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BEYOND
THE MIND
Other Passage Press Books by David Frawley

AYURVEDIC HEALING
A Comprehensive Guide

THE ASTROLOGY OF THE SEERS

A Guide to Hindu (Vedic) Astrology

FROM THE RIVER OF HEAVEN

Hindu and Vedic Knoweldge for the Modern Age

GODS, SAGES AND KINGS

Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization

TANTRIC YOGA
The Worship of the Goddess
(Forthcoming)

THE UPANISHADIC VISION

(Forthcoming)

WISDOM OF THE ANCIENT SEERS

Mantras of the Rig Veda
 BEYOND
THE MIND

by David Frawley

Passage Press
Salt Lake City Utah
Passage Press is a division of Morson Publishing
Morson Publishing
P.O. Box 21713
Salt Lake City, Utah 84121-0713

©1992 by David Frawley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in
the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Published 1992

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design by Ted Nagata Graphic Design

Printed on acid-free paper

ISBN 1-878423-14-2
 CONTENTS
Foreword by V. Ganesan
Preface
PARTI: The Way of Discrimination
The Search for Enlightenment 7,
The Myth of Mental Knowledge 2k
The Culture of Illusion et)
Demystifying the Mind 32
The Process of Inquiry 31
Mind as Matter 40
Matter and the Unconscious 43
The Origin of the Mind 49
Se
Ger
Fe)
Ci
Sie Human Nature and Intelligence 53
Evolution and Transformation I Du
Evolution and Transformation II 60
Spirit, Matter and Nature 64
Matter, Energy and Mind 67
The Sacred and the Profane 70
Discovery of the Divine iP}
Se
eS Bo
Mle
PE
SB
AE
SN
=ee The True Basis of Culture 84
PART II: The Challenges of Awareness
Action and Transformation 95
Addiction and Thought oT
The Alchemy of Perception 99
Being 101
Beyond Self-Illusion 103
The Burden of Memory 105
Can One Live Without Thought? 107
Channeling and Meditation 109
~P
Pt
RY
AA
Pp Conscious Will 111
10. The Consumer and the Consumed 113
11. The Creative State 114
12. Direct and Indirect Knowledge 115
13. Discrimination Between Subject and Object 117
14. The Eternal 119
15. Fear and the Unknown 120
16. The Flame of Awareness 121
17. The Fundamental Question 123
18. The Influx of Matter into Mind 125
19. Karma 127
20. Kundalini 129
21. Limitation and the Unlimited 130
22. Mantra 131
23. Meditation and the Unconscious 133
24. The Message of Anxiety 135
25. Opposition and Understanding 137
26. The Pain of Consciousness 139
27. Positive Thinking or Negation of Thought? 141
28. Power and Energy 143
29. Pranayama 145
30. Presence and the Present Moment 146
31. Purity of Mind and Going Beyond the Mind 147
32. Pursuit of Security 149
33. Reality and Appearance 151
34. The Religion of Truth 153
35. Renunciation 154
36. The Role of the Guru 156
37. Self-Integration and the Abandonment of the Self 158
38. Sensation, Emotion and Thought 159
39. Service 160
40. Suffering and Awakening 161
41, Thought and Conflict 162
42. The True Self 164
43. The Universal Religion 166
44, The Waters of Life 167
 — Contents —

45. Wonder and Awe 168

46. Yogaand Meditation 170
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 FOREWORD
BY V. GANESAN

David Frawley has long been known to our readers as a writer of great
knowledge and profound insight into the teachings of our Hindu tradition
and their practical application in the pursuit of Self-realization. With his
command of the Sanskrit language and personal experience over years of
spiritual practice, Mr. Frawley has demonstrated his apprehension of deep
spiritual truths in his many books and articles, much to the benefit of the
earnest seeker.
In Beyond the Mind he has departed somewhat from his usual schol-
arly approach to share with a more wide-spread audience the benefit of
his reflections and insights. Drawing upon the teachings of such greater
Masters as Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti and Swami
Vivekananda, and such schools of thought as Advaita Vedanta, Sankhya,
Zen, Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism, Mr. Frawley has synthesized
the fundamental truths at the heart of all teachings pad placed his findings
before the reader as a unified whole.
In many ways Beyond the Mind reflects Mr. Frawley’s own search,
and the various chapters are meditations or contemplations on the eternal
verities rather than scholarly expositions on the writers and writings he
has studied in the course of that search. Yet each sage has left an indelible
print on the author’s mind, as can be seen from the chapter in Part II
entitled “The Fundamental Question,” where Mr. Frawley points out the
central-most core of all teachings, the enquiry into the source of one’s
own being, our “I,” as taught by Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. This
vital theme recurs throughout the book, often interwoven with the com-
plementary teachings of J. Krishnamurti. Each “meditation” bears careful
study and thought on the part of the reader, while application of the fruits
of such contemplation will certainly lead the reader forward on his or her
own Path, whatever it may be.
In the words of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharashi, all Paths and
practices converge upon the same Goal, just as the one “fundamental”
question is the last to be answered, while at the same time being the very
Goal itself: “Who am I?” “Who is meditating, practicing, questioning,
‘doing’?” When this is found, all is found and, as Mr. Frawley reiterates
throughout the book, when this is found, paradoxically, All is found, and
10 — Beyond the Mind —
oneself, into the One
when All is found, “All” disappears, together with
that lies beyond the realm of mind, though t or words.

V. GANESAN
Editor, The Mountain Path
Sri Ramanasramam
Tiruvannamalai, South India
April 17, 1992
 PREFACE

There is an eternal spiritual science based on the discrimination

between spirit and matter, the sacred and the profane, the Divine and the
undivine. On a psychological level, it is the science of discrimination
between the perceiver and the perceived, the inner and the outer, the
conscious and the unconscious, subject and object, the Self and the
not-Self.
This science of discrimination is perhaps the classical form of world
spirituality. It is the original basis of ancient Hindu philosophy, not as a
mere theory but as the practice of direct perception and clear observation.
On this foundation the systems of Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta and Buddhism
grew and evolved. We find traces of this science in early Greek thought,
in Persian Zoroastrianism, and in the mystical essence of the Judeo-Chris-
tian-Islamic tradition. However, in these systems it tends more toward
dualism or monotheistism rather than the monistic view of the world
embodied in the Indian systems.
This system is not ultimately a form of dualism. It is a path of pure
unity that negates falsehood and duality. It is therefore not a discrimina-
tion between two aspects of reality, but discerning reality from illusion,
which is necessary to arrive at truth.
This spiritual science is also presented mythologically in stories of
the battles between the forces of light and darkness, the gods and the
demons. It is hidden in the sun and fire worship of ancient cultures, the
religion of light and enlightenment, particularly in the Vedic culture of
India that goes back to the dawn of human history. It is the cultivation of
our inner light and its discrimination from the darkness of fear and desire.
We find this same science of consciousness prominent in modern
Vedanta, with teachers like Ramana Maharshi, Swami Rama Tirtha or
Vivekananda. Aspects of it occur in most forms of insight meditation,
most notably Buddhist Zen or Vipassana, as it is the essence of the
knowledge whereby thought is understood and transcended. This science
also occurs outside of defined spiritual traditions as it transcends any
formal limitations. In this regard a similar approach is found in such
non-traditional modern teachers as J. Krishnamurti.
In a deeper sense this science of consciousness is not a system or
science at all. It is the system of no system, the science of the spiritual
which is the negation of materialistic science. According to its deeper view
12 — Beyond the Mind —

all name, form, number, quantity and system apply only to the outer, the
unreal and superficial side of life — and as long as we believe in these
things as reality we live in illusion. This science of consciousness is the
sense of the Atman or Purusha, the true conscious subject who is one with
all, in whom we discover our inherent ability to transcend all mechanism
and predetermination. It is not so much a tradition as the continuity of the
awareness of the eternal that is beyond all time, karma, image or identity.
As such it is the science of meditation, which is the essence of the
practice of Yoga. Yoga implies a dual movement, not only uniting with
the real, but also dis-identifying with the unreal. In fact as the real is always
there, the real action of yoga is not in uniting with truth but removing us
from falsehood.
In the course of my spiritual studies it became clear that the true
knowledge behind all the original traditions is eternal and universal and
that it alone has the power to deliver us from our present human crisis.
However, many of us today cannot perceive the inner meaning of ancient
or Oriental teachings, which are often veiled in mantra, symbol or
philosophical terminology. Nor can many of us today understand the older
languages like Sanskrit wherein these views are best explained. Yet many
of us do have the intelligence to grasp these insights if they are presented
in understandable terms. For this purpose the present book evolved and
because of this need it avoids the use of Sanskrit terms or traditional
references. These I have dealt with in my other works.
While we may relate this science of consciousness to particular
traditional formulations, it must be understood that what is really aimed
at is the direct perception of the reality that is beyond thought and
formulation. How we may relate this to time, place, person and culture is
only secondary.
I have used some terms of the older Western spirituality, like the
sacred and the profane, though these should be understood in another
sense than that to which they have been reduced by organized religion
and its stereotyped thinking. I have attempted to restore these terms to
their original meaning in order to link us up with the great stream of human
thought and awareness that was projected through them in ancient times.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section examines the
issue of thought and the mind in a comprehensive manner. The second
section deals with specific topics, usually of one or two pages. The first
section therefore deals more with the background issues of our life. The
second section shows how to deal with them on a practical level. Books
of this sort are not meant for quick, casual or cursive reading. They are
meant to be approached slowly and meditated upon carefully. There is a
 — Preface — 13

certain circularity to their logic because their central point is simple and
allows no departure from it into the extraneous.
This book is a substantial revision of the Indian publication of the
same name, Beyond the Mind (Indian Books Centre 1984), which was
first written in 1981-1983. A number of people have gone over the book
to some degree through the years and have contributed various comments
and reviews, and I wish to express my appreciation for their help. The
book is dedicated to the teachers and teachings mentioned above, who are
responsible for stimulating these inquiries in my own life, most specific-
ally Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti and Swami Rama Tirtha, who
have been the most instrumental in this regard.
As a personal note, this book was like a sculpture, like carving a stone
into a statue. There is perhaps more in what has not been said, and could
not be said, than in what has been set forth. Much more has been hewn
off and left behind than has remained.

DAVID FRAWLEY
Santa Fe, N.M.
September 1991
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 PART I

THE WAY OF DISCRIMINATION

Yoga is the negation of the thought-com-

posed mind. — Patanjali Yoga Sutras 1.2

Not what one knows with the mind, but that

by which, the seers declare, the mind is known.
That is the reality which you should know. Not
what people regard in this world as an object.
— Kena Upanishad I.5

As stars, as a flickering lamp, as magic, as

the dew, as a bubble, as a dream, lightning or a
cloud, thus we should observe the manifest
world. — Buddha, Diamond Sutra 32
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 1
THE SEARCH
FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

According to the science of Yoga, what we call the mind or our

thought process is something material. The mind is part of the material
world and ruled by its mechanism. Therefore, whatever one may do by
the intentionality of the mind is materialism, even if one uses the mind in
the search for enlightenment. Thought is matter and what is truly spiritual
is beyond matter, and hence also beyond the mind.
To discover what is truly spiritual we must learn to go beyond the
thought-composed mind and its mechanism. We must learn how to
dissolve thought on both conscious and subconscious layers. This is not
a conceptual or analytical process, nor is it anything that we can arrive at
through personal will or effort. Thought only comes to an end when we
comprehend its origin and its limitations, when we understand the futility
of its processes. We cannot get beyond the mind by any activity of the
mind, but only by dissolving it in its source in pure consciousness.
No mere theoretical knowledge or conceptual grasp of the issue is
sufficient. Whatever we do through thought only perpetuates our condi-
tioning and its resultant sorrow. Whatever action we undertake without
understanding the mind will only further our bondage. We will remain
caught in the material world, trapped in a mechanical existence and a
compulsive dependency upon the external. What is spiritual therefore can
only come into being when the mind, which is matter, is set aside. It cannot
arise through any extension of the mind but only through its abandonment,
its surrender to the light of “seeing” within.
The real search for enlightenment, therefore, is not so much a search
with the mind as an inquiry into what lies beyond the mind. Hence the
search for enlightenment cannot cater to mental values or the mind’s need
for information and ideas. These only feed the mind and through it our
attachment to the material world and the personal self. Whatever thought
may fabricate, however subtle the idea or convincing the information, is
not the fact of existence, which is beyond description. It is merely the
mind’s pattern which, however lofty, remains limiting to reality in its
unbounded vastness.
18 — Beyond the Mind —

The development of the mind and mental powers, however useful, is

not itself spiritual, but another extension of matter and its conditioning.
Thought can produce a certain capacity and extend our powers on material
or psychic planes, which are more extensive than we think, but it cannot
bring us real understanding or lasting peace. This is because the place of
the mind is not to afford the perception of truth but to allow for the
appropriate outer orientation in life. The mind is a superficial orientation
device that cannot perceive the profound depths of being where truth is
revealed.
Unfortunately, spirituality and religion today have been generally
reduced to a pattern of thought — to intellectual assertions, emotional
attachments or social presentations. While truth can, and indeed should,
be presented in a rational and harmonious manner, any reduction of it to
an exclusive pattern or identity reflects the inertia of the materialistic
mind, not the spontaneous order of truth. Where there is an insistence that
truth takes one identity as opposed to others, it is the bias of the mind, not
the nature of truth, which is ever free and overflowing.
Much of the apparent spiritual awakening in the world today remains
on an intellectual or emotional level and has not yet reached the place of
true perception. It is often merely a change of appearances, an acquisition
of new roles or information but rarely a real transformation of who we
are. It is often dominated by the same pursuit of sensation, entertainment,
stimulation, identity and status which characterizes the limitations of our
culture as a whole. It is usually not interested in the depths of emptiness
and inquiry where truth is revealed but in the surface display of spiritual
and occult experiences, phenomena and powers, or simply in psycholog-
ical and emotional imagination and indulgence.
Yet, given the extreme intellectualization and materialization of life
today (which modern technology accommodates), it is hoped that at least
some of us have reached the point of maturity wherein we can see the
inherent limitations of thought — that we have developed the mind
enough so that we can go beyond it. Our society may not survive if we
cannot do this because matter is the transient and limited and cannot lead
us to the enduring and the full. Materialistic and self-focused values must
result in disintegration to the extent that we embrace them as what is of
true value in life.
What is truly spiritual is not a matter of wishful thinking or of positive
emotions, or any of the manipulations of thought. The spiritual work is
the arduous labor of freeing ourselves from the mechanism of the mind
and its subconscious reactions. Though various actions and techniques
can support this work if applied consciously, nothing in the realm of form
 — The Search for Enlightenment — 19

can bring it about. Nor is the spiritual work another type of enjoyment,
curiosity or fascinating experience. It requires that we patiently expose
the ignorance at the root of our mental process.
The spiritual work, which is meditation, requires that we give up all
illusions about ourselves and what we know and can do. It requires
actually draining the marsh land of the unconscious by no longer accept-
ing the rule of thought and its mechanical reactions as legitimate. For this
it is necessary that we see our impulses for what they are — external
influences to which we allow ourselves to succumb through lack of
attention. It requires, to use the language of ancient mythology, that we
slay the dragon — that we master the serpentine energy of the habitual
thought process which arises from the separate self. We have to break
open the heavy rock of the conditioned mind and ego and release the Sun
of Truth imprisoned within it.
The only way to discover what is truly spiritual, beneficent and real
is to dissolve the mind, which is a mechanism of matter. This means seeing
the mind for what it is — nota true intelligence but a subconscious process
into which we fall when we fail life’s challenge to be aware. The mind is
our bondage to the past, which is matter, time and death, the rigidity of
that which is no more, through which no real transformation can be
possible. The mind functions as a veil on our perception of truth, and until
that veil is lifted we cannot know the real.
To understand the mind we must examine the entire nature and
structure of our thinking process, not as an intellectual exercise but as part
of the process of meditation. This requires that we no longer follow the
current of our thoughts but trace it back to its source in consciousness
itself.
Apart from thought there is no entity that can be called the mind. The
mind is a bundle of thoughts, which themsclves are often confused and in
conflict with each other. When the mind is no longer fed with distracted
thought it naturally ceases, and with its passing all of our problems,
individual and collective, also come to an end. ;
Real awareness, the consciousness of being, is not of the mind and
has no limits or boundaries, nor can it in any way be possessed. Real
awareness comes into being through the capacity to objectively observe
our thoughts. It has a substance and energy that no idea can ever reach, in
which there is spontaneous peace and liberation.

