F.: In your second e-mail, you said, “This seems to call for some exercise of the mind after all.” While the “mind” is to be discarded, the new book entitled LIBERATION (Attaining Freedom from Personality via Realization) offers nine specific “exercises” or actions that can re-purify the consciousness and free persons of the deteriorated “psyche” that drives them. The “Foreword” to the book offers this point:
Various teachers use various approaches (or various yogas) for guiding protégés to Realization and Liberation. Why? Because there are three types of learners: auditory, visual, and kinetic. Also, the three body types among humans call for different approaches for different persons. The first body type is contemplative while a second type is more active. The third type includes students or protégés who are driven to be vigorously active.
Since you mention “exercises,” you might be in the action group, so two actions will be suggested today, but continue as well to meditate upon the considerations in order to Realize, once and for all, and then cease the arduous task of constantly working to be at peace. (For persons to tell you that you must do their religious or spiritual exercises on an on-going basis for a lifetime in order to get peace or maintain peace or restore peace begs the question: “How effective is their supposed solution if it only results in a temporary condition and if its effects only last for a day or a week? Full Realization is firm, final, fixed, and finished. How could that which is uncontaminated, pure, whole, and unadulterated require “weekly restoration” or “daily maintenance”?) So, continue with these considerations as well in order to abide as the pure and whole and unadulerated Absolute:
Some say “white is the presence of all colors” and “black is the absence of all colors.” What is really happening is this: white objects reflect most of the light cast upon them; black objects also reflect, but they just don’t reflect very much of the light cast on them. The full moon is not a white object surrounded by blackness. The light is omnipresent but is only observed when reflected from the surface of the moon. So it is when persons employ their “minds”: "the world," as registered in the “minds” of personas, is merely a series of reflections that are generated by the fictional, warped “mind” and then taken by that warped “mind” to be real.
In fact, those persons are not in the world at all. The world is in them…in their imagination, in their “minds.” Understand that the “mind” is that which imagines (and imagines erroneously), so it will never see anything realistically. How could it when it is the repository of beliefs and concepts that are steeped in unreality? Just as you might look into a mirror and see a reflection of you that is not the Real You, the "mind" in that same fashion can only register reflections that are not the Real.
Persons (the non-Realized) live in the mirror, mistakenly taking their images and the reflections in “their world” to be the real. If you think the reflection in the mirror is really you, you are out of touch with reality (which amounts to being insane). Likewise, if you think that the reflections that are being registered by your “mind” are real, then you are out of touch with Reality (and therefore believing the false to be real, which is another description of insanity). The check test for insanity is this: the sane live naturally; the insane live unnaturally or supernaturally. It is natural to be sane, and it is unnatural to be insane. No wonder the “aching” you mentioned is so widespread when persons all across the planet are living unnaturally and supernaturally on a planet where only natural living is sane and normal. Vast stores of energy are being wasted as persons try to live supernaturally or as they burn themselves out by living unnaturally. Only natural, AS IF living can result in the "ache-free" living that you are longing for.
To understand further that the “mind” is an aggregate of lies that inspires belief in even more lies, realize this: if you were programmed and told that a certain object is “a steel beam,” then each time that object is before you, it will be reflected in your mind as “a steel beam.” But that is not what it is at all. That is only its wrongly-perceived appearance…nothing more than a mirage. Looking at it with the advantage of an electron microscope, you would detect a swirling mass of energy that looks nothing at all like what you were programmed to think a beam is. Use the microscope of Realization on yourself, see beyond all of the appearances and reflections, and find what Your True Self really is and what THAT is which is even beyond that True Self. Use the pure (or re-purified consciousness) as a microscope which can allow you to know that the mirages that you thought you had been observing are not at all what your “mind” had been perceiving them to be. The programmed “mind” will never see anything other than distortions and misrepresentations and images and appearances that are not even close to that which is real.
How to stop believing in those false reflections of the mind? The re-purification of the consciousness and the discarding of the “mind” happen simultaneously. The “mind” (which is taken to be real after the corrupting of consciousness) is merely the aggregate of all of the false ideas, concepts, attitudes and beliefs you've learned. Since you want exercises, here is your first:
ACTION #1: Start questioning everything you believe, everything you’ve ever been told, and all that you’ve been taught.
Then, if you require more action, continue to question it all until you truly see that it is all just so much garbage. So far, you have not been willing to throw away the garbage that you are clinging to. Why? Because your enculturation has caused you to follow the masses who assign great value and status to the “mind.” Your culture values the unreal and hasn’t a clue what the Real is. If you were to keep all of your physical garbage in your home, it would eventually result in such a degree of contamination that life could not continue. So it is with the collection of garbage called “the mind.” How else to be free of “the aching of the mind”?
ACTION #2: Admit once and for all that you do not have a “mind.”
If you still require more action, continue to admit that your “mind,” as is the case with all “minds,” is a mirage. But understand that dealing with mirages always requires a caution: just as you might swerve off a highway in order to dodge a mirage and then die in the subsequent wreck, so too can you die as a result of letting the mirage called “the mind” determine the actions you take. (Now do you see the roots of your comment about sometimes "wanting death?") The "mind" can become so filled with twisted and warped ideas that it will tell you that a part of Realization is that kind of longing (instead of realizing that Realization ends the reign of control that desires of any kind have over your relative existence).
ACTION #1: Start questioning everything you believe, everything you’ve ever been told, and all that you’ve been taught.
Then, if you require more action, continue to question it all until you truly see that it is all just so much garbage. So far, you have not been willing to throw away the garbage that you are clinging to. Why? Because your enculturation has caused you to follow the masses who assign great value and status to the “mind.” Your culture values the unreal and hasn’t a clue what the Real is. If you were to keep all of your physical garbage in your home, it would eventually result in such a degree of contamination that life could not continue. So it is with the collection of garbage called “the mind.” How else to be free of “the aching of the mind”?
ACTION #2: Admit once and for all that you do not have a “mind.”
If you still require more action, continue to admit that your “mind,” as is the case with all “minds,” is a mirage. But understand that dealing with mirages always requires a caution: just as you might swerve off a highway in order to dodge a mirage and then die in the subsequent wreck, so too can you die as a result of letting the mirage called “the mind” determine the actions you take. (Now do you see the roots of your comment about sometimes "wanting death?") The "mind" can become so filled with twisted and warped ideas that it will tell you that a part of Realization is that kind of longing (instead of realizing that Realization ends the reign of control that desires of any kind have over your relative existence).
You have a collection of ideas that have been taught to you and that you now believe are “your ideas.” There is no such thing as “your idea” or “your mind.” There is only the collection of their ideas and the passed-down content of their minds. No Realized Advaitan would ever offer you more concepts to use to replace the old ones you have. All offerings are invitations to be rid of all concepts, including those presented in order to guide you to discarding all ideas and concepts and lies that make up “the mind.” Please enter the silence of contemplation. [Tomorrow: The Conclusion]
