Liability of Mind

There is the Liability
of the Mind, and that Liability is a Matter for
Understanding

Adi Da Samraj (Bubba Free John) –
1973

“People imagine that to be
realized or to understand you must sit in mindless
samadhi.”

 

For
a practioner of this way one doing sadhana should be capable
of dealing with his karmic theatre when it arises without
becoming hysterical, or full of self-doubt or doubt of the
Guru.

For such a one, study has also
become enquiry. Not only is his life stable and full of
humor, but all his study has become enquiry. There is a
tendency among those who engage in the traditional versions
of spiritual life to anathematize the process of thinking
and to consider the natural state to be literally
thoughtless. Such people imagine that to be realized or to
understand you must sit in mindless samadhi, dry as a dead
toad. This is not true. The natural state is completely
prior to thought, and therefore not in itself exclusive of
thought. It is free of thought even while thinking
occurs.

It is not being suggested that you
engage in some process of emptying your mind. Or that you
become an asshole and no longer think, no longer study, no
longer require the mind to conform to the real structures of
existence. You must do such things. You will think in any
case, and you will also analyze yourself in any case.
Self-analysis comes under the heading of all those things
that will arise even though you are living the life of
Satsang. It is just that the fundamental insight, the
radical realization, is one that is prior to all thought,
that is not created by thinking.

There are two aspects of the thought
process. One is negative, the whole compulsive drama that is
worked out at the plane of the mind, including self-analysis
and accumulation of thoughts. This drama will occur in any
case. And principal insight will appear, freedom will be
realized in the midst of the thought process, just as
freedom will be realized even though there is also the
breath process.

In contrast to the negative drama of
the mind, there is the purely functional aspect of the mind.
The mind is an ordinary and useful function of human
existence and, like all the functions of your life, it must
be brought to the condition of Satsang as well as to the
useful communicative, ordinary conditions of life. This
functional dimension of the mind, the purely practical use
of the mind, is quite apart from that whole problematic life
of the mind which everyone is suffering. But in the usual
man, whose functions are rooted in dilemma, that practical,
functional aspect of the mind has become enmeshed with the
problematic use of the mind.

The sadhana of the life of
understanding requires that you use the mind consciously,
bring it to the functional, real conditions of life, to
study and service, in order to lift it out of that
identification with the search, with problematic existence,
with self-meditation.

The man of understanding still uses
the mind. He does not sit in “nirvikalpa samadhi” all the
time. He has not lifted himself out of the world. He uses
the mind. So don’t yield to the temptation to identify the
perfect enjoyment of the life of understanding with some
peculiar psycho-physical condition in which there is no
thought. The life of understanding is a condition in which
there is always already no thought. Therefore, there can be
thought. It is a condition in which there is already no body
and no self, and yet there is conventional self-existence in
the world. There is the body as a functional condition, just
as there is the mind as a function, but this condition is
not limiting. And this apparent condition of self-existence
is not lived as self-meditation. It is realized as Divine
existence, in which there is no separate self as the
principle.

Do not expect me to propose that you
become anti-intellectual. I expect you to bust your ass in
studying this work. But you will tend to yield to the
dilettante’s view of the mind, if you are lazy and do not
apply yourself to study. You will think it is contaminating
your meditation or something. This is not true.

So there is the liability of the
mind, and that liability is a matter for understanding.
Nothing you do with the mind can in itself serve that
understanding, even though you will continue to manipulate
the mind because it is your tendency to do it. But there is
also the simple, practical, functional aspect of the mind,
which you must discipline by bringing it to the ordinary
forms of life and study, and by making it useful entirely
apart from the drama of Narcissus.

When one becomes free of the drama
of Narcissus, he begins to discover that the mind is quite
different from what he might have supposed previously. And
so he might make statements like those made by Bubba Free
John: “There is no thought when I am speaking. There is no
thinking going on apart from the speech.” In other words,
there is no longer that problematic, dualistic contact with
the mind that assumes the separate self. The so-called mind
is fundamentally a spontaneous display of conventional
communications like, “Let’s go to lunch.” It does not in
itself involve self-meditation, illusion, suffering. It
involves none of that. It is an amusement. But in one who
does not understand, the mind is identical to
self-meditation like everything else he does, including
going to lunch.