* KK
20 — Beyond the Mind —

There are two forces in the universe — the knowledge and the igno-
rance. The ignorance is thought which disperses the light of consciousness
into the external world, wherein we lose our true being. This ignorance is
the belief in an external reality, a bodily identity and a separate self.
The knowledge is the inner light which reveals the self-sufficient
reality of being. We all sense this deeper knowledge in our intrinsic
yearning for the eternal, the pure and the real. True knowledge is self-
knowledge, or self-awareness, which is not self-consciousness or personal
identity, but the perception of all the universe as abiding within the heart.
We must learn to move from the ignorance to the knowledge, which,
to use an ancient Vedic prayer, is to move from non-being to being, from
darkness to light, from death to immortality. This is the path of discrimi-
nation whereby we see through illusion and discern the eternal truth .
hidden behind it. In this process our false identity or separate self is
discarded and we come to know who we really are in the consciousness
that is one with all things. Our eternal nature or true Self is revealed, like
the sun that shines forth after an eclipse. This takes us beyond all doubt
and sorrow to the Absolute that is our deepest nature.
Truth itself cannot be produced or arrived at by anything. To find truth
we must negate the falsehood which obscures it. Hence this book proceeds
primarily by the way of negation, which is the main method of the yogic
path of knowledge. However, this approach is not meant to leave us in a
state of negativity but to remove the veils so that the inner light, which is
self-effulgent, will no longer be obscured.
These are the main themes of inquiry in this book. We will dwell on
them, explore their implications and endeavor to understand them in our
daily lives. It is not enough merely to read these truths or to think about
them. We must absorb them into the very fabric of our consciousness and
perception on all levels of our being. On them our meditation proceeds.
 2
THE MYTH
OF MENTAL KNOWLEDGE

We worship thought; that is, we have made thought into our primary
means of knowing reality. We take what thought tells us to be the truth.
Our entire culture is based upon thought and its coordinates. This is true
not only in regard to science, art and philosophy — the mental superstruc-
ture of our society — but also the basis of our personal identity, our
psychological infrastructure.
Western culture has long held the intellectual genius as the highest
human type, the great man of thought as artist, scientist or philosopher.
Our religions operate primarily in terms of thought as belief, faith and
identity and have long since codified themselves intellectually and struc-
tured themselves socially as vested interests in the material world. We
may admit the existence of different domains of the mind extending
beyond ordinary intellectual realms into the occult or the mystical, but we
seldom recognize that the mind itself is an illusion-building mechanism
that cannot be relied upon for the perception of truth. Even when we
consider that there may be something real beyond the mind we tend to
reduce it to another idea or level of thought, and approach it by trying to
expand the mind rather than transcend it.
What we regard as real is the material world that we know through
thought. The two always go together: thought is based upon some external
phenomenon that gives it form, and the recognition of matter is dependent
upon thought, which measures it. Even our thoughts of what is beyond
matter are organized in a materialistic fashion into different mental forms
and emotional assertions. We may believe in God or have an idea of
enlightenment, but our thought process remains limited by its very nature
and merely fashions various patterns which, whatever they may be about,
are still the operation of the materialistic mind projecting its rigid struc-
tures on life which is ever free.
In the civilization developed in what is called history, we are essen-
tially creatures of thought — mental beings. Our intellectual culture is
merely the refinement of our basic self-conscious thought process — its
sophisticated or aesthetic articulation. Our culture is based upon thought
either in the simple materialistic sense of the measurable, as with money,
22 — Beyond the Mind —

status and informational knowledge or with the idea of the immeasurable

or God, which becomes the basis for organized religion. We are creatures
of the outgoing mind whose concern it is to acquire and achieve in the
material, social and intellectual world through the calculation and moti-
vation of thought. Thought is our life, the automatic process of our psyche
and the ground of our consciousness. The basis of our social conditioning
is to make us think about things, react to them for or against, and thereby
come under their influence. We live under the rule of thought, which is
the rule of materialistic becoming — though the names and terms of this
becoming are diverse and ever-changing.
In the development of modern civilization and its success in technol-
ogy, we have oriented our rationality toward the outer world. In fact by
the term intellect we have come to primarily mean the outer-oriented mind
that judges all things in terms of measurable forms and quantities. This
outer-oriented intellect has become our main tool not only for understand-
ing and manipulating the external world but also for dealing with psycho-
logical and social problems. It is the basis of most of our science,
philosophy and politics, through which, in extreme instances, we are
actually trying to remake the human being. This can be dangerous because
the outward-seeking intellect, ignorant of inner reality, must remain
limited and superficial. It does not have the capacity to understand life,
but tends to reduce it, sometimes with violence, to a rigid pattern or
ideology.
What we call the intellect has a mechanical nature. Its purpose is to
allow us to understand the outward or mechanical side of life, which it
does through its ability to organize sensory data. This is certainly neces-
sary and helpful in the practical world, but it is the wrong tool for
understanding our life or soul, which is beyond thought and sensation.
The intellect has neither the capacity nor the right to determine what is
truth, life or God. The intellect does not have the ability to understand or
to change life. If we use it for this purpose, it can only distort life’s organic
harmonies with its artificial patterns.
The more the intellect interferes with life and tries to manipulate it
through thought, the more problems in living will be created. It is not a
question of merely not enough information or the wrong technique but
that no amount of information or improvement in technique can ever touch
the real depth of life. It is not further study and research that we need to
solve our problems, but a new approach — one of awareness, not calcu-
lation; one of direct insight, not any form of analysis.
To understand truth or ultimate reality we require a science of con-
sciousness, a science of self-observation rather than one of examination
 — The Myth of Mental Knowledge — 23

of the external. It does not require the abandonment of rationality, but the
true awakening of reason, which is to discriminate between the eternal
and the transient, not merely to play with the fleeting appearances of
things. This is the sense in which the ancient yogis and seers spoke of the
intellect (Sanskrit Buddhi) and regarded it as the real measure of man.
The human being as an intellectual and rational being is not meant to be
aslave of the senses but cognizant of eternal reality and willing to organize
his or her life and aspiration around it.
_ To return to our true status as conscious perceivers we must turn the
intellect around, reorient it from outer to inner reality, from the world of
the senses to the domain of consciousness. This does not mean that we
must lose the capacity to use the mind to understand outer reality but that
we give priority to its inner function. To reorient the mind inwardly
requires mental passivity rather than activity, the silence of mind that
allows the inner nature of things to reveal itself.
We have created an entire cult and mystique of the outer-oriented
intellect or materialistic mind. It is so pervasive that even those who
oppose it may only see through one side of it. We may easily question a
superficial intellectual approach to life, but few of us ever really question,
much less get beyond, the domain of thought with its fixation on the ego
and the worldly side of our nature.
Modern rational and intellectual culture may appear to be enlight-
ened, beyond the superstitions of the primitive mind which, we think, in
its ignorance of natural phenomena invested the world with spirits. But
how enlightened is the outgoing mind, whatever it may do by itself? Is it
only a coincidence that such an intellectual culture has brought us to the
point where the very life of the planet is endangered?
From the standpoint of yogic knowledge, modern intellectual culture
itself could be called a kind of superstition. Our culture is one of spiritual
ignorance that remains based on and bound to the darkness of the separate
The
self, which is a materialistic or bodily idea as to who we really are.
the outward- oriented intellect is a cult of materiali sm. It is a
culture of
main thing
worship of the external, which regards the outer image as the
in life. Look at our world and perceive this for yourself. Our prime
religion as
attention is on politics, business, entertainment, science, and
is in our physical and social
belief or institution. Our prime sense of self
identity.
ogy,
Though we have developed a complex and sophisticated technol
es from primitiv e emotion s like greed and
we have not freed ourselv
more sophisti cated weapons but this only reflects
violence. We may have
n. We have
how we ate still dominated by primitive fear and suspicio
24 — Beyond the Mind —

gained in outer proficiency, in the ability to manipulate the external world,

but our underlying mentality has not fundamentally changed. It is based
on aggression and assertion, the imposition of our thoughts and desires
upon reality, which leads to division and conflict.
While the ancients invested the idol with a soul in order to use the
image as a vehicle for the spirit, we now take the idol or material form to
be itself the true reality. We have not so much removed idolatry from the
world as we have banished the spirit from the form. For us the idol or
material thing is the reality and we value it as it is — a mere object or
person for transient enjoyment. We try to invest matter itself with tran-
scendence, as if gaining more pleasure or success were the highest goal
of life or had some ultimate value.
When functioning apart from the light of awareness, the intellect, to
use a Biblical metaphor, becomes Lucifer or the fallen angel. It loses its
spiritual or angelic role of supporting awareness and becomes a factor of
corruption and decay. When the intellect claims to determine truth it
usurps the place of the Divine or our inner consciousness and breeds
illusions. This is the real meaning of the fall of man.
The intellect is only a secondary means of knowledge. It has no real
light of its own but can only properly serve to reflect the light that comes
from above it. When we assert the intellect as a true and independent
means of knowledge we separate ourselves from the light of truth. Such
separation must eventually lead to sorrow and conflict as the inevitable
outcome of a process of division.
What, after all, is matter and how do we actually experience it? Matter
is the external, the seen, the object. Matter is not the light of consciousness
but the form that is illumined by it. Hence the more externally oriented
we become the more unconscious we become, the more creatures of
external influences, habits and, ultimately, addictions. In the outgoing
process of thought we materialize ourselves and become dense, heavy and
weighed down by our own beliefs, opinions and emotions.
What is external and material, existing in time, is also mortal, allied
to death, and must lead to decay. This is not a moralistic judgment but
rather a simple issue of the nature of forces in their operation. Thought in
its outgoing function leads to disintegration. Regarding the external as
reality puts us under an externalizing force that fragments us.
We must also ask, What is the nature of the intellect or outgoing mind?
It is a reduction of things to a pattern of name, belief or system. It is the
attempt to organize life in a materialistic fashion by coordinates of time,
place and person. It is our impressionability to details and differences, not
a consciousness of unity. The outward-oriented intellect thus remains
 — The Myth of Mental Knowledge — 25

under the allure of matter which is the glamor of sensation — our evolu-
tionary inertia of sex, violence, comfort, territory and personal power. The
intellect thereby becomes the high priest of the worship of matter and
sensation which, though it may be refined as ideas or images and broadcast
through technology, remains based in illusion. The intellect serves to
develop the culture of the ignorance that recognizes the outer appearance
of name, title and wealth and is blind to the soul or essence in which alone
is true and immortal life.
The thought-composed mind remains bound to the thing or the image
on which it operates. It exists in the shadow of the stone and so tends to
assert the reality of the outer world rather than the inner consciousness.
Mental knowledge is thus a form of superstition, a belief in the reality of
what is only an illusory appearance. Truth is not to be known by the ideas
of the mind, which are only limited material patterns, but only by direct
perception when the mind is quiet. This is not to say that the mind has no
place. Its place is as a servant who aids us in our outer functioning, not
the lord of the house. It is not the light and by itself can only lead us into
darkness.
Matter and its articulation as the mind is only the surface, the shadow
of life. Life is not the form which can be known, but the light and the love
that looks through all things. It is the sacredness of being which any name
violates, the beauty of the morning flower which puts to shame all the
gtandiose formulations of thought. It is found where we do not look and
in what we do not know, in what we are too informed to see. Life is the
subtle presence, not the dramatic sensation. It is the being which unites,
not the form which divides. It can only be known by the pure perception
of undivided awareness, compared to which preoccupation with any idea
whatsoever is darkness and superstition.
The belief that the thought-composed mind is intelligent — that the
cultivation of its powers and expressions will bring enlightenment or
make for a true culture — is a myth. It may be the ultimate and most
dangerous of myths because it arrogates enlightenment for what is only a
reflection of the light.
What science and intellectual enlightenment is creating for mankind
may be another mythology, yet a mythology without any real impulse
toward transcendence or the Divine. So far it appears to be a mythology
of materialism, of purely outward happiness as social, political entities,
as physical bodies in a world of material freedom, as if this transient life
were the sole reality. As long as we do not learn to question the mind and
see beyond it, we will create more illusions, more brave new worlds in
which, however much we may achieve in terms of outer comfort or
26 — Beyond the Mind —
alone is
enjoyment, we will not come to know our true nature, in which
happiness.
given
This does not mean that we have to abandon science, which has
l level, but that this
us many helpful tools in dealing with life on a practica
science of
outer science must be subordinated to an inner science; the
-
consciousness must be given its central place. In fact the whole develop
science may be a prelimi nary step to the real
ment of our outward-looking
-
movement of human civilization and enlightened culture — the develop
inner science of awarene ss. After opening all the vistas of
ment of the
all
intellectual knowledge the conscious being within us will ask: “Is this
there is? And what lies beyond death?” Awareness alone can fulfill our
d.
desire to know the truth, not any idea or information, however profoun
Even modern science itself has proved that there is little reality to the
world as it appears to the senses. Yet few of us have yet to question our
identity as body or mind. To find reality, which is not a thing of the mere
mind or senses, requires true rationality and true enlightenment which
penetrates through all the illusions of thought starting with our own
self-image. The highest rationality reveals not the mechanics of the
manifest universe but the ways of thought. Understanding ourselves we
come to understand all things — but if we seek to understand all things
without knowing the nature of our own awareness, great will be our
calamity.
 5
THE CULTURE
OF ILLUSION

