a mind that is not even “ours”.
If we clear an open space, one of the things we begin to see is that our thoughts – all thought – is cultural and collective and conditioned. It’s as if we unknowingly participate in a mind-cloud, a kind of self- forgetting. As children, we’re immersed, like our parents and peers, in a kind of popular mind-matrix. Our seemingly individual “thoughts” are those which are fashionable, those which fit the style and taste of our inherited time. But are they personally ours?…yours and mine? Or is it actually the case that We, the Whole Mind Cloud, think our thoughts, feel our feelings…sense our prescribed “good”, our prejudged “bad,” world? What if this container of “experience” we call “me” is not the whole truth?
I’ll stop here for now and invite you to graze in this moment, to explore this life as it is, to dance this dance and see what happens!
