Mind is Not You

How would you define experience? For me, experience is how the mind defines it. In other words, I experience according to how the mind defines experience. And since I can never move out of the mind, I am merely an experiencer of the mind. I am not the mind but merely experiencing what the mind offers.

Do I have a choice in how the mind experience? Yes and also a no. I can create causes for the mind to experience a certain way, but I cannot change how the mind is already experiencing. Give for instant, pleasure. Pleasurable feeling is an already arisen state in the mind and I am a receiver of it. Can I reject it? No way. Similarly if anger is already in the mind, which is an unpleasant feeling, I too have to experience it according to what the mind has generated. In both instance, be it pleasant or unpleasant, both are merely experience deriving from the mind.

Now how you experience both depends much on your own wisdom. If you were to truly understand that both are not really yours except a passing by experience of the mind then you are able to take both equally as they come by. It will be difficult for one to understand how both experiences can be taken equally the same considering that one is more pleasant than the other. It is possible if you were to consider what makes one pleasant and the other unpleasant. Pleasant and unpleasant are relative by nature and not as fixated as what you think it is. One moment of pleasant can next be relatively unpleasant to the experiencer if another object of much deeper pleasure comes into picture. The depth of the experience depends on how you relate to it. There is no difference between a cup, or say, a lover, except your meaning given to it. Both are merely objects subject to my relation but my relationship to it is another thing all together. My relationship with the cup is just for drinking whereas my relationship with my lover is emotional, hence both gives me different flavour and intensity to the experience.

As such how I relate to it defines my experience. So if I think I can reject the mind experience, I might try resisting the unpleasant feeling or to hold on to the pleasant feeling. My ignorant thinking makes it so; ignorant to the fact that the mind is here to stay, not something I can push away or hold on to. Ignorance will result in my not seeing the mind is constantly what I am experiencing and as such I do not have any say on it except to experience.

If you truly understood and realized this fact, then your pleasant or unpleasant feeling will be equal as you will see there is no possibility of holding on or resisting it. That is why it is so important to come back to watching my own attitude if I wish to stay as much peaceful with the world, as the world is in actuality the mind receiving and processing and I am the end receiver of it. If I don’t see that the mind is not me, I will be having a hard time accepting what is. This is what wisdom is for when one meditates – you can’t detach from the mind but you can be detached from the experiences of the mind in an impartial way – and this can only be done by right understanding or right view.

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