No-mind, no-thingness, suchness.

 

This is definitely an area where I've got to talk my way around that tricky area of the inexpressible.

According to the scientific view, the mind perceives a THING only when it's projected in the 3D experiential space of the mind. Before that, an eye received light, nerves sent a signal to a part of the brain that does the incredibly complex job of comparing the image with memory and learned patterns of light and dark shading, associated with shape. It then translates these signals into objects, things, which are then placed in mind–space, giving a hopefully accurate rendering of what's seen.

The fact that we see the mind's interpolation, not the "reality" is evidenced in how the mind handles the eye's blind spot. The extent and fact of its projection can also be shown with the drug mescaline. This interferes with some of the dimensioning functions of perception which results in some people seeing a ball rolled towards them as getting startlingly bigger. The mind has failed to compensate for the shift in perspective. Hypnosis has shown that people can see, handle and be hurt by things that are real to them but not to the hypnotist's audience.

The point here is that the perceived world, consisting of things, is factually incorrect, or at least is suspect in its representation. The teaching of Maya (illusion) is not that "all is maya, there is no substantial reality", it's more that maya is the veil, the interpolation of experience, the movie screen. Reality is the truth, existence as it is, what the camera filmed, not the edited movie.

No-mind is the experience of perception unfiltered by the mind's interpolation. Sounds impossible and chaotic, (that inexpressible trouble again) surely we'd be talking about a kaleidoscopic mess? . . . No, not a mess, just truth. Experience as it is, not the mind's elaborate construction.

So what is reality, the "stuff" that we seem to experience around us and which forms what we like to think of as our bodies?

If we listen to the physicists, their investigations into "what is matter" have resulted in the currently fashionable theory that giving rise to the appearance of all the atom stuff is an 11 dimensional space, the eleventh of which is very long, but miniscule in other directions. This eleventh dimension is a membrane which just nearly touches every point of the 3D space we experience, lying a teensy fraction of a very small part of a millimetre "away" from every point of it. This is the reality that underlies the appearance (illusion) of string theory's strings, atomic theory's protons, electrons and so on. Yes, even the great scientific minds don't quite get there – it's still inexpressible.

Reality is what is. That doesn't make immediate sense perhaps, but the bottom line is that you, I and the rest of them have only our own experience to go on. Everything borrowed, everything we've been taught to believe, our very way of looking, all this has to be discarded. There's a statement that works like a koan to help start the investigation:

What is, IS and what isn't, ISN'T.

This little phrase, said to yourself in times of confusion, starts working within you, starts improving the quality of data your mind gets to work with. Give it a try…

A meditator shares her experience of using this device to investigate pain:

"But then the pain isn't actually real. Its the lie; its the ridiculous, outrageous joke! IT IS THE VEIL As long as we buy it we're trapped. Feel it moving through your body and know its a set of associations/judgements/mind tricks, that's all. Your awareness is the blade that will cut those threads. You have that. It cannot be taken from you." –– Crystal