What size is your mind? Can the universe fit in it? Where would your mind be if your mother had conceived with someone other than your father? What would your mind be like if one of the other 40 million sperm had crossed the line first on that fateful night? Would it even exist?
Imagine a group of soldiers moving through woodland behind enemy lines. The silence is suddenly broken by the crack of a twig nearby. They are suddenly wide awake. It could be the enemy. All senses are on high alert. At that moment, the mind of the soldiers is pure awareness – no memories, no thoughts, no daydreams. In a split-second, life-and-death situation like this, there’s no room or no time for personal concerns. All the soldiers are of one mind – listening and watching for the slightest sensory cue.
Imagine a small group of people in a room listening to someone play an exquisite piece of music. If they are really listening, there will be no thought. Their minds will be as clear as pure mountain water, hearing the music emerge from the silence and die back into the silence again. If they find themselves reverting to thought or judgement, they’re no longer really listening
There’s nothing personal about pure awareness. It’s the same for all of us. It has no colour, no shape, no sound, no feel and no smell. It’s that clear space in which the whole world arises. To me, my body is an object in awareness. My thoughts and emotions arise in awareness. What I think of as my personality is just another object that arises in awareness. It’s like the screen in a cinema, totally unaffected by all the action in the movie. We fail to notice the ever-present screen because we’re distracted by the action taking place in the movie. Meditation allows us to rest in that pure, transpersonal awareness and notice how we generate our sense of self, moment by moment.
As the Nobel quantum physicist Erwin Schroedinger pointed out, mind is never experienced in the plural. Mind is always singular. My mind and your mind are aspects of a single Mind, with a capital M. Mahayana Buddhists call this Big Mind or Buddha Mind. It’s not personal to me or you but, paradoxically, it’s the most personal thing in the world. No matter where we are in the world, we are all breathing the same air of awareness. We can hear and appreciate a story told by anyone in the world, at any time in history because we are all, literally “of one mind”.
Hindus call this Big Mind “Self” with a capital S to distinguish it from our normal ego-self. It’s a Self that we all share. When Jesus said “Love you neighbour as yourself”, he didn’t mean “Love him ‘as if’ he were yourself”. He was pointing to the fact that, in the big picture, there is only one Self. Since the one Spirit manifests in everything that exists, loving your neighbour is loving God.
The questions I asked at the top of this blog seem to be real questions but they dissolve into the ether when you understand the real nature of mind. I don’t have a mind in the same way as I have brown eyes or a green car.
As scientist Freeman Dyson put it ”[Is mind] primary or an accidental consequence of something else? The prevailing view among biologists seems to be that the mind arose accidentally out of molecules of DNA or something. I find that very unlikely. It seems more reasonable to think that mind was a primary part of nature from the beginning and we are simply manifestations of it at the present stage of history. It’s not so much that mind has a life of its own but that mind is inherent in the way the universe is built.”
“…I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.” Max Planck, Nobel prize winning founder of Quantum Theory.
“The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul is no longer adequate.” Werner Heisenberg, Nobel prize winning quantum physicist.
“the doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”
Bernard d’Espagnat, “The Quantum Theory and Reality,” Scientific American, Vol. 241, No. 5 (November 1979), pp. 158-181.
In one department in our universities, our neuroscientists are busy demonstrating that mind is a simply a by-product of matter, while down the hall in the physics department, they’re showing that matter is really mind-stuff. Curiouser and curiouser.