The Error Inherent in Mind

There is a natural feeling that there is a thread in one's life connecting time with some identity call "I" or me. This "I" or me, which is given a name at birth is associated with a body and later on more identified with mind, an interior identity.

I recently asked an 82 year old woman how old she felt. She responded by saying, "I feel 25!" Now, obviously she was not talking about her body, but about her mind. When someone examines this identity of "I" one realizes quickly it is not the body they they are referring to because the body changes. In other words, the sense of a continuous "I", this sense of a personal identity is not based on the body being something that continued through time. Nor does the remembered "Me", of the mind remain the same. The mind changes like the body as the personality signs change. But yet, there is still this sense of sameness, a continuing 'somebody' traveling through time. Is this the soul?

The only "you", "I" or "me" that is constant, constant in all the states is the "I" that is trying to have a sense of identity. This sense of "I" looking for a continuousness or fixed person in the memories, concepts, photographs; this whole history, apparent history, that keeps examining - in this changing history, this thing, this body-mind that keeps changing. We affirm this sense of sameness while all the time being unable to 'locate' or 'identify' it.

Where is it then, this thread?

When we investigate our identity further we see we are not associated with a something at all - not in the case of your own so-called body, your "own" mind, or anything else or anyone else. What you observe is a constantly shifting pattern, that is very complex, very paradoxical, in terms of how it all fits altogether into a constant, independent identity.

If we could see with at least some spaciousness a view beyond our local body position, the presumed body-mind identification, we would observe a lot of patterns and these patterns ultimately have the pattern of a grid. This grid is the mechanism of mind, a fracturing of light, which is the mechanism for the perception of conditional existence. This is the inherent nature of mind.

"The truth-treasure whose principle is the self-nature of Mind, has no selfhood (nairatmyam), stands above all reasoning, and is free from impurities; it points to the knowledge attained in one's inmost self; Lord, show me here the way leading to the Truth." (Lankavatara Sutra)

"...by Grace, with all Help Given to you, your intelligence exercised, then you can break the spell, you can move up from the pond. It is just your reflection, you see. You open up and feel beyond, without the self-contracted forms of mind, emotion, and body. All that is felt beyond". (Adi Da Samraj).

Mind is pattern moving and shifting, always changing. Mind appears filled with characteristic of replication, reproduction, repetition. And yet not repetition in the sense that its sameness forever, but a paradoxical, complexly self-replicating process of patterning in which sameness is paradoxically never achieved. Mind is change not sameness, or put another way; Mind is time.

Organisms use memory for survival purposes that serve the ever flowing pattern of changes and the participation in the those changes. But we think memories are about us in some "me-ness" sense that is perpetual and ongoing through time we fall into the illusion, believing what we 'sense' is 'real'. The nature of the the mind, the body or of the world, all of 'this' is continually changing - shift, shift, shift, replicating, continuing, changing in an ever cascading flood of experience.

So where is this ever changing flow of experience is the presumption of continuity, this thread of sameness, then? It is Consciousness, Awareness. It is the witness, the free witness of attention. Feeling-Awareness and Consciousness have no relation to time. Consciousness neither begins nor ends. It is prior to phenomenon and is constant. It has no content, it has no "itself", no object, no center, no bounds. It is not in the context or the content of the body-mind, or of objects. It is coincident and at the same time prior to all that arises.

Consciousness has no patterns. But you, as mind, as the thinker, the feeler has a sense that there is a constant "I" identified, experiencing these changes. This sense of "I" is not any different at the time of birth or at ten years old than it is now. You believe and act as if there there is a 'I' that is a "you" doing life, identifying with an ever constant sense of body-mind, world and life.

This sense of "I" or self is a reflective mechanism of the mind itself. Added to this is attention or the focus of mind, 'the laser beam of attention'. There is this mechanism of attention which lies as if it were in a grid. It never moves and becomes the center of 'the world'. It can appear at any point in the grid, but it cannot go from place to place. It is the point of association with the grid. It is a reflection of mind.

The reflection is "Narcissus" or the illusion of self. Through the gaze of attention, "I" or identity of mind, superimposes its own characteristic on reflective nature of existence. The reflection becomes interesting, threatening, desirable. But you don't realize that it is your own mind reflected back, you don't know that it is you, you think it's an other. You don't know or notice that the pattern - which you are regarding to be full of desirability, being, and so forth-is just changing illusion, patterns of mind. And you are superimposing a feeling of your own nature on it.

"All that arises within it arises as experience, as an interpreted reflection and limitation of the whole. All of its impressions and memories serve it only in functional and conventional terms. If you try to read the Nature and Condition of things through that experiential point of view, you will be misled. Experience is always a form of exclusion and limitation".
Garbage and The Goddess

The separate "self" does not exist - except in mind and is only a mental illusion. The illusion of mind as separate "self" has no Reality-characteristics. Therefore, separate "self" is a lie and a negatively-destined pattern of life.

Realization of Truth or Reality is an intrinsically egoless matter. It is the realization of the state that is the Divine not realization of a superior, developed, or "evolved" mind-state. Realization of Truth of Reality has nothing to do with "self"-identity, or ego-"I" or anything that can be "accumulated" or "achieved" in the states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping.

The ego-"I" mind reflexively refers everything back to itself and transforms everything into the ego's own pattern. The ego-"I" mind is a pattern-driven machine of illusion and bondage - in the midst of the Intrinsically egoless Domain of Reality Itself.
(edited and adapted from Atma Nadi Shakti Yoga)