Thought, if we learn to observe it, is a reaction-mechanism devoid of

true consciousness. It is the inertia of our conditioning that we fail to truly
question.
We live in the hypnosis of thought and through it we develop the
glamor of conceptual knowledge. In the modern world we have huge
computers filled with data about the external world, but how much real
recognition of an inner reality do we possess? We look to information to
save us, which keeps us in a perpetual search and distraction that avoids
the fundamental issues of who we are and what, if anything, transcends
time and appearance.
Our culture considers the growth of intelligence to be the expansion
of the mind and its powers: science, art, philosophy and the whole of
intellectual and technological expertise. We think that the development of
the mind through education and the cultivation of thought brings about
intelligence, while without education we remain ignorant and unrefined.
But both the intellectual genius and the common person as products of
thought are conditioned entities. Development of the intellect gives
freedom within the prison of conditioned existence, but does not allow us
to leave it. Its illusory freedom may in fact prevent us from seeking to
really escape from our bondage. True education thus is not found in
developing thought but in the process of meditation, whereby we learn to
set thought aside.
Modern materialistic culture is only the inevitable outcome of human
civilization based on thought. Religious cultures based upon belief turn
God or the Spirit into a mere idea or sentiment. This paves the way for
purely materialistic cultures, which regard the appearances of thought and
sensation as the real world, the measure of truth itself. What these
so-called religious cultures have valued is not the truth of the infinite and
the eternal, but a particular name, book, idea or person representing it. To
the extent therefore that we give central importance to thought, even in
the name of what is holy, we provide the justification for a purely
materialistic culture. We give impulse to a purely profane society in which
28 — Beyond the Mind —
in one
nothing is sacred, in which all is subject to the scalpel or the label
form or another.
The mind possesses surface data — names and forms, facts and
theories — temporally bound personal and social expressions that can be
interpreted in any number of ways but afford no certain knowledge, no
understanding of the universal and eternal. The mind remains bound to
an object, a measurable and nameable thing or phenomenon. By ignoring
the subjective, conscious and living element behind the world, it appears
objective. Thus the intellect has a false objectivity which reduces things
to superficial appearances, to a lowest common denominator in which
their unique essence is obscured. It has the objectivity of the external,
which is the insensitivity of the rock that admits only the evident form.
Hence an intellectual culture tends to ignore or to deny the higher and
deeper values of life, and ultimately may even lose track of its own ethical,
aesthetic or philosophical values. It reduces life to the common run of
sensation, to the material world of work and pleasure in which all real
transcendence is lost.
Modern rational and intellectual culture is the inevitable outcome of
the very superstition it has appeared to oppose — the idolatry of the name,
the image and the unquestioned belief. We have erected new temples of
matter worship as shopping malls, movie theaters, science exhibitions,
and so on. We have made nature into a recreation ground for physical
enjoyment, and may expect religion to be entertaining or financially
rewarding. We may not be worshipping matter consciously, but sensation
is where we invest our main thought and energy, where we feel the greatest
allure and seek our transcendence. Our very thought process — which
runs of itself perpetually in our minds as an endless concern with things
and appearances — is evidence of the hypnotic rule of the external over
us.
The scientific intellect today has swept away most of the old religious
mythology, but we have replaced this with a new irreligious mythology.
We have not freed ourselves from the rule of idolatry and illusion but have
merely secularized it. We may not worship images of gods and goddesses
but we have turned them into movie stars, sports heroes, politicians, and
so on. It is in these personality cults that our real religious zeal has been
placed today. This we can judge by the amount of energy and consider-
ation we give them, which can become adulation or even hysteria.
The nature of the mind is to seek truth and happiness, as these qualities
are not inherent in the mind, which is confusion and sorrow. The older
religions, particularly those of the Eastern world, reorient the seeking
nature of the mind in the direction of the Divine. Today we have “demys-
 — The Culture of Illusion — 29

tified” ourselves by removing this orientation to the eternal and have

thereby directed our innate sense of seeking (which is a kind of worship)
to the transient, creating purely materialistic cults like rock music or
political fanaticism to fill the vacuum. We seek transcendence in life not
by going beyond the limitations of sensation but by exhausting ourselves
with ever greater sensations.
On the other hand, Western religions have often tried to eliminate the
use of images in the name of removing idolatry. Yet it is not the attitude
of idolatry or the limitation of truth to a form that they have usually
opposed, but merely the use of images or forms in religious worship. They
have thereby succeeded only in eliminating a creative and artistic ap-
proach to the spiritual life, and rendered their religious beliefs rigid and
sterile. Rather than freeing us from limitation they have even more
dogmatically limited truth to an idea, statement of faith, single savior or
book. This exclusivism and attachment to names and divisive attitudes
exposes a materialistic bias that has no place in the religious realm.
Images themselves are not idols. They only become idols when we
see them as truth rather than as symbols or metaphors. All things in nature,
including our own bodies, are such images or appearances. Our self-
image, which is the reduction of our eternal consciousness to our bodily
appearance, is itself the root of all idolatry and without dissolving it we
cannot be free of the illusion of the world.
The placing of a medium between ourselves and reality is itself the
real idolatry. This deprives us of direct perception, and eventually the
medium becomes more important than the thing itself, to which we no
longer have direct access. The idolatry of modern civilization is nowhere
more obvious than in the mass media, which sets up an intermediate
image-realm that can prevent us from facing life directly. Whatever
intermediary we place between ourselves and reality, whatever we are
centered in that is not existence itself, becomes our false god. All such
intermediating influences deprive us of our souls as they take away our
own direct experience, which is our true life and being.
What modern science provides for us as truth or reality is essentially
only the mystique of numbers. Science cannot give us life, which is
incalculable, but only formulas. These numbers may be very large or very
small, but they remain surface measurements, not a direct communion
with the nature of things. Apart from their practical value, the idea that
they allow us to know reality is a mystification. Numbers help us manip-
ulate the external world, which may make our material lives easier, but
they cannot bring us to peace, harmony or eternal truth. The limited
mentality they foster can cause their practical powers to be used to invent
30 — Beyond the Mind —

as we
new weapons of war or new articles for commercial exploitation,
have already witnesse d.
The great numbers and magnitudes spoken of in science may provoke
a feeling of wonder and awe in us as they show the vastness of the cosmos,
but the being or soul enshrined within that cosmos is inherently beyond
their reach. However far we extend the realm of numbers we will never
reach the point of true knowledge, which is of the infinite. Truth and being
is qualitative, not quantitative, not to be measured but only to be com-
muned with in silence. Modern science can trap us in the idolatry of
measurement and calculation unless we can recognize the sacred dimen-
sion in life that numbers can never circumscribe.
Numbers can be to the mental sphere what money is to the business
sphere — measurements to determine or control the reality of things.
Believing that scientific knowledge determines reality is no better than
thinking that money determines the worth of things. Numbers can no more
calculate truth than money can buy happiness. Money and numbers are
fetishes through which we hope to possess things. They are our magic
power words that we use to control things. They are not themselves
anything real. They can make us insensitive to the real nature of things
and allow us to manipulate and exploit the world. Hence the person
attached to intellectual knowledge may be no different than one attached
to wealth. He is merely following the same process of acquisition, but on
a subtler level.
This urge to possess, whether materially with wealth or intellectually
with knowledge, is the blind urge of matter to expand itself. This happens
through inertia when we are not conscious of life. Whatever we think we
possess is an illusion because life cannot be possessed or divided. Even
our own body does not belong to us, how much less so our property? We
may think we own things but, however much power over them we may
have, they will eventually fall out of our grasp just by the simple process
of time and death.
Apart from their practical utility, which is simple and objective,
material things have only a psychological value, the value we give them
through our thoughts as giving enjoyment or importance to the self.
Beyond their ability to provide the necessities of physical life, like food,
clothing or shelter, material things have no intrinsic worth, and can
certainly provide no lasting happiness or inner fulfillment.
What interest do we have in a game if there is no one who wins or
loses? The mind’s activities in themselves are meaningless, like a pile of
statistics or mathematical formulas. They become important by way of
habit or compulsion, according to their ability to impress others and
 — The Culture of Illusion — 31

manipulate the external world. Only if we are identified with the names
and forms of the mind do they have the power to fascinate us.
Until we are free of this process of investing material things or the
things of the mind with psychological value, which is a process of
illusion-building, we must be drawn into error. We will fail to see things
as they are but interpret them according to our fears and desires, which
must remain partial and distorted. True enlightenment dawns only when
we cease projecting value onto things but recognize their underlying
reality in awareness itself. This occurs when we are no longer taken in by
the structure of the world into believing that it is reality, or when we see
that the marvelous order of the universe is that of consciousness itself. To
atrive at this realization we need only understand the number One. Unity
is the true reality, which renders all calculations void.
 4
DEMYSTIFYING
THE MIND

The thought-composed mind, though a limited entity, has an unlim-

ited range of expansion within its field. There is no end to its potential
within its various domains, which, however, are themselves circum-
scribed.
The mind can develop endlessly in a limited dimension. This is like
mathematics. There are innumerable mathematical systems and opera-
tions possible, but mathematics remains limited and superficial, unable to
comprehend life, which is incalculable. Not comprehending the limita-
tions of the mind, we become caught in its endless capacity for play and
illusion.
Through the corridor of the mind we see no end to its great expressions
and perceptions. We see unlimited potentials of growth scientifically,
artistically and so on. Arriving at the mind’s open horizon from a non-in-
tellectual background is like finding the door open to a promised land that
stretches in every direction and should be enough for anyone. But the
mind is not all, and it is not enough. It cannot bring real peace, under-
standing or sensitivity. Its greatest aesthetic values are only an adornment,
incapable by themselves of transforming life. The mind is not the prom-
ised land. It is the island of illusion. The great heavens of the mind —
whether intellectual, aesthetic, occult or religious — are just a more
sophisticated materialism, a happier ignorance, a comfortable salon added
to our prison but still under the lock of a spiritual ignorance.
We must not look at the mind from the point of view of the mind. The
mind cannot see itself, just as fire cannot burn itself. The mind looks out
on its horizons, the territory in which it is invested. This it can only see
as valuable and strive to protect. Instead we must learn to understand the
simple ignorance under which the mind operates. We must cease being
dazzled by the mind’s various phenomena through which the self-image
hides and perpetuates itself. What is all our seeking if we take the sense
of personal achievement out of it?
While we may perceive the limitations of a materialistic or mecha-
nistic view of life, we seldom seriously consider how much we remain
under the hypnosis of thought. As long as the automatic stream of
 — Demystifying the Mind — 33

conditioned thoughts continues, it is evidence that we have not yet deeply

understood and freed ourselves from our conditioning. The mind mysti-
fies us with the name, idea and image, which in social terms is the
personality. Unless we question this process, we will only deceive our-
selves and fail to understand who we really are.
It is not the place of thought to determine truth, reality or what could
be called God. These are not within its domain. These belong to the
infinite, undefinable, unknown and unthinkable. No system of logic or
calculation can reach the reality of life which is sacred and inviolable.
Thought can explain the mechanics of the outer world but it cannot tell
us who we really are. To understand our true nature requires self-knowl-
edge, which is beyond all numbers, statistics and calculations, as well as
any theories, speculations or deductions.
Self-knowledge is not a matter of imagination or superstition either.
It also requires reason, discrimination and patient observation, but of a
different order. It requires the highest process of doubt, that of meditation,
wherein we must question everything, starting with the very idea of who
we are and not ending until we have negated all thoughts and opinions
from our minds. Self-knowledge requires purifying the mind of its con-
tents, not merely changing these contents around into another pattern.
Usually we think of the spiritual as something within the mind or
some higher part of it. As we search inwardly we find that there are much
wider areas and many different levels of the mind of which our material-
istic culture is unaware. We may see the opening up of these other parts
of the mind as spiritual growth; and indeed they may bring greater powers
of thought, concentration and perception as well as deeper experiences.
Yet they do not bring lasting peace or happiness, and often create more
subtle illusions, in which a more subtle or concentrated form of the ego
may remain hidden. We are not cognizant of the frontiers and boundaries
of the mind because we are too immersed in its activities. We expand the
screen of thought and remain caught in the mind’s images. What we think
is our spiritual growth is often just thought perpetuating itself through
spiritual appearances, making another of its endless adaptations.
For the mind, the Divine is a name, image, belief or person — again,
a quantifiable and hence material object, however subtle or fascinating it
may appear. What the mind believes in, even the name of God, is its own
experience, which leads us ultimately to deny the spiritual or to use it for
personal ends. Similarly, even a mind that denies God is caught in the
superstition of images and appearances. It is not free of illusions but is in
fact reduced to them alone as they are the essence of the material world.
34 — Beyond the Mind —

The mind can use the idea of God to assert the ultimacy of its own
formulations, which is a disguised worship of its own capacities. Such a
God does not take us to the sacred but entrenches us in an opinion or
experience as supreme. It leads us into argument and division because
there are as many different ideas, images or beliefs as thought can invent
and therefore any belief can claim as much validity as any other.
We usually follow the belief into which we are conditioned by birth,
whether it is Christian, Hindu, Buddhist or whatever. Or we join some
religious group because it offers us something special, some reward which
is often material in nature or makes us feel important — things most
missionary efforts try to provide. The same logic can justify any religion
or cult as the true faith.
Much of what we know as religion, particularly in religious traditions
that are not based on meditation, is little more than a cult — an illusion
of belief and mystification of salvation. All creed-based religions —
exclusive beliefs that ours alone is the only real path to God or truth and
that all others are false — are cults, or forms of hypnosis and mind-control
because they reduce truth to a limited pattern in which we become bound
and separate. They are based on wishful thinking — that if we believe, if
we accept some person, word, book or idea as God, we will be saved,
while those who think differently than us will in some way be condemned
or made to suffer.
What such so-called religions save us from is usually only the inquiry
into truth because through them we become trapped in a conclusion that
prevents any deeper examination. They keep us bound to a doctrine,
organization, or leader and deprive us of our own creative intelligence and
direct perception. They make us think that religion is a choice of the mind,
an emotional statement, or merely another social identity. Such religions
do not require an actual change of consciousness but merely a shift of
loyalty within the field of the known. They keep us from the real inner
work, which is to negate all beliefs into the truth that transcends thought.
The mind itself is a mystification and hypnosis. Thought is a process
of illusion-building. We can see this rather easily if we examine our own
thoughts and their automatic functioning. Note how many fantasies or
expectations we entertain in the course of a day or even an hour. It does
not take any effort for this process of illusion-building to occur. It happens
instantaneously as part of the nature of the mentality in which we live. As
long as fantasies occur (which we may believe are innocuous or even
healthy) they must have an effect on a conscious level and distort our
perception.
 — Demystifying the Mind — 35

Most of our culture, with its cult of personality and achievement —

whether politically, in the business world, or in the intellectual world —
is based on this fantasy process and its stimulation. The mind responds,
at least on a subliminal level, to every suggestion (a tendency the adver-
tising industry has been keen to manipulate). Such personal fantasies are
promoted because they keep us under the control of the external world
and the vested interests that run it, but they never lead us to any real
fulfillment.
It is necessary, therefore, that we demystify our minds from the
illusion of thought. Not to know the great illusion power of the mind, its
capacity for self-deception, is to remain naive in the spirit, no matter how
proficient we may otherwise be in thought or action. The mind is a
mystification because, if we examine deeply its knowledge, we find that
there is nothing really there — that it does not provide us with any direct
awareness of truth or reality. As the philosophers of India stated long ago,
the mind is Maya, the power of illusion. It is an illusion-building mecha-
nism which erects a superficial knowledge as the ultimate truth.
We must realize that thought is not an adequate means of knowing,
much less of changing reality. As long as we base our consciousness on
thought, and use it to change or improve things, we will remain trapped
in its compulsions. Our culture will be the victim of its collective fantasies
— political, social or religious — and of the attempts to convert, manip-
ulate or destroy to which they lead. Individually we will similarly come
to grief as the pattern of our beliefs and expectations must inevitably be
broken into pieces by the forces of time and death.
Whatever conclusion we come to as the truth, from any point of view,
regardless of how many facts we have or how many authorities accept it,
can only be an illusion because truth is not a conclusion but a state of
reverence. As long as we are thinking about things — trying to influence
the outcome of events, worrying, gossiping, calculating and manipulating
— we are violating the sacred natural order of “what is.” However good
our intentions, all attempts to know reality through thought must remain
insensitive and disruptive.
Truth manifests of itself when we cease trying to make it conform to
our thoughts, when we cease naively believing in any idea as truth. The
perception of truth arises spontaneously in the innocent and empty mind.
It is something that a mind burdened by it self-importance and caught up
in its attempts to know things cannot suspect. All effort at acquisition,
mental or material, disqualifies us from it. The truth is that we do not need
the mind and do not need to be dependent upon thought to define who we
36 — Beyond the Mind —

are. If we hold to our true nature of pure awareness, the mind will follow
in its appropriate place.
We are afraid that if we do not think about things we will lose them.
Yet the more we think about things the more we do actually lose contact
with what they really are. The more we think about ourselves also, the
more we come into doubt as to what our true nature is. Try to grasp yourself
with thought, and then ask who is the self that is known and who is the
self that is the knower? The veil of thought, which is the cover of illusion,
must come down for the perception of reality.
To go beyond the mind requires a sharpness and clarity of vision that
strips bare all the glamor of conceptual knowledge and imagination,
revealing their basic ignorance. The thought-composed mind is, without
qualification or possibility of change, material — a creature of ignorance.
There is nothing wrong with it in its appropriate outer domain, but we
should not look to it to grasp the essence. We cannot change the nature of
the mind. The mind can only be surrendered and subordinated. It cannot
be transformed into a true intelligence but must be made secondary so that
true intelligence, which is intrinsic, can manifest itself.
The mind’s sole purpose is transient orientation in the material world.
It is not meant to be the measure of our being, which is immeasurable.
And that immaterial being is not far away. It dwells at the heart of life as
the matrix of creation. This immaterial being can only be discovered when
we divest ourselves of the mind’s glamor and no longer believe in any
images, including our own. The self-image is itself the root of all confu-
sion and idolatry. When that comes to an end the light of truth illumines
everything.
 5
THE PROCESS
OF INQUIRY

