The form of the ordinary mind, the parrot mind, or Manas mind, the monkey mind that jumps from one tree to another and operates with the literal meanings of existence as given to it by the senses, is a very powerful veil that leaves us trapped in scenarios of automatic and repetitive vitality. For this mental form, the separation between subject and object is unquestionable: objects are materially real. The Manas mind expresses a dualistic metaphysics that believes in matter. The materialist believes in matter as something final and definitive that requires no further explanation. Such a belief is not experienced as such, as something that comes from a thinking, feeling and desiring subject, but as something independent of the subject: matter, with the form given to it by the human mind, is the final reference of the Real. From this point of view, knowing is knowing matter, and matter is uncritically considered to be what makes our everyday life. To have your feet on the Earth is to be concerned with the material and the material in relation to the realm of everyday matter. The Manas mind does not want to know anything that has no practical use and flees away from philosophical thinking as if it was the devil. Any critical examination of existence beyond its small plot is toxic material for the smart Manas mind, which always knows better.
When we begin to think about the Subject, another form of mind begins to activate, Buddhi, a mind that feels the object as a projection of the Subject, the mind that leads us to see the continuum of Consciousness around us, the mind that draws a bridge towards Chit, the Consciousness-Force. Buddhi coexists with Manas, so the awakening of Buddhi entails that we find ourselves in an expanded existence. In this expansion, the veils of the subtle worlds begin to fall, and we begin to perceive them embedded in everyday life, and at the same time going much further to spaces of Infinity. Discouragement spreads for those who begin this journey. On the one hand, there is doubt about the mental health of these new forms of expanded Consciousness. On the other hand, to the Infinity of the world of objects is added the Infinity of the Subject, and we feel that we would need many lives to be able to begin to understand anything at all. We feel small and powerless, and if inherited and learned feelings of guilt intervene in the equation, we see ourselves as a miserable worms that neither deserves nor could begin to glimpse the Real. All of these are adverse forces, resistances that perform a task that is as necessary as it is hard: distilling drops of deep longing.
We cannot cross into spaces (worlds) of Buddhi carrying the backpack of Manas. From the point of view of Manas we could never know that Infinity. From Buddhi, that Infinity is what you are. You know Infinity by being Infinity, not in innumerable actions of knowledge that would entail an infinite memory of evanescent properties and attributes. You don't need to know infinite masks, but the force from which all those masks emerge: You. Knowing yourself is... simply Being. From the point of view of Manas and guilt, only great souls cross the river of Samsara, after countless works and adversities in which they purify a karmic burden that is that of the species and Life itself. From Buddhi, there is no river of Samsara, nor guilt. Manas is the dream you have of a bad night in a bad inn, which dissolves in the imperturbability of Grace that right now expresses itself as your Atman. You are at the same time the river, the one that crosses, the boat, this side, the other side, and the butterfly that on a flower dreams that it was a worm.
Adverse forces make us want to escape, to go towards a small self-image of the past that Manas created. Mevlana Rumi -God bless him- said that when you feel yourself that small and dark you have to move closer to the Light and not run away from It. Light does not see our limitation and our darkness: Light only sees Light.
Comments