Participant 1: [Comment inaudible.]
David: Yeah, look at a lot of flowers.
P1: I guess it kind of takes the edge off of it basically and makes it funny.
David: Yeah, you’re supposed to take the edge off your suffering. That’s why you were given a rational mind to make those types of decisions, favor Bliss, and avoid suffering. God gave you the mind to get to God.
P1: Okay.
David: It’s just that you’re so complicated as a living organism with mind, emotion, intellect, imagination that you sometimes don’t understand the place of the mind in all of that. So, the mind ends up confounding you instead of liberating you.
Now in another context, I might tell you that the mind needs to be confounded, and yes it does by the Bliss that arises from Consciousness. But the mind should come back and function. Otherwise, you’re going to be walking into traffic not knowing where you are and you won’t know where your mouth is when you try to eat. So, you need an ego-based mind to know where your mouth is, to pick the fork up. All that implies time and space.
Even Ramana Maharshi says clearly that the whole objective reality is created by mind. It’s created by the mind. It is the mind. The causal field, the world of cause and effect, the world of change is the mind. It’s the projection of the mind that occurs within the mind, the mind structure. You take the mind away and there’s no world. So, by that definition, you need to have a mind to function.
He also talks about eradicating the mind but that’s only in terms of the Self. It’s how the Self speaks about its relationship with the mind once Realization has occurred. If you talk to the Self the Self will say the mind has been eradicated, but if you talk to the mind the mind might say it’s been enlightened. It just depends on which perspective you’re taking.
Would you believe there are people who think that the mind is killed after enlightenment? Even as they’re talking with you. They’ll say, “Oh yes, my mind is dead.” Well, who’s having this conversation? When you wake up and read the ingredients on a cereal box is that the Absolute reading it? Give me a break. When Ramana Maharshi was in that cart where he used to answer the letters that people used to write to him, he used to write replies to people, it was his mind thinking the letters.
Why is everyone so reticent to admit that there’s a mind after enlightenment? Are these purists? Are these anti-sin types? You get this kind of strange Victorian element even in the eastern teachings. It could be that they’ve been polluted by Judeo-Christian Islamic influence. This idea of sin has become such a dominant motif, such a theme in western and eastern spirituality because of the missionaries going to the east that they have poisoned the ground well of these really non-dual teachings where there’s really no such thing as evil in these eastern teachings. And yet Christianity got its slimy fingers inside these pure systems that understood that what the human being calls evil is just a kind of activity in creation itself that helps bring forth the evolutionary process, carry it out.
We have a lot of deep archetypal memories with lots of garbage down there. You’ve got to shine the light way down. So don’t be surprised if you begin to feel a little upset and disturbed when that light of pure understanding starts to illuminate all the things that you rely on for crutches because you still haven’t found out who you really are in the context of the Universe and the Consciousness of the Universe. You’ll start to feel a whole lot better once you understand that the mind is a good organ to use to understand but very bad to be totally dependent on in terms of the creation of your universe of meaning. The mind is a good obedient tool but very bad when it gets the upper hand.
At the same time, it’s good to have an educated mind, a sophisticated mind, a rational mind. All of that is positive because there are certain laws that you need to follow through rational approach. But you’ve also got to get the visions. You’ve got to get the visionary ecstatic hunger fulfilled. Otherwise, you’re going to be just a machine. And that ecstatic realm is traversed by the devotional mood, and that will take you beyond all rational understandings.