We have learned to question things in the outer world, to examine

material objects to see what is behind them and how they work. Yet we
have not learned to question the mind itself. However, unless we have
first understood our instrument of knowing, the knowledge it gives us may
itself be questionable. How do we question the mind? This requires that
we learn to examine our own thoughts rather than using our thoughts to
examine the things outside us. It requires that we turn our attention within
and seek the origin of thought.
What is the mind and how does it operate? How much of its operation
is really our own? To what extent is it really conscious? Actually we know
very little about the mind because we are caught in its mechanism and do
not take the time to observe its functioning with detachment. If we begin
to observe the mind we see that it is a subconscious process that happens
to us. It is not ours and is not under our control. We do not consciously
think about things. We are not in control of our thoughts, though we can
manipulate them superficially. Thought happens to us when we lose our
attention and come under external influences. It occurs when we come
under the thought of the external world as real and the image of ourselves
as an external entity. To accept thought as belonging to us and to try to
further or to alter it is only to further come under its disintegrating
influence.
We have less control of our minds than we do of the things in the
world around us. Yet if we cannot control our thoughts, how can we
control anything outside of ourselves? However, it is not the mind that
we seek to understand or control but the outer world. In so doing, however
successful we are, our own being remains in doubt and confusion. Unless
we take the time to examine our own thought process, our lives will be
out of our control, though we may appear to rule the entire world.
We do not control our thoughts. Rather, our thoughts control us. They
build up as inertia in our minds and create pressures over a period of time
which can suddenly and completely overwhelm us, though we may try to
rationalize them away. The impetus of thought is not from within us, from
our own inner being or unique creativity. Thought comes from the
38 — Beyond the Mind —

environment, from sensation — particularly from various types of social

conditioning. If thought appears to come from within, it is usually not
from any true awareness of our own but from the unconscious, the residue
of conditioning that we have ingested into ourselves. Our thoughts follow
a certain compulsion, inertia and mechanicalness. They occur even
against our will and impose their shifting impulses upon us. They are not
any action which we initiate consciously but a reaction we become subject
to and which we find it convenient to accept.
To give in to the reactions of thought and accept them as our own is
convenient and comforting. It gives us the illusion that we are real people,
that we have our own ideas about things which are meaningful and that
we can organize our life and world in an intelligent way. But such thoughts
are mere self-justification. Thought is a superficial reaction, and to justify
it as intelligence and understanding only serves to mask its compulsive
nature. If we really examine ourselves and our thought patterns, with their
limited and isolated reactions of fear and desire, the uncertainty of our
existence becomes evident.
For the religious or spiritually inclined, we may also try to develop
the mind with special thoughts, techniques and visualizations. Such
methods can be useful in a preliminary way to help purify the mind, but
they are not themselves the means to true enlightenment. Seldom do we
ask what the mind is, what limitations it may have, or whether it is
necessary to develop it at all, even though this has always been considered
to be the essence of real meditation. We seldom ask whether the develop-
ment of the mind can lead us to what we really seek.
Thought can continue in spiritual as well as in material forms because
all form is matter and form sustains the mind. For the spiritual life it is
necessary to no longer believe in the reality of name and form. It may be
helpful to develop the mind first in order to go beyond it, and this may be
facilitated by a belief in the capacities of the mind, but only when we come
to understand the limits of our entire thought process can there be the
awakening of real intelligence.
There is nothing inherently spiritual about having more subtle expe-
riences through the mind. It is the discrimination between the mind and
intelligence — between thought and awareness — that alone constitutes
spiritual or self-knowledge. There is no development by degrees from the
mental to the spiritual. There is, on the contrary, a revolution in conscious-
ness, the reversing of an entire polarity and the entrance into a new
dimension in which the limitations of the mind are as apparent as a cup
sitting on a table. There is, as it were, a radical dissociation from the mind
that reduces and reorganizes it on another level.
 — The Process of Inquiry — 39

One of the best ways to develop the mind spiritually is to first leave
it alone, to let it lie fallow. Any mental development by personal effort or
intention sustains the self-focus behind the mind, which must lead to
fragmentation. But, one may ask, is that not what most people do, not try
to develop the mind at all? Most of us do not try to develop the mind, but
we do not really leave it alone either. We are content to drift with its habits
and motivations. We fill our minds with sensations and do not allow them
to be empty even for a moment.
Leaving the mind alone means the surrender of ulterior motives and
self-projected goals. It means offering the mind as an instrument for true
intelligence to energize. Intelligence will develop the mind as needed
without all the illusions of personal seeking. The very power of intelli-
gence will repolarize the mind as a responsive medium of conscious action
and expression.
Yet receptivity of the mind is not an inattentive state. It is a form of
inquiry, an observation of who we are and what reality is. It is a state of
prayer, not as a seeking for our wishes to be fulfilled, but as an openness
of the heart to the sacred nature of existence. It is also not an inactive state.
In the receptive mind there is a downpouring of grace and knowledge that
goes far beyond what any self-motivated mental activity can accomplish,
which itself may lead us to new actions and creations beyond what we
have regarded as our capacities or our interests.
Without inquiring into our true nature, we can never come to the light
of truth but must ever wander among the images created by our memories.
Hence inquiry, however difficult, painful or arduous, is the only true way
of spiritual growth. Without making it the prime focus of our lives and
our cultures, whatever else we may do, we cannot get beyond the net of
sorrow.
 6
MIND
AS MATTER

There is no real dualism of mind and matter. The mind, or stream of

thoughts, is a form of matter and therefore a mechanical process. If we
observe our thoughts, particularly while engaged in our habitual daily
activities, we can observe this for ourselves. Yet this is not to say, as some
would argue, that there is not something spiritual beyond matter, but that
what is beyond matter is also beyond mind — beyond the entire material
realm which includes the mind and is not just limited to the physical world.
Mind is matter and thought is a material process in the mind. This is
not a theory, nor does it simply mean that all thought has a chemical
counterpart in the brain. If we examine our thoughts, our automatic stream
of mental activities, we see that they happen largely without our control
according to external conditioning factors. Our thoughts have the inertia,
obstinacy and dumbness of matter — of the stone. Thought does have a
pseudo-intelligence, an ability to organize sensation or ideas, but it does
not possess real objective awareness or self-knowledge. In fact, each
thought has a kind of will of its own to perpetuate itself and tries to impose
itself on all the rest of our thoughts. Hence what we call our self or ego is
just a reflection of whatever thought may be temporarily motivating us.
Insofar as we are creatures of thought and the outgoing mind we fall
under the determinism of matter or the force of karma. Through thought
we identify with the body or the world and thereby become susceptible
to the pain and limitation that is inherent in manifest form. This is not
some idea to merely be accepted or rejected. It is the fact of our daily lives
that our thought process is a mechanism of impressionability to the events
around us, which easily affect us and cause us to lose our equilibrium.
Our minds remain bound to the time, place and circumstances in which
we live and are trapped in their parameters. As such our thought is a
shifting and variable process that has no real consistency or continuity.
Our minds are not merely in a state of chaos but, more precisely, our minds
are the state of chaos.
The state of chaos, the state of unformed matter or the “darkness upon
the face of the deep,” is this confused state of the outgoing mind. It is the
mind functioning in the darkness of external influences without recogni-
 — Mind as Matter — 41

tion of the true light of consciousness within. Chaos is the state of

existence determined by thought in the absence of true awareness. It
occurs when we accept our conditioning as who we really are. Our minds
are confused because chaos is the nature of the mind as a mechanism
running out of control in the dark night of ignorance. As long as our
awareness is based on thought, our lives will remain in confusion even
though we may cover it over with a good appearance. There is no
fundamental solution to this internal chaos and contradiction through
merely improving or expanding the mind. The nature of the mind as
confusion will remain as long as we believe in the validity of its projec-
tions.
The mind is a mechanical reaction system that remains trapped in the
realm of confusion and uncertainty. To escape its own chaos it invents an
idea of order, but in its deeper layers the chaos goes on. The order created
by the mind is artificial, and therefore becomes the source of disorder.
Thought ever seeks to impose its limited order upon the whole of life,
which is unlimited. The mind can grasp the mechanical order of the natural
world, which gives it a certain capacity, but that capacity has been
stretched beyond its limit and used as the measure of existence. To impose
a predictable pattern upon life is misleading because life follows a fluid
harmonic movement of its own that is beyond thought. The imposition of
the mechanical order of thought, with its narrowness and rigidity, upon
life is the root of the violence of man against man and man against nature.
The mind is not capable of creating any lasting order, which is only
possible outside of the fragmentation process that is thought. The mind
can never bring order to itself because its superficial order creates disorder
within. Disorder in life is just the reverse side of an artificial order. It is
the decay that rigidity must lead to. In nature there is neither mechanical
order nor chaos but an organic harmony, but this is of an intelligence
beyond the mind and it cannot be arrived at through any operation of
thought.
To go beyond our internal chaos we must first recognize it. The
perception of chaos as chaos is the initial shining of the light. Only by
penetrating to the heart of darkness can we remove the obstruction so that
the light can really shine. The basic falsehood under which we live is the
belief that the mind is intelligent, that it can organize life harmoniously
and bring us to a state of happiness. We imagine that we are intelligent,
conscious beings, possessing real perception and free will, when in truth,
if we would but observe our mind’s functioning, our thoughts are fleeting
and vicarious and their continuity is merely inertia. All the mind can do
by itself is perpetuate its own chaos and superficial order, which is only
42 — Beyond the Mind —

chaos masked, trying to assume some continuity that is not legitimately

its own.
Real change is possible only when we reach the undetermined essence
of life, not its already determined form. As long as we live through thought
and try to change ourselves through it we can only shift our position in
the realm of determinism. We can never become free or escape from
external influences. To live in thought, even in its most refined intellectual
form, is to subject ourselves to the mechanistic and determined realm in
which there is no real freedom. The law of this realm is not peace and
harmony but division and conflict. It is the nature of matter to decay and
of materialistic orders to fall into corruption, as our various civilizations
have testified. To seek order through thought is to open ourselves up to
the inertia of metal, the rigidity of the inanimate, in which we ourselves
become trapped.
The real order and harmony in life lies in creative intelligence and
consciousness, not in thought which is its shadow. The mind tries to
understand things by judging appearances based on the senses. However,
appearances are not reality but the reflection of reality into time, which
can only be partial. The mind can only play with the appearance of life
but cannot bring forth the true light. The attempt to modify appearances
is just a movement in darkness and cannot produce the light. It serves to
continue our fixation in the darkened realm.
The mind knows only matter and can only strive to manipulate it. But
matter is formed according to the energy of the spirit. Matter being inert
cannot rule itself. Asserting the reality of matter through thought we only
divide ourselves off from our deeper life and spirit, and thereby lose track
of our own source and meaning. As long as we are creatures of thought,
such self-enclosed activity and its negative effects are inevitable. Thought
cannot improve life because the mind is our legacy of what has been
determined, which is death, our consciousness of the formal, the fixed and
the rigid. The mind’s inertia tends to destroy life, not directly and overtly
but owing to its lack of affinity with it.
Spirit is the flame; matter is only the fuel that allows it to manifest.
Thought itself is no more than the smoke, the sign that the spirit has not
yet come forth from its material vesture. Thought, which is ever attached
to the defined or material appearance, can never penetrate to the roots of
life, but remains in the crystallization and fixation of time, which is death.
Yet when we learn to observe our thoughts, we discover that we have never
been bound and are always one with the essence of all existence. It is only
in what we can never figure out that our salvation lies.
 ;
MATTER
AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Modern psychologists have uncovered the basic chaos and inertia of

the mind, though they have yet to truly understand it. This is the uncon-
scious, in which are hidden all the latencies of primitive and animal
existence. Beneath the rational modern mind and ready to spring out again
is the violence and superstition we were supposed to have long since
progressed beyond. Our modern rational ego appears to be little more than
a veneer on the surface of the unconscious and is never really free of its
influence. We have seen on a social level, as in wars and fanatical political
movements like the Nazis, that this dark force can threaten to take over
the world or even end life as we know it. It is imperative, therefore, that
we come to understand our minds and become free of their inherent
prejudice.
A culture dominated by the outward-looking mind, not knowing the
subtlety of life, must inevitably manifest the negative potentials of the
unconscious, and produce some kind of intellectual, social, political or
religious intolerance or oppression. The mind believes in furthering its
own patterns, in imposing its self-centered will and perception upon life.
It dissects life and manipulates people and the environment as mere
quantities to suit its calculations. As long as we accept thought as the
measure of reality, whatever else we may do, this destructive power must
manifest eventually.
What we call the mind has a rational surface and an underlying
deep-seated disorder which constantly threatens to overwhelm it. The
question therefore arises as to whether what we call the conscious mind
is really free of or different from the unconscious. Is it just another part
of the unconscious, which as disorder and division is divided against itself
and contains its own internal opposition? Is the apparent difference
between the conscious and unconscious not itself part of the chaos of a
greater unconsciousness which includes our limited intellect and self-con-
scious ego? Has our failure to free ourselves from the blind inertia of the
unconscious been simply because our conscious efforts are still based on
the same drives, fears and desires of the unconscious? If we inquire deeply
into this question we see that what we call consciousness is still a form of
44 — Beyond the Mind —

unconsciousness, an aggregate of compulsions or series of obscure im-

pressions, not a clear and continuous awareness.
Similarly, our society has a superficial order, which often has to be
rigidly enforced, ever threatened by a social disorder and discontent.
Hence on a social level the complementary question arises: is what we
call “civilization” an advance from the primitive state, or only a greater
expansion or refinement of primitive drives for power and domination?
Is the difference between civilization and barbarism not itself part of a
greater ignorance which includes intellect and technology? Has our
civilization’s failure to transcend war and crime been merely the reflection
of the fact that its order remains inwardly based on violence, though
perhaps concealed? Our civilization hides an internal darkness, a flight
from the eternal and a rejection of the spiritual life that undermines any
real flourishing or peace.
There is really nothing mysterious about the failure of our apparently
rational culture to get beyond violence. Thought is the mechanistic
intelligence of matter with its rigidity and violence towards life. Efforts
to change our consciousness, to bring the unconscious under the control
of the conscious mind, must fail because the conscious mind is by its very
nature under the control of the unconscious. The conscious mind itself is
ruled by fear, desire and the separate self, which are the attachment of
matter to its particular forms. So too, our efforts to change society, to
control criminal or socially negative elements (which are variable depend-
ing on the nature of the society), cannot succeed because the social order
itself is based on a rule of violence, power and authority, though perhaps
less overt in nature.
What we know of as the conscious mind is not something different
from the unconscious. It is like a fish that lives in the inconscient sea. It
has some freedom within the sea and can seemingly go against some of
its currents, but nevertheless it remains wholly determined by the sea,
living by its substance and circumscribed by its domain.
Psychologically, we try to bring order to the mind through analysis.
Analysis filters out the negative influences from the mind and emphasizes
those we consider positive, thereby adjusting ourselves to some external
reality or creating a better idea of ourselves. We examine our past
conditioning and try to put it in order, to align it to some idea of reality
or of who we think we are supposed to be. Analysis, though it may bring
some relief to the surface mind, does not result in peace and harmony to
the psyche, nor can it bring us to the power of awareness that reveals the
truth of who we are. Analysis keeps us hypnotized in our own personal
becoming and cripples our power of action with endless doubts and
 — Matter and the Unconscious — 45

