Going beyond the mind

For some of us, nearly most of our days are spent in some mental monologue (or we may see it is a dialogue) with ourselves. Mind games. We get so hooked on feeding the mind with more and more ideas and scenarios, that we struggle to have even a short moment of clarity.

"I need to do this later. I should have done that. What shall I cook tonight? Did I lock the door this morning? Some tea would be nice." So it goes, on and on and on, from the moment we start our day until we fall asleep.

Let's look at how we think, or how our mental activity is conditioned. Are our thoughts even our own, or are they all second-hand thoughts? The way we think is completely conditioned by the way we grow up, our culture, society, religion, school, and the books we read. These ideas or thoughts we are fed with obviously comes from somewhere. Thus, we may constantly be getting recycled thoughts or ideas, and nothing we think may be our 'own'.

We are not our minds, ideas, and thoughts

When we think about ourselves, others, the taste of food or a beverage, we can only use what is within our mental capacity to compare and relate. We may have tasted something sweet before, and therefore we can say that something else is not sweet. We may have seen a tall person before, so we can compare someone else to a past memory of tall, and come to the conclusion that someone is short. See, how we only use our mental 'library' to compare and understand? The same goes for when we try to understand deeper or more profound things.

On a deeper level, it is clear that we are not our minds, our thoughts, and ideas. Why do we say this? Since we can observe and experience something, we can say that it must be something separate from us. Think of the heat of a fire. A fire can not burn itself, but it can burn what is not the fire.

At our cores, we are aware of our thoughts, our mind, we are observing thoughts, but we are not the thoughts themselves! We know this, because the mind keeps changing, emotions, and ideas, concepts keep changing. The only way we know that it is changing is because we must be something solid, something that does not change. Does this make sense? Only something unchanging can observe change happening. Consider this for a moment...

Even with our bodies, we observe the changes. We can look at old photos of us, and we can see that we are clearly not the baby or the teenager anymore. Yet we say "That is me", even when it looks nothing like us anymore. We are observing the change, but we are not the change itself.

A clear mind, projecting a clear reality

Now, let us go a bit deeper into this. What if we can go beyond mental concepts? Beyond the mind? If we allow the mind to calm down, calm the thoughts, ideas, just calm the waves of our minds, what do we feel shall surface?

Consider how a lake looks when there is a lot of activity in it. Dust surfaces from the bottom, waves or ripples are all over, the water seems cloudy and dirty, we can barely see a reflection in it. However, when the lake calms, when the dust settles down and the waves stop, then we can see how clean and clear the water is. We can see through it, and we can also see bright, clear reflections all over. It can reflect the sunlight, so pure and bright!

The same thing happens in our minds. Through the practice of meditation and mindfulness, we can calm down the winds of constant thinking, stop feeding our minds with useless thoughts, and allow the mental 'dust' to settle. Utilizing this, we may be surprised to discover what is there. What we may discover there is nothing new, no. We may actually discover something that has been there all along!

Rippled ocean water, making a wavy reflection of the sunlight.
The same can be considered with our minds and awareness.