Category: General

Mind experiences are liken to dream state, replaying itself of what have occurred, albeit differently. Conditioned by numerous past factors, each moment of experience are byproducts of what has been gathered by the mind, through its veil of views, perceptions, feelings and consciousness. Even in the now, the way I type out this entry and the way you read it now, are all conditioned by the past and yet also conditioning the way I view, perceive and feel in the future – for my present state determines what comes up next.

In short, the past becomes what I am now and what I am now becomes the future. The now encapsulates the past and future. In linear dimension, we would have gathered and understood the statement as the past and future is actually in the now but what is more true is that each now churns out the history of past and future. Yes, even future is a history as it is already determined by the now. The now itself is a molten pot of past and future.

Thus in reality, to say the now is entirely new is incorrect as what is here are merely permutations of the past brought a fresh again, metaphoring the statement same stuff in different packaging. Bad as the news can be, there is nothing new at all in the entire universe, which is the mind. The simile that came to me is the alphabets of A to Z which in different ways of arrangement spell new words and meanings, millions of them, and yet they are merely 26 characters.

Similarly all meanings and experiences of life boils down to the mind aggregates of consciousness, feelings, perception and mental activities and the form is the product of it. So is there any difference in terms of happiness, sadness, jealousy, upset, grief and many more emotions and mental states – all the variation of experiences that has never left you and will never leave you, albeit in a different storyline?

Is that the game I wish to play? Or do I really have a choice? Hence, so long as I am not awakened to this dream of replay, I will still be in the dream, not realizing it is a dream. There is nothing wrong in playing the dream – what will be wrong is that I don’t see it as a play and took seriousness in it, entrenching myself deeper into the abyss of the game, which by then I will no longer see it as a game but a reality – a fictitious reality. What a nightmare that can be!

Enlightenment, to my understanding, equates to awakening to the dream found within the mind. And that can only be made possible when one is out of the mind. Out of the mind differs from out of mind where the latter is still in the mind except not knowing himself. Out of the mind is a clear realization of release, of disengagement of mind, of something that the mind can’t imagine. It cannot be expressed or explained except in the experience. Yet it is not experience per se, as experience can only be from the mind. How deep down the rabbit hole do you wish to go?

Resolve the mind, not what is within the mind.

The weather man is able to forecast upcoming weather due to his skill in observing a certain pattern the weather takes. Similarly a fisherman can tell through his own experience where and when is the appropriate time to fish so as to maximize his catch. Having skills, irrespective whatever area of interest, is a blessing as it derives benefit of wellbeing to the beholder. By having skills, one does not need to go through unnecessary trials and errors to arrive at a certain result.

Skills can be derived either through personal experience or through learning what others have experienced. The former may not necessary be found within everyone as a certain level of wisdom is required for one to learn and rectify mistakes, else it may be taken as failure and giving up can be its result. Whereas the latter can be relatively an easier journey to take on since it does not involves trials and errors and mistakes are easily pointed out and understood through logical reasoning.

In short, everything has its own peculiar and unique pathway, which when given time, can be easily recognizable, only if one takes the interest to understand its mechanics behind the processes. The mind too is of no exception. One can learn about the mind through personal introspection of each moment of occurrences without any prior knowledge – deriving personal understanding and realization from it; or through a certain set of information that he has acquired from elsewhere and using that knowledge he applies it to the mind to derive its result.

There are many skills we can acquired from life – yet, rarely do we see the importance of learning about the mind. Probably it could be due to lack of information and understanding that the mind is the forerunner of everything, if that is what you don’t already know. To have the know-how of the mind is essentially a must as most of our happiness or misery are derived directly from it though seemingly we are been given the impression and experience that it is because of something out there that is causing us to feel a certain way.

The more we investigate the mind instead of chasing after the experiences of the world, we come to get a better glimpse of how, or the way we relate to the world is what we experience from the world.  The source is within the mind. As an analogy, when we look at the mirror we tend to forget that the image in the mirror is merely a reflection of what is looking at the mirror – the mirror is only doing its job of reflection just as the mind is merely doing its work in projecting the innate qualities to the world. When we don’t like the world we are in fact complaining about the qualities that is already inherent within the mind, forgetting that the source has never left us. Hence to begin learning about the mind is the source of happiness to ourselves and also a way of freedom from the bondage of ignorance.

I own a Hewlett Packard laptop that has the hp logo placed on the top cover. What I find it interesting with the logo is that whenever I place the laptop for use, the logo will be shown in the opposite direction, meaning it is no longer seen as hp but instead dy.

It is an obvious letter ‘dy’ if I did not have an inkling of the company hp. But due to the fixative idea of the meaning “hp” in the mind, whenever I see the logo placed the other way round, the mind interprets the letter hp as overturned rather than seeing it as dy. If a person is not familiar of the existence of HP he will be consistently seeing it as DY and hence his reality is such that his laptop is DY branded. This experience reconfirms in me how fixated the mind is – it is not flexible in discerning what is in the moment except what is in the past brought into the present. I am constantly being brought to the awareness that the mind is never in the state of seeing new except seeing old. Yes, the experience is new, but what it perceived is old, albeit unknowingly.

Here lies the dilemma of existence. When I am not awake to how the mind works, I am constantly in ignorance to the fact that what it perceives is constantly of the past. Awake and ignorance is just opposite sides of the coin. If I am not awake to this phenomenon, I am not aware ignorance is working out in me. In other words, wisdom and ignorance is not in my equation of life. I am totally oblivious to it. Probably my life will be in mediocrity, resigning to the fate that life is what is – or the question of such may not even arise at all.

But when such awakening enters into life, recognizing that there is an untapped truth going on in my space, the wisdom in me could not help but move towards the direction of finding out what is it that I have missed in life, or about life. This happened to me a few years ago and since then it was a slow but sure journey of finding out about the meaning of existence and why the need to exist. It is not a pleasant journey to deal with and neither is it entirely unpleasant. What is unpleasant is that when I am awake to the truth of what is actually occurring in this moment, rather than what I am experiencing in my thoughts at this moment, the fact of discomfort is no longer out there for me to direct at, except for me to face with minimal struggle and restraint and observe what is the underlying idea or ideas that have deceived me from taking on the truth. I trust a time will come where struggling with what is will get lesser, and probably diminish over time, as the wisdom that accompanies does its work of undoing what was once ignored.

For now the work in progress is acknowledging many more stuffs coming up in the mind that are false (“many” is just an understatement), and the interplay of ignorance and wisdom working on each issue. It has come to a point that there is in fact nothing much I can really do except to remember to be awake to what is without interfering with what the mind is offering at each moment, bearing in mind that wisdom takes the lead, and when or where it will arise is not my choice. My only job is to be awake to the now and surrender to what is. It can be a pretty lonely path and yet joyful when wisdom comes in unprecedented, letting realizations mature to new levels, allowing what was not understood before to be understood and realized. Hence another level of undoing is done.