considerations. It does not lead us to the direct perception in which alone

our problems are put to rest.
Analysis only serves to sustain a buffer state of analytical thinking
between ourselves and our subconscious urges, which may blunt or dull
somewhat their negative potentials but cannot fundamentally change
them. It does not alter the more deeply seated inertia of the mind but
merely better shields us from it. It does not cure the disease but only dulls
us to its pain. It does not free us from the rule of the unconscious and its
compulsive fears and desires, but merely establishes a zone of safety
within it. Analysis is an attempt to make the life of the self tolerable, when
actually it is the self which needs to be negated for real happiness to be
possible.
Any process of thought or analysis, therefore, must give continuity
to the forces of ignorance and unconsciousness. Analysis is a process of
division that cannot bring true integration. Through analysis we can never
free ourselves from the rule of the compulsions of the unconscious
because analysis continues our fixation upon them and thereby gives them
more power. Through analysis we dig further into our darkness, think
more about it, organize it variously but remain preoccupied with it and
thereby continue to sustain it. Instead we must learn to give energy to the
state of seeing, in which the past has no place and in which alone there is
true freedom from our conditioning.
This does not mean that awareness cannot deal with the past. In the
wholeness of awareness the process and meaning of all life, history and
time, back to the origin of all creation, is revealed and unraveled; not by
a probing intellect but by the natural unfoldment of the state of seeing.
This happens not through thinking about ourselves and our experiences
but by emptying the mind in meditation.
The fact is quite clear for those of us who would examine our own
daily thoughts: the conscious mind and self-image is based upon the same
blind urges and instinctual automatism as the unconscious. It has the same
basic fear and desire, the same blind and separative emphasis on the self
and its becoming.
Our so-called consciousness is the product of the unconscious. Con-
versely our kind of consciousness itself creates and sustains the uncon-
scious. It is not that the unconscious limits us, but that we in our ignorance
encourage and sustain the unconscious. The unconscious is the product
of a limited self-centered consciousness that does not want to be truly
aware because this threatens its sense of self-importance. Our kind of
consciousness is a refusal to see or to be aware, a fixation on what we
have been which throws the greater energy of our being into the uncon-
46 — Beyond the Mind —

scious. The conscious mind cannot control the unconscious because its
very self-centered and inherently limited operation breeds unconscious-
ness. It is our sense of a separate self that opens us up to and puts us under
the influence of all that is unconscious, which is the entire realm of fear
and desire.
Our own unconscious is rather extraordinary. It contains the latencies
of all life on earth and the elemental evolution that preceded it. There is
almost no limit as to how far we can fall into it, bringing up tendencies
into our minds from the animal realm or even lower on the evolutionary
scale — or worse yet acting like machines, mimicking the pre-life state
of matter. As long as we are not watchful and aware in the present, our
life-energy can only fall into the past. As long as we are not observant of
our thinking, our minds can only sink into the grooves of past condition-
ing. It happens automatically and instantaneously when awareness is lost.
These latencies possess a certain built-in self-justification. When we
draw them up, from wherever they come, they impress themselves upon
us as our own. This is not because such tendencies actually belong to us
or represent our true nature, but because all thought, being limited and
self-centered, automatically projects an ego according to its nature.
Caught in thought, we are trapped in the ego that thought projects, with
its sense of self-justification and its need to survive and defend itself.
We may think that we are defending our family, our country or our
religion, for example, but it is usually merely the ego defending itself. In
our lack of self-awareness we draw up various pre-human latencies and
put a human, social or personal stamp upon them. We translate, for
example, the animal urge towards territorial expansion into a personal
need for land or our country’s need for power, and such blindness
inevitably leads to conflict and to war. As long as we hold to a thought-
based consciousness we will live in the shadow of the unconscious. We
will be the victims of fears and desires, individually and collectively,
which we do not suspect until they overwhelm us. The unconscious, as a
stagnation of energy and awareness in which there is disintegration, must
be divided against itself. Hence we are usually at war with ourselves,
trying to change ourselves or become something that we are not. This
conflict can never be resolved but only abandoned because both sides are
within us. Conflict results from the attempt to change reality, whether that
of the world or that of ourselves, according to our thoughts and desires.
This throws our energy outside of ourselves, outside of reality, into the
confusion of what we want things to be or think they should be.
Only because we accept thought as the true means of knowing reality
are we caught like puppets in various mass unconscious forces. Thought
 — Matter and the Unconscious — 47

itself is our fall into the influence of the unconscious and so it can never
take us to true awareness. Only awareness of the unconscious and me-
chanical nature of thought takes us beyond illusion.
It is not difficult to be aware or to observe things as they are. It does
not cost anything, require that we go anywhere or see anyone, nor does it
require any physical or mental exertion. It happens of itself when we no
longer give importance to ourselves and our opinions about things. Yet it
is difficult to remain in the state of awareness, because everything in our
environment is oriented toward drawing us out of awareness. Only long
term abidance in simple awareness can clear out all the illusions of the
unconscious.
In reality, the human being does not have to be under the rule of the
unconscious at all. There is no real necessity for it. All the latencies of the
unconscious are by nature behind us. They can impel us but not compel
us, unless we fail to approach them with complete attention. Only to the
extent that we become inattentive, or fail the challenge of life to be aware,
can they affect us.
This we can also observe for ourselves. Imagine, for example, that
you ate walking across a busy street, but worrying about some particular
personal problem. Suddenly a car approaches you and could possibly hit
you. What do you do? You instantly jump out of the way. You scarcely
have to think about it. You will also note that at that moment all of your
wotries and anxieties are forgotten. Why? Because in that moment you
have complete attention in the present.
Therefore, only because we are not serious and not aware do we allow
our desires to dominate us. It is lack of awareness that gives them the
space in which to influence us. These desires are always there. The world
is constantly bombarding us with them. Hence it is easy to give in to them
at some point. But there is no real need to do so. It only arises through
lack of attention, distraction or boredom.
If we observe our minds for what they are — compulsion and inertia
born of lack of awareness — in that perception is the birth of the true
consciousness that will deliver us like a savior across the dark night of
ignorance. Our true being abides in the state of seeing, not in anything
that we have seen or experienced. Our true nature abides in detached
awareness in which there is no longer anything worth considering. We do
not arrive at this state by an effort to be detached. Awareness itself is
detached, while the effort to be detached is just another attachment of
thought.
We need not strive to stop the flow of energy into the unconscious.
The effort to control energy itself wastes energy and loses it to the
48 — Beyond the Mind —

unconscious. We need not struggle with or resist the unconscious, or try

to change it in any way, for these are all negative fixations upon it. We
need only surrender our attachment to the unconscious, which is identical
to our attachment to the external world and an external idea of who we
are. This requires holding to awareness, rather than thought, as the basis
of our being. Only because we allow ourselves to accept a life without
self-observation are we burdened with the unconscious and limited by it.
The unconscious itself is innocent, a mere receptacle. It is we who sustain
it by not inquiring into our true nature.
 8
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ecenderrpapnrn!
1 111(0hehe
OF THE MIND

The mind exists in the animal and plant realms. It is present even in
the first cell. An energy of thought exists in all forms of matter down to
the atom, as the elemental intelligence of attraction and repulsion. The
ego or sense of separate self is the original point or particle out of which
the world of illusion is constructed by the mind.
Just as material evolution began with simple elemental forms like
atoms, and as the evolution of life began with simple life forms like
protozoa, so too the evolution of mind begins with simple mental forms.
The human mind on the scale of the evolution of consciousness has not
yet reached the stage of true intelligence. To draw a parallel with animal
evolution, the human mind is on an amphibian level; not yet a creature of
the dry land and sunlight of reality but still held in the inertia of the
primeval sea. The mind is only aware of one aspect of the universe of
consciousness — that which it can measure and name and thereby become
the center of. The mind is evolving slowly out of the primeval waters; and
upon venturing forth a little distance it quickly retreats, becoming easily
afraid.
The ego-based mind can only imitate the power of real intelligence.
It is a reaction to the influx of intelligence but not the true entrance of
intelligence into the world. Thought thus functions as a restraint on the
evolutionary ascent of life and consciousness. Hence the mind is based
on karmic reactions, impressions from the past, rather than on a creative
response to life and participation in its movement. Thought serves to
continue the unconscious or conditioned side of creation and cannot take
us to real perception or awareness.
In pre-human states of evolution the ego exists in a state of latency.
It has no independent power of movement or expression. Pre-human life
forms are immersed in nature and are held in the unconscious unity of
natural forces. The ego remains submerged within a general sense of the
unity of life. The ego is only semi-differentiated and is unable to separate
itself from the stream of life. The ego as instinct still reflects the hidden
intelligence of nature. The ego is present only as a dim sense of separative
existence, an inertia which clings to what it is and resists the impulse of
50 — Beyond the Mind —

nature toward further growth and evolution. We could say that in pre-
human life forms the ego is mute. It is bound by nature and unable to
manifest its negativity.
The ego is the force of inertia that resists the evolutionary stream of
life and forms a contraction within it that creates separation. Such a force
of resistance is inevitable and necessary to sustain and give continuity to
what has already been achieved. Yet this force, when allowed predomi-
nance, will hinder the stream of transformation which is life. The ego is
thus a manifestation of the death instinct, the force of attachment and
decay. It is the negative force in evolution that allies itself with the past
and can be swept away with it.
In man, the evolved mental being, this inertia of the ignorance or
hidden ego in things becomes able to manifest. Human consciousness
delivers into expression the latent ego from the stone of the material
nature. It gives a voice to the inertia and resistance of the rock, the bush
and the beast. It allows the separative tendency hidden in the lower
material nature, which is only its density and dullness, to articulate itself.
Building up the ego or separate self, we release the forces of ignorance
and insensitivity upon the world. We come to incarnate the revenge of
elemental matter against life, of the pre-evolutionary state against evolu-
tion. Hence we are destroying the living planet with machines and
chemicals, damaging the biosphere itself. In this sense, it is only the
human being that is materialistic. Materialism is thus nothing but our
self-centered thought process which frees matter from the rule of the spirit.
We should note that it is only because our bodies are under the rule
of nature, which is the hidden rule of the spirit, that we have health or
well-being. If our bodies functioned like our thoughts, with all their
variability and confusion, our health would be immediately threatened.
The body is naturally healthy. It is our disturbed thought process that
causes most of our diseases. The world is naturally saved. It is our
disturbed thought process that makes the world in need of salvation.
Animals think; plants, minerals, metals and even atoms have
thoughts, but their thoughts are immersed in the greater stream of life and
creation. They have a sense of differentiation but not of separation. They
feel themselves as leaves on a tree. Hence they never suffer alienation and
never feel empty as the unconscious ocean of nature ever bathes them in
the sense of a greater life. We alone have liberated thought from its
confinement to the unconscious stream of nature.
As human beings, as a higher type of being in nature, this primeval
sense of unity with the natural world is denied us. It has become regressive
for us and is no longer achievable except through an unreal kind of
 — The Origin of the Mind — oy

nostalgia. Our thought perpetuates and expands the latencies of the

pre-human state, but apart from their background root in the stream of
nature. Rather than a secondary differentiation within a field of unity, as
in pre-human states, the ego has become a primary separation and alien-
ation that leaves us rootless. The ego is a vacuum that almost anything
can enter. We try to fill it with more thoughts and sensations as if by more
emptiness we could become full.
We as human beings have the freedom to determine our nature. Our
instincts are tendencies but not imperatives. We can shape or magnify
them for greater pleasure. We can even pervert them, which is what much
of our civilization has done with its artificial entertainments. However,
because we can modify our instinctual fears and desires, we also have the
capacity to go beyond them. They are a raw material that we can work
with, but one also that we can discard. Their rule over us ends when we
cease trying to establish our identity through them, but have the courage
and the daring to be who we are in consciousness, which is everything
and nothing.
All thought is a kind of arrogance; that is, all thought automatically
projects an “I” or ego. This arrogance is the assertion of matter that it
exists in itself. The ego is the effort of matter to expand and be real by
itself. It is proof of our evolution beyond nature, but also proof of our
failure to reach a higher term of unification and our inability to recognize
our own conscious being. In place of nature that is behind us and in
ignorance of the spirit which is in front of us, we free the ego to assert
itself as reality. Instead of moving forward along the creative stream of
life, we hold to the past and thereby release its negativity, which becomes
our own alienation from life and existence.
Thought sets forth the external as the real. Yet it is we ourselves who
turn the external into the reality. The idea comes from us, not from external
objects that are themselves inert. Hence it is we as human beings who
create “external reality” and thereby destroy internal reality and inner
peace. The idea of an external reality causes us to look upon people and
things as if they were external, which means that they become things to
be controlled, dominated and exploited. Thus thought is alienated from
the world it creates and must in turn try to conquer it. Hence thought and
the object, self and other arise together and remain in turbulence until the
mind is put to rest.
The origin of the mind is thus not merely an event in our evolutionary
past. It is not an event that occurs at only one point in time. It occurs every
moment that we fall into the compulsions of thought, which subject us to
the realm of time and all that is past.
52 — Beyond the Mind —

The origin of the mind is in the “I-thought.” All of our thoughts are
based upon the I-thought and arise from it, as we can easily observe within
ourselves. We are driven by this thought and try to further it in various
ways, though it leads us into confusion and sorrow. What is necessary is
not merely to follow or believe in this thought but to question it. This is
to turn thought around and return it to its origin in consciousness.
This inquiry requires that we cease to look outward to find ourselves
or reality. It requires that we question who we are, and whether any of the
identities we have made for ourselves are real. Our true being is not a
formation of matter or thought, not any image or quality, but the awareness
in which these come and go like clouds in the sky. We cannot reach it as
long as we are pursuing thought’s reflections in the outer world.
 9
HUMAN NATURE
AND INTELLIGENCE

As we currently exist as human beings we are unnatural creatures. We

are dominated by tendencies that do not really belong to us, but which
result from external conditioning and lack of self-awareness. We are under
the domination of a mechanical nature — a process of thought-reactions
— which inherently breeds distortion and excess.
This mechanical nature appears to be normal, as it functions automat-
ically within us. It is our ego nature or identity as separate self. Out of this
arises the desire for social and material achievement, which renders our
thoughts and actions motivated, manipulative and contrived. As creatures
of thought we try to justify ourselves, abiding in an unnatural state of
thinking about things and never simply being who we are.
We generally accept this ego nature as who we are, though it leads to
confusion, conflict and misunderstanding. We accept our self-image even
when it is negative, clinging to sorrow, oppression and anger. Its autom-
atism is strong; it requires a great deal of energy to overcome, which we
do not know how to develop.
Therefore we cannot merely accept ourselves for what we appear to
be. As we are now, we are little more than puppets of obscure forces that
go far back into the dark night of time. To accept this ego nature is to
accept our fall from grace, our hypnosis to the external and the reduction
of our being to mere things and bodies. It is to provide a justification for
all the compulsive and violent behavior we see in the world. We must
learn to recognize this false nature for what it is and not accept its
compulsions as proof of its rightness or inevitability. We must see itasa
sign of our own lack of true consciousness, of our falling under external
influences that are alien to the inner spirit.
Intellect and intelligence are two entirely distinct powers. Intellect is
thought which is matter and is limited to elemental reaction patterns of
attraction and repulsion. It has its place in understanding the surface order
of life, providing us our orientation in time and space, but it has no place
in knowing the essence of things. Intelligence, on the contrary, is imper-
sonal and universal. It is empty of all glamour, fascination and enthusiasm.
It projects no preconceived knowledge or experience but simply points
54 — Beyond the Mind —

out the truth of what is. It has no worldly content — no fixation in terms
of time, place and person — but reveals the essential being which is the
same in all things.
When we think we have figured things out it only means that matter
within us has deceived us into believing that its limitations correspond to
reality. The pride we feel in our knowledge is the comfort matter feels in
being able to maintain its sense of self-importance. In short, whatever we
think we are doing by our own thought or will is really just matter
accomplishing some elemental processes, duping us into thinking that we
are the doer and that it has some benefit to us. Our sense of separate self
and its worth is the arrogance of untransformed matter within us.
We are not yet intelligent beings aware of who we are and what we
ate doing, nor is our action truly creative and harmonious. The inner and
outer conflict in the world is proof of this, as is our uncertainty and
confusion about what is ultimately real. As long as we mistake thought
for intelligence we will give a false justification to the ignorance and allow
it to continue. We will have to avoid the voice and guidance of life that is
always showing us the obstacles and conflicts we create through our
attachments.
We have tried to develop intelligence and an enduring world-order
through thought and the expansion of its knowledge. This has failed not
because the field of our information is insufficient, but because it is not
the way to truth. True intelligence cannot be produced by any individual
ot collective effort but can only be found in our surrender to what is.
Real intelligence is not of thought, nor is it anything merely human.
Real intelligence is cosmic, the one life itself. It has the substance of
existence, which is the presence of being, and is not a mere fleeting
thought process. Awareness is vast like the ocean, not limited and shifting
like the waves of thought. It is not of the surface but of the bottomless
depths. It has no content but contains the essence of everything. It has no
bias, is not caught in any point of view, and cannot be manipulated.
The mind is not the instrument of real knowledge; in fact there is no
instrument for real knowledge. Real knowledge is possible only through
being, consciousness and direct perception unbiased by any mediating
influence. As long as we are relying on an instrumentality, a material
apparatus — whether organic like the mind, or some tool we have devel-
oped — we can only arrive at incomplete knowledge according to the
limitations, the bias of the apparatus. An instrument can only bring us
knowledge of appearance, not reality. No matter how many instruments
we create or how we may refine them we are merely extending the
dimension of superficial knowledge.
 — Human Nature and Intelligence — 55

