The previous six columns were quite exhausting for me. The first three concerned law and its letter and spirit. The next three flowed out of the first three. law and its letter and spirit led me to laws of nature, space, time and constants — hardcore matters of physics.
The last column spanned literature, physics, medical science and spirituality. It was a vigorous exercise for my mind and I hated every bit of it while it lasted. But now I feel good. I feel I have done justice to my job as a columnist, done my bit with utmost sincerity.
Now I let my mind loose. And where does it go toIJ Well, it goes precisely nowhere. That’s a peculiar nature of the mind. No wonder many spiritual masters say the mind is like air. If you try to catch air by closing your fist, you have no air in the closed fist. If you don’t try to catch air and keep your palm open, you get all the air that can rest on an open palm. That’s the mystery of the mind too. That’s why all mind control regimens fail totally in the end. The mind behaves like air, like a spirit. Just like air, it refuses to be held in any attempts to hold it. And when no attempt is made to grasp it, it falls gracefully in grasp like air on an open palm.
There’s nothing ever wrong with the mind. The mind goes wrong when a war is waged with it due to an incorrect understanding of its nature. And the nature of the mind is that of a spirit, whether one likes it or not. Tao talks about having without possessing. That’s the quality of spirit. You can have the spirit only without possessing it. The moment attempt is made to possess the spirit, it cannot be had anymore. That’s what happens when someone loses his mind. He does not have his mind with him while trying to control it, possess it, regulate it. The mind will remain what it is — a free, free spirit — whether people know that or not.
The spirit has its own laws and running through all of them is the dictum of freedom, absolute and unqualified. Spirit is lost or violated to the extent to which its foremost law of freedom is violated. So too is the mind. That explains losing balance of mind, peace of mind and sanity. A person will lose his mind and sanity to the extent to which he violates its primary right and nature to be free and tries to control it.
What I have said goes against the common mainstream understanding of the mind that dictates it needs to be constantly controlled to keep it sane. To me, that’s a huge tragedy for mankind going back millennia. The mind has been completely misunderstood. No wonder there’s so little peace in the world today. For peace is a quality of the spirit, just like joy, love and freedom. And these qualities come and go together along with the spirit. So if there is no peace, there would not be joy, love and freedom too. All because the mind was not understood.
Due to lack of understanding, the mind became man’s biggest foe, full of hatred, jealousy, clutter, confusion, pain, worry, fear, greed — the entire endless spectrum of negative energies. They all arose because the beautiful spirit-like or, pardon me for using a word that is treated with virile contempt in some quarters, yes, the spiritual identity of the mind was not recognised.
And when the mind became an enemy, man turned against himself, he became schizophrenic, a person with a torn, cleaved, broken mind. Man declared war on himself, fighting with himself, controlling himself, torturing himself to remain sane, find some peace, but always remaining insane to varying degrees, always remaining in turmoil to varying degrees. And the kingdom within was lost, paradise lost, even though countless kingdoms and paradises were established in the world without.
There’s another character of psychology arising from the spirit nature of mind. A truly sane person will not know or feel that he is sane. The duality of sanity and insanity won’t exist for him. That’s the nature of the spirit. It needs to neither affirmed nor refuted. Attaching any label to the spirit takes away its essence. That takes me to my earlier law columns where I had said that the letter, any epithet or word, can never convey the spirit. That becomes rather mysterious. Mystery is another quality of the spirit. A mystery that can never be known.
But let’s come back to the mind. If we bid it to dwell on a subject, it keeps wandering off. If we bid it to not dwell on something, it keeps coming back to it. If force of will is applied to keep it focused on an issue or to not keep it focused on an issue, it takes the mind against its grain, its genius, its nature. Through various ploys of training like routine, habit and regimen, all very visible in spheres of activity ranging from schools and armies to spiritual orders and judiciaries, the mind succumbs to the pressure of control for some time, ranging from days and months to decades and centuries.
From a river that is free to flow as it wishes, the mind becomes a restricted flow, like a dammed river. At times the control diktat is so severe, the mind is reduced from a free flowing river to a pond or well, totally cut off from its nature. Uttarakhand in 2013 was just one signal from nature how wrong and destructive damming of rivers can be.
As nature is crushed and ruled more and more, whether in case of the mind or a river, it takes in the pressure to some point, and then, like a coiled spring, when it cannot take the oppression any more, it straightens itself to regain its true self set in freedom.
The mind falls into the pits of many diseases, anomalies and aberrations when its free,spirit-like core is throttled. The schisms in it become virulent. The cracking and breaking go on till the mind at some point implodes to straighten itself. That implosion is both a curse and a benediction.
It is a curse because the implosion is painful for the person experiencing it and for people around him. It is a benediction because after the muck accumulated over years stretching over perhaps lifetimes in the stagnating pits of the mind is cleansed and it realises its blessed existence as a free flowing entity, it becomes cleansed, free and peaceful for all time to come.
For very mysteriously, the mind loses its identity in a moment of ignorance about its real nature. But once it regains its identity in a moment of awareness about what it really is, there is no question of it being taken for a ride anymore. The key thing is awareness. I close with two little quotes I coined that go against the established coinage. An empty mind is not the devil’s workshop but God’s paradise. And awareness, not ignorance, is bliss.
amitshekhara@gmail.com