What is the Mind?

[Recursoinominado]

I have noticed that i don't really know what "mind" is.

We talk about the need to quieting the mind but never about what the mind is?

What is attention? Why the hell we can direct our attention and focus the "mind" on some phenomenon?

I do not mean in an absolute sense, yeah, i know, all is God, all is Consciousness, but this "human/brainy" mind seems to be where thoughts are fabricated and then it arises in consciousness. 

Our ability to perceive our own thoughts like we see a chair is also remarkable and strange as fuck. 

[allislove]

Mind is a belief, there is no mind. 

Attention is "stretching" yourself towards an object. 

You are the sky, thoughts are clouds. 

Self-inquire: see how thoughts comings and going, ask yourself: "who is experiencing this thought?". You won't find any mind. 

The trick is to relax, allow the attention to sink... then, you may have realization: "WTF! There is no me. Everything is me. Nothing really happens. It's all peaceful peace. I'm beyond time and space" ☺️

 

 

[caspex]

Well the idea of there being an inner space called mind is just that, an idea. Really what you are doing is directing attention/awareness. You don't really arise your thoughts or intentions as well. They arise, your awareness goes to them. So ask yourself what is Attention? And how do thoughts arise?

[Batman]

Sometime on our human evolution, we developed an amazing capability to conceptualize. Meaning, the ability to have a mental representation of something we perceived. Over time, we learned to distinct different faculties of conceptualization within our experience: memory (a representation of past experience); belief (a thought about certain behavior in existence that is not grounded in personal experience); imagination and creativity (the ability to fabricate non actual reality); language (the ability to represent personal experience with symbols); meaning attribution (the ability to place value or charge for every aspect of experience); internal chatter (the ability to speak with your "self") and so on. We also see that there is a certain overlap between the various distinctions in the domain of Mind experiences.

Mind activity is an extremely useful tool for survival. Try to discern all the mind activity you have going right now, in this moment, regarding your current existence, past experiences, who and what you are, what is life and reality, where do you live, how do you relate to certain people in your life and so on. It will be almost impossible to discern all the mental activity your mind is project onto you perceptions, for the benefit of your survival. It is really remarkable, and it is the sole reason for our ability as human species to dominate other animals.

Mind is a very complex web of all the memories, concepts and belief a human being "assembles" throughout life for the purpose of survival. In its essence, it is a matrix of concepts imposed on your perceptive faculties, allowing your to ignore, emphasize, distinct, interpret, assign different values, etc., all in relation to the self. Mind serves to maintain the form of the self.

As you probably noticed by now, mind also has the capability to self-reference. You are using your mind in order to distinct mind activities from other activities. This means that the distinction mind, created by mind, is a concept as well, and not what mind really is. But using mind for discerning different activities of mind is very useful for transformation and awakening. But again, one must remember that representing mind using mind is self referential and the same as viewing the map as the territory. Hence, every distinction within your field of awareness is the working of mind. That is, even your self. Mind is the organizing principle of distinctions in awareness, and it is the creator of your self. Self is only a distinction your mind creates within your perceptive faculties. Now you must become directly conscious that your experience of being separated from others in purely conceptual, and dominated by the mind.

This is why psychedelics are so powerful in insights and awakening. Psychedelics disrupt the normal activity of the mind, allowing you to experience a different mind-matrix for some time. This provides you with more reference points to what mind really is. Mind is a very complex structure of mental activity, and it is probably impossible to map the areas in the brain that give rise to all this mental activity. Moreover, because mind is what used in order to understand and represent experience, it cannot and will never grasp or understand itself fully. The 'intelligence' that enabled the formation of mind in the first place will always triumph the limited intelligence of the mind. This is also why psychedelics are so powerful in realizing what mind is. Shutting of elements of the mind enables to grasp the mind from an experience which isn't dominated by the mind. That is, a different perspective on the mind, or vantage point. Do you get it? And different psychedelics have different effects on the mind, so you can play with the psychedelic experience to unearth different landscapes of mind. It is like position on a mountain in order to view your house from a certain point, and then going to another, different, viewpoint (like a tower) to view it from different place.

[kbone]

@Batman

Thank you for posting this take on the mind. Just for the sake of reference, did you write it?

It gives a very nice synopsis of how mind is actually secondary to Intelligence, which actually informs mind from its impersonal, transcendental viewpoint. The sense of self, identity, world knowledge, and experience are of the mind. More often than not, peeps never actually awaken from that world of boundaries, concepts, and delusion, living a life cut off from and, seemingly, lacking Wholeness.

Consciously be aware of when, as Intelligence, touching the mind takes place and the bifurcation into/as duality begins. The sum of such bifurcated "parts/distinctions" will never amount to Wholeness/Oneness.