Because we believe in instruments (a reflection of our belief in the

reality of matter) we do not have a true and direct perception of existence.
We try to arrive at true perception (which can only be from within) through
external means or by the opinions of others. We try to find truth by putting
together, combining or comparing superficial, secondhand, indirect and
mediated knowledge. Whatever we may know through thought is always
superficial, though we may all agree upon it and pronounce it as conclu-
sive or authoritative. It will remain only a knowledge in the distance, safe
because it is not close enough to cause us to question our preconceptions,
but inconclusive because it is outside the essence. Hence it must lead to
every sort of conflict and difference of opinion.
Whatever we do out of our mere humanity, our mortality and sense
of difference from the rest of life, remains ignorant and disharmonious.
Life possesses all powers and accomplishes everything without effort by
its very nature. To the extent that we interfere with and try to manipulate
the nature of things we only open the door to destruction. Such interfer-
ence with immortal being is the arrogance of the mortal mind which places
us under the power of death. }
The greatest knowing is to know that knowledge is an illusion and
that reality is only to see and to be. Reality is the essence of awareness,
not the content of any idea or experience. The greatest capacity, similarly,
is to realize that we can do nothing by ourselves, that all is accomplished
naturally by being itself. Whatever separative and special personal knowl-
edge and capacity we project is just the ignorance of matter setting up its
limited frontiers.
Whatever we think we know only prevents us from looking deeper
and learning further. On the other hand, to accept our basic ignorance
allows us to never stop learning. To acknowledge that we do not know is
to enter into a state of total learning which is the answer to all doubts.
Whenever our mind concludes that we know, it places a limit on our
knowledge. Hence giving up our arrogance of knowing will allow us to
learn all that is necessary for our right being and function in life.
If we are honest with ourselves we see that we are not yet real human
beings, not yet truly humane, compassionate or sensitive creatures. We
are not yet independent, aware, intelligent, mature and responsible, with
a concern for all life. Our basic values stem from the self-image —
pleasure, power, wealth, and so on. They are the values of the self-focused
mind trapped in its desires. We may refine this basic immaturity of the
mind, make its indulgences more benevolent, its prejudices more tolerant,
but at the core it persists.
56 — Beyond the Mind —

The mind is immature because it is based upon a subconscious sense

of separate existence that is self-promoting. We cannot make the mind
mature. There is only maturity when we dissolve the mind through patient
awareness. To do this, we must move beyond our conditioned humanity
to our cosmic humanity, which is the sense of the Divine being or person
in all beings.
Our true humanity is in consciousness, not in any name, form or
appearance. Our true humanity is not in being identified with a human
body, and is not to be merely human or mortal. It arises through the
recognition of the conscious being as the unique essence in all beings.
This true humanity is not of time or of any particular world. It is the
awareness of the Divine being which is the true Self of all, which contains
the entire universe within itself and spreads infinitely beyond.
 10
__BVOLUTIONAND
TRANSFORMATION I

The process of natural or material evolution that has fashioned the

brain is not the means of true growth, evolution and transformation for
mankind. True human evolution is not produced by further changes in the
body or brain. It is only possible when we learn to go beyond matter and
mind — which may produce certain changes in both. True evolution is
not in moving from one side of the brain to the other but in getting beyond
the brain altogether.
True human evolution lies in the development of consciousness, not
merely in the development of further material or organic capacities. True
human growth cannot be arrived at by a better brain, which would only
be a bigger computer, but by going beyond the sphere of desire. The brain
as a material entity cannot produce consciousness. Its inherent materiality
and dullness tends to obstruct awareness. Only when the brain is quiet,
when we are not caught in its conditioned patterns, can conscious intelli-
gence come into function. The evolution of consciousness is thus not a
matter of environmental adaptation via the brain, but of freedom from
environment through putting the brain to rest, not in the dullness of sleep
but in the peace of awareness.
What we call evolution is the refinement of matter, which is the state
of ignorance or lack of true awareness. The thought-composed mind is
the subtlest product of this process, but remains bound to the separate self
that matter projects. The separate self reflects the limited consciousness
of matter, the sense of localization in time and space whose coordinates
make up the mind. Evolution enlarges its sphere of action, but it cannot
alter the mind’s nature, which is fixed as a material entity. Matter cannot
evolve into the spirit. The spirit can take up the instrumentality of matter
and transform it, but by no action of its own can matter take us beyond
the worldly sphere.
Evolution is the product of time. Our evolutionary heritage resides in
the innumerable tendencies of our subconscious nature. These tendencies
impose their regressive will upon our rationality which itself is their
by-product. Further evolution can refine the process of conditioning, but
we will remain conditioned, material entities reacting according to a
58 — Beyond the Mind —

pattern, not intelligent beings who perceive things as they are and act in
harmony with all life.
Evolution is the mechanism of growth and development for the
pre-human realm, but for human beings it becomes regressive. The human
being exists to develop conscious intelligence. This cannot develop
mechanically according to external influences. True human evolution
requires going beyond evolution. This means going beyond time and
thought, beyond both personal and natural history.
We cannot truly evolve or really improve ourselves through further
or more intense conditioning. We can only progress by leaving evolution
behind, including all state and institutionally induced social evolution. We
can only truly evolve when we no longer try to change ourselves from the
outside as if we were external entities but accept the transformative power
of our own being.
Evolution is time or history, from which we must free ourselves. As
division in time, evolution also creates division in space as property and
territory. This too we must set aside to transcend conflict.
Mental man, the self-conscious creature of thought, is the limit, end
or goal of material evolution. He is all that matter can achieve without a
direct entry of the spirit. Any further developments are likely to be
superficial, extraneous, or perhaps even backward in nature. Man is meant
to be the beginning of the spiritual evolution which can only occur when
material evolution and its mechanism, the mind, is set aside. Real evolu-
tion for human beings thus consists in eradicating our evolutionary
heritage, the mind and its tendencies that spring from the eons of the
evolutionary process.
What gives us intelligence, beauty and delight is not what we have
evolved materially or mentally, but the pervasion of the light of conscious-
ness, through which alone all things come alive. We become truly humane
and aware only when we get beyond the reactions of our evolutionary
conditioning and learn to see things as they are, not as our evolutionary
program colors them.
The mind is a form of subtle matter, something protomorphic, like a
chameleon. It is a matrix created for the entrance of consciousness, made
in the image of consciousness, but only the mold, not the substance. It is
a very fluid creature that can assume any form, even the appearance of
intelligence, but yet is not truly aware. Hence the mind cannot be made
into a conscious intelligence. It can only be made receptive to that
intelligence, which can then function without its obscuration.
In our true consciousness we are spiritual beings and all matter is
beneath us as a medium for creative expression. The mind is a dependent
 — Evolution and Transformation I — 59

entity that has no real life and consciousness of its own but assumes these
superficially through lack of contact with our own inmost self and nature.
What is necessary is not to develop this false entity further but to return
to our true nature which abides beyond all change and mutability.
Consciousness is not a material or mental capacity to be evolved.
Consciousness is the nature of existence which material evolution (the
process of material reactions and environmental adaptations) can only
obscure. Consciousness pre-exists, but the mind and ego — our attach-
ment to the material world — blocks our recognition of it. Being is there,
but our becoming in mind-matter, on which our consciousness is asleep
and dreaming, fails to recognize it.
The ultimate goal of all evolution is thus simply that we be ourselves
— that we be who we are when we are no longer thinking about things,
when we are no longer worried about others, or concerned about the
external world. This is also the highest grace which accomplishes every-
thing. What is important is not to depart from our true nature and fall into
the realm of time. This requires the abandonment of thought and its
temporal coordinates — its sense of gain and lose, advance and retreat —
as determining our reality. It is not we in our true nature who are evolving.
Evolution is the dance of creation that we are observing from the point of
the uncreate. What is necessary is to observe the whole process of time
and change from the standpoint of the timeless. There is nothing that we
need to become or achieve within the domain of time.
 11
EVOLUTION AND
TRANSFORMATION II

At some stage in evolution, conscious intelligence is meant to take

over from the automatic drive of nature. For this purpose the mind is
evolved. But at the point when consciousness can enter, the mind can also
assett its predominance. The rule of nature is thereby broken, not for the
higher rule of the spirit but for the regressive reign of matter and external
influences. The entering consciousness is subverted and brought under
the control of the fear and desire of the mind, which is the fall of man.
This fall of man is not only a cosmic event but a psychological fact.
It is the movement of thought from moment to moment, whereby we lose
contact with our own eternal consciousness and try to become something
in the outer world. At each instant our thought process re-creates the fall
from grace that deprives us of our inner peace. Understanding this we can
transcend all of cosmic evolution in an instant by merely holding to our
inner nature as pure awareness.
Presently we are entering into a new and potentially more dangerous
phase of domination by our conditioning. Past cultures had certain reli-
gious sanctions and rituals that, whatever their limitations, helped main-
tain within us some receptivity to the eternal and the unconditioned. Today
these protections have been reduced and in some cased eliminated. This
can be helpful, but only if the freedom it provides us is used for a more
conscious approach to the spiritual life. But without such a spiritual
aspiration it must make us more vulnerable to further domination by
external forces and desires originating from the outer world.
We are now remaking our world according to the artificial constructs
of thought, creating a world of metal, glass and stone in which the living
essence, both in nature and in ourselves, is being sacrificed. Our society,
in its art and its environmental design as in the concrete jungle of our
cities, reflects the elemental realm and pre-life state of matter. This has
occurred because we have given primary value to the mechanical and
sensate mind, which cannot appreciate the subtlety of life.
We are even looking to mechanical intelligence, as with computers,
to solve the problems of life, which only shows how disassociated we are
from life, which is never mechanical. We are furthermore seeking to
 — Evolution and Transformation II — 61

remake the human being through the use of drugs, hormones and genetic
engineering. This is not the product of a spiritual purpose but of the inertia
of thought which seeks to structure life according to its mechanical
patterns. Even our medicine usually does not recognize the existence of
any life-force apart from biochemical reactions. How, therefore, can it
heal us or give us life?
Instead of using technology to free us from bondage to the external
world, we are using it to increase our external seeking. Instead of using
our technology consciously to help us to decondition ourselves, we are
unconsciously allowing it to condition us more deeply. We are replacing
an organic conditioning, such as we find in a life in harmony with nature,
with an inorganic and mechanical conditioning that also deranges our
natural functioning. Our machines and equipment are becoming more
important than nature, sometimes more important even than human
beings.
There is an extensive and perhaps limitless development possible for
the mind, which we may consider to be an evolutionary advance. In fact
our primary idea of continued or higher human evolution is the expansion
of our knowledge through science and technology in order to master the
outer universe of time, space and energy. In this, nothing spiritual or
religious is necessary or foreseen. The mind can develop almost endlessly
since the universe is vast and has many levels and dimensions. Technol-
ogy, the mind’s practical side, can similarly grow in many ways. Yet in
all this we remain in the sphere of the mind — as thought, sensation and
measurement — viewing ourselves as material entities, accepting our
environmental dependency yet trying to overcome it in our pursuit of
external fulfillment. We may even reach into occult domains and gain
powers like telepathy or astral travel. Yet this also may only afford us more
illusion, for subtle matter is still material and can increase our bondage to
the elemental forces and entities which operate through this realm.
Unless we first understand the entity that we are trying to develop or
evolve — the ego or separate self — we cannot arrive at any real trans-
formation. Unless we get beyond the stream of sensation that conditions
us we cannot really flower in consciousness, and whatever else we
produce or become, being based on an outward energy, must eventually
collapse.
Thought is based upon sensation, which is our immersion in the
stream of reactions of the material world. Thought is subtle sensation or
sensation remembered. We can only think about something that has
already happened to us, what our senses have already known. We notice
something and then we think about it, with thought coming the instant
62 — Beyond the Mind —

after the event and not simultaneous with it. What we imagine is also only
a fabrication of previous sensations or an unusual combination of sensory
potentials of form, color and so on.
Thought is the way we interpret sensation and thought proceeds as a
reflection of our sensory reactions. Even abstract ideas, like those of
largeness or smallness, are refined sensations. Thought is produced by
reaction to sensation and remains bound by its sensory orientation. The
thought-composed mind is a material process dependent upon some
stimulus and cannot proceed without an external push.
Yet perception is not fundamentally material at all. We are only
affected by our sensory perceptions when we react to them with psycho-
logical motives and manipulations, likes and dislikes. Otherwise there is,
behind all perception, the light of consciousness in which there is freedom
and creative renewal, which we enter into to the extent that we do not
accept or reject anything. Pure perception — perception without thought
— draws us into the true creative power where life itself is transformation.
It returns us to the light of consciousness in which there is no duality.
Hence the way for us to truly evolve is to change how we look at things,
to learn to observe life without thought or judgment but with the light of
awareness. The key to inner transformation is therefore present at each
moment and is determined by how we perceive things, by whether we
commune with their being or merely react to their forms.
There is a part of our nature which is not the product of time or
evolution, which is not satisfied with the happiness that anything material
can provide us. We revolt against being treated as mere things. We have
another sense of our existence — that we are not just embodied, mortal
entities or chemical processes, but eternal perceivers. We are not satisfied
with transient pleasures and joys, but inherently aspire toward something
absolute in which there is unqualified joy and freedom. We sense that we
have a soul, spirit or immortality, a dignity as a conscious subject, and
even the mind tends toward the idea of an absolute order.
We all sense something unique within ourselves. This is inexplicable
if we are only combinations of elemental forces. We weary of the mind
and its compulsive patterns, prices, speculations and statistics. While it is
easy to show that most of what we have regarded as spiritual or religious
has still been material or mental, social or political, our sense of the infinite
and eternal remains. Even science, in its pursuit of the very vast in time
and space, gives credence to the innate human longing for transcendence,
and takes upon itself the aura of the ancient mystical sense of the cosmic.
There is no way we can avoid the spiritual evolution. It is our nature
to pursue it. We may substitute a mental evolution for it, but in the long
 — Evolution and Transformation IT — 63

run it will not satisfy us. The spiritual evolution is the only true evolution
for human beings, for it alone is conscious, intelligent transformation.
Evolution is not so much a growth through time but a progressive
unveiling of our eternal nature or consciousness itself. Hence all true
evolution proceeds by divesting ourselves of the limitations of the past,
not developing them further. For this reason the highest process of
evolution occurs when we step out of the process of time or becoming
altogether. This requires negating thought and the separate self which is
the accumulated impressions of our being as defined within the domain
of time.
Spiritual evolution or enlightenment of the mind occurs immediately
and of itself when the mind is empty, when thought is no longer used to
mediate reality. The empty mind is the womb wherein the sacred child —
the Divine Son spoken of by the ancient seers — is born, in whom is the
consciousness of immortality. There is nothing more sacred, purifying,
lovely and transformative than the empty, motiveless and receptive mind.
She is the Goddess who gives birth to all the Gods. She is the matrix of
spiritual knowledge, the direct perception who brings forth as her son the
Divine Savior, the consciousness of the unity of all life that delivers us
from the dark limitations of matter and death.
This is no theory, speculation or anything imaginary. Empty your
mind of all presumption of knowledge and the sacred will seek you; not
as something alien, aloof, or transcendent but as life itself. Surrender your
personal becoming, the defense of the self-image and the assertion and
expression of power; be open to existence, and all will be magical. Our
thoughts are our burden of matter that crush us, that cripple us emotionally
and psychologically, that place barriers between us and life, that wear out
our bodies and destroy our creativity. To shift this burden around is
ultimately of no avail. What is necessary is to set it down once and for all.
Our true or higher nature is nothing that can be produced. It is already
there. Being is transformation; the present is the freedom of unbounded
energy. To evolve spiritually only means to withdraw all outward seeking;
to renounce the pursuit of advance and retreat, gain and loss, acquisition
and achievement. Then, freed from its own inertia, matter itself can be
redeemed as an instrumentality of love and peace. Then alone will the
cosinos be delivered out of chaos, and creation out of the dragon’s mouth.
 12
SPIRIT, MATTER
AND NATURE
According to the ancient seers, there is a duality between spirit and
matter or between the seer and the seen. To the extent that we fall under
the influence of matter or the seen, what is spiritual is lost. To the extent
that we hold to consciousness and the spirit, the idea of the separate reality
of the external world passes away.
However, the duality between spirit and matter is not a duality
between spirit and nature, between the spiritual and the natural world, or
the Divine and creation. The duality between spirit and nature is the
complementarity between the transcendent and the creative aspects of the
Divine, the active and inactive sides of the cosmic being. Spirit and nature
are as indissolubly one as spirit and matter are in complete opposition to
each other.
Nature, the creative force, is similarly different than mere matter.
Nature is the force that moves matter and causes it to evolve. The natural
world is a product of the creative intelligence of the spirit. It is not
produced by a mere mechanical evolution of material forces. Nature as
we perceive her in the beauties of the natural world is matter functioning
for the expression of the spirit. It is matter reshaped and organized by the
creative force to manifest the real.
Matter, as the inertia of creation, and nature, as the dynamic creative
force, have a different polarity. Matter repels spirit, though it can reflect
it to some degree; nature embraces, attracts and expresses it. Nature
represents the secret will of the spirit. Matter is the medium of expression
which both spirit and nature work to overcome.
To the extent that we function on a materialistic level, pursuing the
outer goals of pleasure, wealth, or power as the real, we fall into the
domain of matter. We naturally repel the spirit and place ourselves in
opposition to eternal truth. We also oppose nature and her evolutionary
force. On the other hand, to the extent that we set aside our separative
striving we go beyond matter and can no longer be manipulated by
external influences. This does not inhibit our functioning in the natural
world. On the contrary, it brings us into harmony with the cosmic
movement and the creative will.
 — Spirit, Matter and Nature — 65

There is nothing inherently wrong with life, nature and creation. The
problem is that we open ourselves to the inertia of matter by seeing the
external appearance of things as the true reality. We function in life not
for the expression of the spiritual reality which is universal and eternal,
but for some transient personal gratification that ignores the true being of
things. It is only after years of conditioning that we really come to need
and become addicted to all our possessions, achievements, and indul-
gences which have little natural necessity behind them.
There is similarly no necessary contradiction or conflict between
spirit and form, though there is a difference between the two. It is the spirit
that fashions matter into form. Form is matter informed and infused to
some degree by the spirit. The conflict is between matter and spirit, owing
to matter’s resistance to taking form under the will of the spirit. As this
conflict escalates during the course of evolution, the resistance of matter
expresses itself in the clinging to earlier and more regressive forms of
evolution as opposed to embracing life’s newer formations. Spirit and
form in essence are one; that is, the spirit is the meaning behind the form.
The spirit is the ground of the existence of which the form is the
manifestation. Form is how the spirit shapes the formless chaos of
inconscient matter into the formed harmonies of the cosmos. Spirit is not
form, in that form inheres in a material medium, but form is the expression
of the spirit. It is like the pot that expresses the idea of the potter but which
has the inherent resistance of the clay medium into which it must eventu-
ally dissolve. The idea of the pot comes from the potter and it is manifested
by overcoming the resistance of the clay medium. The idea of the pot does
not belong to the medium but cannot be manifested apart from it either.
To find truth we need not withdraw from nature. We only need to ally
ourselves with her secret conscious will, rather than her visible forms. We
must aid in the universal work of wresting cosmos from chaos. This does
not necessarily require that we work outwardly in society for its better-
ment. It is to this secret consciousness in nature that we should open,
which is her inner will. Hence opening our minds to the transcendent also
naturally perfects creation, as it is the will toward transcendence that is
behind all the transformations of nature, all her evolutionary leaps.
Life thus belongs to the spirit, not to the body or to any material object.
To be open to life is not to be attached to material things but to be receptive
the
to the movement of transformation, the seeking of transcendence at
very heart of creation. What is to be rejected is not life, which is eternal,
but the attachment of life to particular appearances. What is to be negated
sness
is name and form as reality. What is to be affirmed is the consciou
which possesses all names and forms but is not limited by them, in which
66 — Beyond the Mind —

all names and forms have their beauty as symbols or manifestations of the
real. Seeing this frees us from the rule of matter and opens us up to life
not as an emotional seeking but as the power of consciousness. There is
nothing to be rejected but thought and its patterns of acceptance and
rejection, which remove us from reality. It is the belief in matter, which
is thought, the separative mental or emotional pattern, that we must set
aside. This is to enter into all life and to move outside of time.
There is, however, a process of mentation which does bring about real
change. It is that thinking which is inherent in the nature of things, the
voice of life itself that occurs spontaneously when we surrender to what
is. It comes to us in the movement of meditation. Being has a voice which
exists both outside and within us. There is a natural intelligence in life, in
the body and behind the mind that we can commune with, that can speak
to us and through whose movement we can comprehend the mystery of
life. It reveals the great order of the cosmos, the great rhythm of life, and
the wonderful harmony of cosmic energy. It is an extraordinary creative
effulgence in which everything is perfect and pure.
This voice of life also unmasks the sorrow of human life and the
futility of selfish seeking. The wisdom which comes through it, however,
is not of the mind or the ego. It is of the soul, of our deepest aspiration,
through which we partake of the eternal consciousness. It does not belong
to anyone and does not come to us as long as we are trying to become
anything. Yet when we are willing to be open, silent and pure, it descends
on us as a flow of grace.
 13
MATTER, ENERGY
AND MIND

Our culture has come to question the materialistic idea of the world
— the classical Newtonian idea of the absoluteness of time and space, and
the solid nature of matter. We have come to recognize energy rather than
matter as the ultimate reality behind the world, and that time and space
are relative rather than absolute. This has been hailed as a great revolution
in human thinking, and to some extent it is. Yet it is premature to assume
that we have gone beyond materialism.
Our culture appears to be more strongly under the domination of
sensate values and the need for personal achievement and acquisition than
ever. We may have gone beyond the classical Western idea of matter, but
to the sages of the East, matter is something far more than solid appear-
ances. Energy itself, however apparently immaterial or non-solid, is
matter, perhaps not in the Newtonian sense but in the deeper sense as
understood by the ancient seers. Matter for the seers is not merely what
is solid. It is anything that can be an object of perception, the entire domain
of the “seen.”
Energy may not be material in the sense of being solid and fixed in
time and space. Yet it is matter in the classical spiritual sense of something
that can be observed. Even the mind, which is nothing but a stream of
thoughts, is material since thought can be perceived or objectively cog-
nized. The ego itself, our self-sense put together by thought, can be
observed and so is also material. Matter is not simply the physical but
anything that has form, appearance or action. Matter is one basic experi-
ential outer reality in three different densities of matter-energy-mind.
These are the gross, subtle and causal states of the same substance.
What is important, therefore, is not merely to move from matter to
beyond
energy, but to get beyond the entire field of matter, which is to go
of thought. What is real and spiritual is not matter, not
the entire domain
the seer or, to be more precise, the being of seeing. We look
the seen but
to the awe
to energy today the way we once looked to matter, according
the surface while
of the external. It is the same naive preoccupation with
missing the depths of our own being.
68 — Beyond the Mind —

To really go beyond the materialistic view of the world therefore is

not merely to realize that behind all apparently solid objects is a dynamic
energy. Behind energy is mind or thought. Behind thought is the ego or
sense of separate self. It is the ego that brings about the densification of
consciousness and its division into forms. To find reality or the sacred,
one must cut through the root of the illusion of the self.
What is of value is not merely to stretch our sense of time and space
into relativity but to realize that time and space are just constructs of the
mind, and of superficial value in a universe where there is really no
division between anything. What is truly liberating to the mind is not just
extending the field of the known from the gross to the subtle, or from the
local to the cosmic, but setting aside the entire field of the known through
no longer believing in the judgments of thought.
Matter-energy-mind is all matter, the field of the known, and the
surface of life. No matter how far we extend this field we remain bound
within its limitations. We remain trapped in the net of time, karma,
attraction and repulsion. We remain caught in the image, the calculation
and the appearance; and the real truth, which is quite simple, we miss
altogether. To get beyond the field of the known is not possible through
merely extending it. It is more a matter of prayer, surrender, and sacrifice
than some exotic cosmic or occult knowledge. It belongs to the heart rather
than to the intellect. It is free from any preoccupation with knowledge and
experience, dwelling in the being of seeing rather than in the event seen.
Today we are seeking ever greater power and energy for our outward
expansion. We are seeking to harness the energy of the atom, of the sun,
of all forms of matter we can find on earth or access through space. But
have we ever really asked, why do we need this energy? It is obviously
for our outward seeking, for providing more stimulation, entertainment
and distraction. It is not for producing peace or creating contentment,
which cannot come from the outside. It is not for our inner creativity,
which we generally deny or ignore.
If we are not seeking anything outwardly, we do not need power. We
need not destroy the earth to find yet greater sources of energy. We can
rest in the ultimate energy of being and let the universal force of truth
accomplish all things in awareness itself. We can be happy with the rising
of the sun and the coming of the rain. We can rest content with the simple
bounty of nature and find bliss in being one with existence itself.
However, there is another meaning for the term energy. Real energy,
like true existence, is not material or mental. All energy that is arrived at
through effort, control or manipulation, all energy that comes from
something external, is no more than a shadow of the true energy which
 — Matter, Energy and Mind — 69

lies within. Just as an incredible outer energy lies hidden in the atom, so
an incredible inner energy lies hidden in our thoughts which themselves
are crystallizations of the energy of consciousness. Exploding the primor-
dial atom of ego-consciousness releases the highest power, the energy of
enlightenment.
The atom of ego-consciousness is the root of all materiality, and only
through dissolving it can we go beyond all limitation. Through this atomic
sense of the separate self all bondage to time and place occurs. We may
talk about the most subtle new understandings of modern physics or the
occult, the transcendence of all material barriers, but without questioning
and getting beyond the atom of ego-consciousness we remain locked into
the prison house of matter and the desert of a purely profane existence.
The real time barrier we must cross is our sense of personal history,
the burden of memory that is the weight of our materiality. The real barrier
of space we must cross is the sense of division between ourselves and
others. The real energy we must release is that of the cosmic being within
us, not of the cosmic energy outside us. Similarly the true cosmos is not
found in discovering the temporal and spatial structure of the universe,
however vast, nor in communicating with beings from other worlds. The
true cosmos is found in our own heart, in our inner intelligence that
contains all the universe. True communication is with our own heart which
contains all existence, both what has been and what is to be.
The materialistic view of the world we must go beyond is the sense
of the solidity of the ego and its barriers, not just that of material objects.
It is not merely the crystallization of physical matter we have to transcend
to find the energy of reality, it is the crystallization of mental energy as
the “I.” This can only be done by meditation in which, therefore, the
highest form of energy is released.
 14
THE SACRED
AND THE PROFANE

All of us, if we look deeply, are seeking something sacred. We long

for something pure and inviolable, immeasurable and unique. We easily
tire of what is common, what can be readily bought or easily obtained —
what is, we might say, profane. Deeply, inwardly we are seeking the
essence of life that lies beyond distortion or corruption. Hence we may
ask: Is there anything really sacred in life or is all really mundane and
profane? Is all, as it were, capable of being bought or manipulated, named
or numbered, made familiar to the point of triviality? What, if anything,
is sacred and how can it be known?
The sacred is the unknown, what thought cannot reach. The profane
is the known, life mapped and made familiar to the mind. Once we have
known something, added it to our field of knowledge, it becomes circum-
scribed and defined. It ceases to be a living reality and becomes a mere
thing of the past. All life is inherently sacred. It is only the mind that is
profane because it ignores the essence and reduces life to mere name and
form. It takes away the being of things, their intrinsic existence, and turns
them into manipulatable objects for our personal and social ambition.
Whatever thought touches, it destroys or makes superficial. Thought takes
the mystery out of the world and leaves us only with the common and the
mundane.
The mind can never reach what is sacred. The sacred is the innocent
and the mind is nothing but a complex of ulterior motivations, assertions
and defenses. The sacred is the natural and spontaneous, but the mind is
a complex of various accumulated appetites and sensations. A mind that
is preoccupied with its own becoming, personally or socially, for the
material or the spiritual, does not have the freedom, sensitivity and
subtlety to perceive the sacred.
The sacred is everything and nothing; it is the inner dimension of
quality in each thing through which each thing is unique and which no
thought can quantify. To the extent that we quantify the world, that we
calculate life, we lose what is sacred and gain only its shadow.
All of our scientific and intellectual knowledge is profane; that is, it
cannot reach the essence, the priceless and incalculable wonder in things.
 — The Sacred and the Profane — 71

And, if taken to be true or ultimate knowledge, it must degrade that

essence into some limited pattern. If we rely upon intellectual knowledge
for our perception of reality, it must make our lives profane and superfi-
cial, an affair of the computer or the marketplace devoid of real love or
cteativity. No matter how much profane knowledge we may acquire, it
will never bring us to the sacred, the pure and the real. It can only provide
us with a plethora of statistics and theories, which we may juggle accord-
ing to our opinions, but it will not provide us any lasting truth or certainty.
This is not to say that profane knowledge has no use. It is necessary for
our outer functioning in life but it is a desecration of reality, we might say,
to take such knowledge for the measure of truth or to look for it to solve
the crucial issues of life, death and immortality.
In the modern world we have created for ourseives an almost totally
profane existence, an existence immersed in the personal, social, material
and transient, devoid of any real transcendence in which alone is fulfill-
ment. Naturally we find ourselves to be eventually bored and empty, with
nothing particularly or lastingly meaningful. We have eliminated the
mystery from life, lost our natural awe and reverence for the vast un-
known, and have laid the heavy hand of the mind on all aspects of nature
and human behavior. We have reduced everything, including the human
being, to numbers, formulas and statistics (which we may call psychology
and sociology). We have left little for ourselves to discover, to experience
for ourselves and have for our own. We have placed our whole existence
under the scalpel of social and intellectual scrutiny, which is to reduce
human beings to their lowest common denominator. We have experts to
tell how us to do everything; how to think, to eat, to walk, to breathe, even
how to relate to each other. Everything has been charted and mapped and
everything is now owned; and in this mechanical order we are trapped.
We have even used the profane to approach the sacred. We have
applied the same mechanistic intelligence to it and reduced it along the
same lines as such secular domains as science and business. In the guise
of what is sacred we worship names, personalities, books, places and
events. We create every sort of organization and institution in which the
living individual, the true bearer of the sacred, is sacrificed. None of this
really brings us to the sacred or brings what is sacred to humanity. It only
creates a false sense of the sacred that may be the worst profanity because
it deflects our inherent aspiration for the sacred into various forms of
exploitation.
The sacred cannot be made into a belief or localized according to time,
place and person. How can it be organized or even thought about? It is
not a profane thing, a mere formula for us to toy with. Nor is the sacred
72 — Beyond the Mind —

something outside of life, like some aloof deity. It lies in the subtlety and
simplicity of the presence which is all life, which is natural and humble,
beyond display or ornamentation.
The sacred is not a social or worldly commodity, a thing of the market
place or the laboratory. It cannot be found in a library or a museum, and
cannot be bought or offered at any price. It is not something one can join,
or another identity one can assume. There is no clever operation of thought
ot social manipulation that can bring it about. There is no place, person,
image or book which in itself is sacred. The sacred is not local, transient
or personal. It abides not in the seen but in the seeing, and can be evoked
in all things only by the purity of perception. The sacred is not what has
been fixed in matter, either outwardly as an object or inwardly as an idea.
Yet it is present in all natural objects and all the products of natural
creativity, some of which may be produced by human beings in harmony
with it, but as the essence and quality, not the recognizable form.
As soon as something is identified or recognized it becomes profane.
Even to call something sacred is already to make it profane. No word,
thought or idea is inherently sacred. These can only intimate the sacred
to the extent that we do not take them literally. All words, thoughts and
ideas including all names of the Divine and spiritual books can be
misinterpreted and used in a purely political, business or worldly sense,
which is the usual way in which we use them.
Nothing in the universe of mind or matter has any intrinsic value. The
world exists only to point out what is spiritual, the pure presence of the
sacred within and beyond all forms. What has intrinsic value, real quality,
or the dimension of the sacred can only be found through openness and
surrender, not through attachment to thought or form. The sacred is not
the apparent or the extrinsic, but the being and presence that is everywhere
and nowhere, where all coordinates of time, place and person cease to be
relevant.
The thought-composed mind is a kind of corruption, a material
process whose nature is to decay. Whatever it sets up as true, real or holy
must similarly disintegrate. For this reason it can be misleading to inten-
tionally cultivate virtue or purity. We should seek virtue and purity for its
own sake, out of the love of truth. We should act righteously not to gain
something but because truth is its own reward. Sacred action is spontane-
ous and unselfconscious. Virtue is not something we acquire but the
natural purity of the heart once we are free of the acquisitive mind.
The problem is not how to avoid corruption. If we do not first of all
realize the corruption that is the basis of our thought process (which is
fairly obvious if we examine our thoughts dispassionately) then we will
 — The Sacred and the Profane — 73

only allow this corruption to hide. Our thoughts born of fear and desire
inherently lead us to various forms of self-protective or self-assertive
actions in which all spontaneity and integrity become lost. We are corrupt
not by any conscious choice or intention. Corruption is inherent in the
way we think, in the nature of the mind itself as a self-consciousness
process which, promoting its own central fixation, breeds fragmentation.
Corruption is our vulnerability to external influences, which arises
through thought. All forms of conditioning are corrupting because they
are based upon some promise of reward, achievement or acquisition, and
offer some identity or sense of importance. They do not promote action
for its own sake but action to gain something, which thereby causes the
action to be distorted to quickly achieve the goal. Corruption and condi-
tioning are synonymous and both involve catering to the inertia of the
mind to achieve and acquire, to become a more successful worldly entity.
We cannot be free from corruption as long as we do not see the full extent
of it. Usually we condemn some form of corruption in others and preserve
a different form of corruption in ourselves, which we justify according to
some ideal. It is not that there are corrupt people from whom we must
protect society. Society itself is a form of corruption and cannot help but
create corrupt people. There can only be freedom from corruption when
we go beyond all social conditioning, when we get beyond the conditioned
mind. What is supremely humane and truly social is to stand outside of
any limited social identity, open to unity and friendship between all
beings.
Existence is beneficence. Being is bliss. “What is” has the power to
heal itself if we leave it alone. There is a natural renewal through silence
and inaction. The receptive mind is the field in which pure consciousness
or the perception of truth can be born. She is Sita, the Earth Goddess of
the ancient Vedas, the valley spirit of Lao-tzu, and the Virgin Mary of
Christian mysticism. The unoccupied mind is one with existence. In it is
the highest form of action, the perpetual transformation which is life itself.
The sacred is existence. It comes of itself to the empty mind, to the mind
surrendered to truth.
Being is fullness, completeness, and an overflowing plenitude. Per-
fection exists already as existence itself before the arising of the name.
We cannot produce it but can only harmonize ourselves to it. Only thought
is deficient, and where there is thought there must be inadequacy because
thought is not based on being or awareness but on non-being, which is the
past. Non-being cannot produce being, so thought and all actions based
on it can only lead to eventual corruption.
74 — Beyond the Mind —

The world does not need to be changed but to be understood. It is our

human thought which breeds want which must be changed. This can occur
only through a sensitivity to what is. If we are open to the fullness of being,
there are no real problems for anyone. If we are not open to the fullness
of being, we will only perpetuate the state of deficiency. Life is already
Divine. All we can do is let it flow through us by surrendering our vain
and personal striving to the love that requires no thought.
All life is sacred; only thought with its reduction of things to super-
ficial appearance, function and value is profane. The profane is the
misconception of the ignorant mind, the false intelligence of matter in an
infinite creation where all is sacred, mystery, wonder and delight.
 15
DISCOVERY
OF THE DIVINE

Who or what is God? What is the nature of that Being which is eternal,
infinite and universal? Does it exist at all or is it just a projection of our
longing for comfort and security? We have all asked this question, or at
least it has crossed our minds.
To really find an answer to such a question we must first understand
what the question is and what it implies. We must also understand the
means of knowledge through which we hope to answer it. We must put
ourselves in a position to really ask the question, as profound questions
require a certain seriousness. It is useless for a man who is blindfolded to
ask the way. Even if he receives the right answer he will not be in a position
to use it. Yet this is precisely what we do most of the time. We may have
questions about ultimate reality, but we expect easy answers that require
little real searching or change of ourselves and how we live. We expect
in our current externalized mentality to be told the answers to inner truths
as if they were just another form of information.
It should be well understood that no one can tell us what is God, the
Divine, or the eternal. It is not an idea or emotion that can be transmitted
from one person to another. That which is the impersonal Reality cannot
be found merely by resorting to some human person. That which is infinite
cannot be found by going somewhere. That which is beyond all limitations
of thought cannot be found through a word, in a book, or as a concept.
Persistence in the search is not enough. What is not sought in the right
way cannot be found. We will not attempt here to give a verbal answer to
that question. Another idea, name or form could be given, but it would
only be another form of conditioning for the-mind rather than a direct
revelation of the being of consciousness in which alone is truth.
If something Divine or truly sacred, infinite and eternal does exist, it
It
is surely something we could never expect, imagine or be prepared for.
would certainly not be anything in the ordinary field of what we already
any
know. The infinite is something that can never be arrived at through
human beings have been imaginin g such an
projection of thought, though
was known about it. It is the nature of the
experience ever since anything
itself
mind to fabricate, to project anything it wants or thinks important for
76 — Beyond the Mind —

to experience. As the Divine is said to be the greatest experience, there

has naturally been much mental illusion built up around it. We can
pre-project mental or material experiences because we have had many of
them before. But for the immaterial and non-conceptual, what is compa-
rable in our experience to which we can relate it?
We must ask ourselves if we really want to directly know that supreme
reality or if we are content with some transient experience or mere idea
as to what it is. To approach the sacred at all we must develop a tremendous
openness and honesty, and no longer self-indulgently project experiences,
even so-called spiritual ones. What is eternal cannot be experienced
because experience is only possible of events in time, of appearances in
the realm of name, form and action. How can what is not bound by time
or space possibly be experienced and by what instrumentality?
To ask what the Divine is we must be prepared to look beyond matter,
which means also beyond thought and emotion. We cannot approach it as
another idea or experience to add to what we already know. We have to
set aside our mental and material conditioning and preconceptions, for if
they have any validity in worldly actions, they certainly have no validity
in finding out what is beyond the world. A mountain cannot be climbed
by digging into the ground; so too the Divine cannot be perceived by
thought or by the action of the personal will and motivation.
However, in placing the Divine beyond mind and matter we should
not place it beyond life or our inner being. That would be to make it into
something dead or so remote as to have no relevance for us. In searching
for the Divine we are questioning our own minds. The world is just a
surface construct of the mind through which it organizes its perception in
terms of time, place and causation. Yet there is in each living thing
something unique, incalculable and priceless that cannot be reduced to a
time-space quantity or understood relative to a stream of causation. The
intrinsic is everywhere and we sense its beauty as the essence of life, even
though thought cannot grasp it.
The real question then is not, Does God exist?, or What is the Divine?,
but rather, How valid is our idea of who we are and what the world is?
Our sense of the Divine is just our sense of the sacred nature of all life
beyond the mind’s reduction of everything to mere name, form and
recognition. When we place the Divine outside of ourselves or apart from
anything we are still accepting the mind’s materialistic view of the world
as valid. In this way we also reduce the Divine to an extreme abstraction
or remote absolute, which is just another mental fabrication and not the
true existence beyond thought. What is necessary, therefore, is not so
much the search for the Divine but the setting aside of the sense of the
 — Discovery of the Divine — 77

undivine. As long as one treats anyone or anything in an unholy or

inconsiderate manner, there can be no question of any real knowledge of
the Divine.
We must also ask, why the word God? It should be fairly obvious that
if there is such a spiritual reality beyond time and space it must be beyond
name as well. Therefore it is not of great importance what name is given
to it, since properly it is the nameless. Unfortunately the word God has
acquired all kinds of associations apart from any direct reference to the
sacred. The different names for the Divine have been used to identify
transcendent truth with various personalities, beliefs, organizations and
cultures which are not Divine but merely human. Usually the name of
God is not used as a mere pointer to that which is beyond all names but
rather as a means to reduce the spiritual truth to a particular material form,
through which it then becomes another means of exploitation in the world.
To know what is Divine we must set aside all these incidental,
personal, social, intellectual, historical and religious associations crystal-
lized around it, which by their rigid and sectarian nature betray the
materialistic mentality behind them. The Divine is not what people have
thought or said about it. It is not a kind of matter or idea that certain groups
possess, rule and dispense from on high according to their favor or caprice.
Perhaps one should use a different word altogether, free of all these false
associations, but any name can be abused. We must realize that our
fixation on names and their propagation is a superficial play of the mind.
The essence of materialism is the naming process, which reduces all things
to mere forms that can be manipulated. If this is misleading and destructive
even with the things of the natural world, how much more so with what
is beyond time? Without first setting aside the limitations of word, name
and idea, to approach the Divine has no meaning.
The problem is that we seek the Divine through what is undivine. We
seek the Divine by the method or intention of the undivine part of our
nature, the mind and separate self. Thought has no place in saying whether
anything immaterial and spiritual exists or not. To seek the Divine through
the mind is like asking a deaf person whether a certain sound can be heard
or not. To deny what is spiritual because it has no material or intellectual
basis is senseless, because what is spiritual or immaterial can have no
material basis anyway. It is not within the field of the known as time, space
and causation.
The mind’s assumption of knowledge blocks the intrinsic truth from
shining forth. When we set aside the arrogance of the mind to know reality,
the Divine will seek us because we will no longer be hiding from it.
78 — Beyond the Mind —

To find what is Divine we must realize that in truth we know nothing

at all. All that we call knowledge, apart from some superficial practical
value, is really ignorance. What is real cannot be known by our means of
knowledge, which are not appropriate to it. If we merely ask a question
without first questioning our means of knowledge, we will only get an
answer in terms of what we already know. We will only project our
preconceptions. We will not find out the objective reality but only what
we want to hear. We will reduce the Divine, the sacred, the unknown to
some mere form, person, group or culture, as is the tendency of organized
religion. Such forms or ideas may comfort us, but they cannot bring us to
the truth of who we really are.
We usually assume that what we know constitutes reality. We do not
ordinarily feel that we live in a state of ignorance or illusion. We may be
willing to expand our sphere of knowledge, but we are hardly prepared to
abandon or surrender it altogether. What we know is what we have
experienced, namely sensation, which is the product of time. All of our
knowledge is of matter, the external name, form and measurement. To
define the Divine according to our type of knowledge is to reject it. Before
we can even inquire into any spiritual reality we must therefore realize
our own ignorance, which is the root of the mind itself. What is necessary
is not to positively seek the Divine, for that is already to give credence to
our existing knowledge which is undivine; what is necessary is to question
our own thoughts.
Whatever we think we know is only our own ignorance and arro-
gance. What the Divine is, therefore, is not a question that thought can
answer. It is a question that the mind cannot even properly ask. If we are
to truly make this inquiry it must be done with something other than
thought. The understanding of the limited nature of thought is itself the
awakening of this real inquiry. The real asking of this question occurs in
the surrender of thought. As a search not for another form of acquisition
but for an inner awareness which transcends thought, its foundation can
only be the surrender of the self and all of its attachments.
The mind, in fact, is inherently atheistic and cannot recognize any
spiritual reality beyond itself. The mind is not an instrument of perception
but only a means of organizing what we have perceived. The mind can
rely upon the senses and create thereby a materialistic view of the world
— the idea of a world of enjoyment for the self. Or in the understanding
of its own limitations it can become silent and allow a higher intelligence
to function. Only on the horizon of mental receptivity can real knowledge
dawn, not because the mind can arrive at it but because it no longer
obstructs it.
 — Discovery of the Divine — 79

To inquire into reality therefore is above all to question the mind and
its thought process on which our entire sense of identity depends. It is by
identification through thought that we know ourselves as “I am this,” or
“This is mine.” Thought posits the conditions and qualities with which
we identify ourselves and similarly establishes the categories on which
our world-idea is based. But are we what we think we are and is the world
what we think it is? Are we content with our identity and sense of reality
as created by thought? On the contrary, our identity is always in question.
We must ever achieve and acquire, trying to become somebody in order
to have security, and our triumphs often become the basis for greater
losses.
Similarly, we are always in doubt about the world and threatened by
it. We must constantly reorganize our ideas about it, as it constantly
changes itself and ever presents itself in unforeseen ways. This constant
shifting of thoughts regarding self and world is neither natural nor.
inevitable, but rather is the evidence of wrong perception, a wrong view
of ourselves and the world. Its fragile, artificial and mutable character —
its tendency to disintegrate if not sustained by continual adjustment —
indicates its illusory nature.
We are not content with the material idea of ourselves or the world.
We do not accept death and mortality, or the transient nature of our
fulfillments and achievements, all of which would be inexplicable if we
were truly material entities and if the outer world itself was real. We
imagine our immortality. We long for it even if we believe that it is an
utter fantasy or childish dream. We imagine some higher consciousness
and inevitably must seek it. Yet merely to believe in something Divine or
immortal, or to imagine it, has very little meaning. It becomes just another
thought and only allows us to become more comfortable with our limited
identity, without stimulating any deeper inquiry. It is just another trick of
the mind to perpetuate itself.
To search for the Divine, therefore, means that we must first face our
own nothingness; for if we in our transience and finitude — in our
personal being — are important, then there is no room for the eternal and
the infinite to be known. To search out the Divine we must see how
ungodly we are, how utterly unable we really are even to ask the question,
much less find the answer. It is not some moral guilt, some original sin
that we uncover here, but only the limitations of the mind — its original
ignorance.
We cannot hope to know the Divine because all that we know is what
is not Divine. Our means of knowledge are limited and outward-looking.
They give only mental images and cannot actually unite us with the
80 — Beyond the Mind —

essence of things. To find what is truth we must live beyond knowledge,

which means accepting only its superficial value. If the Divine, infinite
and eternal does exist we must empty our minds of the finite, transient
and personal to find it. As long as we are preoccupied with what is not
Divine — closed in the field of our personal becoming and transient
fulfillment — there can be no question of knowing what is beyond it. To
search for the Divine means to empty our minds of thought, as that plenary
knowledge cannot come into a vessel already full and closed.
Hence we discover that the question, What is God?, or What is the
Divine?, may not bea legitimate question at all. If the spiritual, the infinite
and eternal exists, then since it is everywhere at all times, knowledge of
it must be intrinsic. It must already be within us as the ground of our being.
The question then is not, What is God? or How can we know God? but
rather, What is obstructing the intrinsic perception of our own Divine
nature?
The answer is obvious if we look carefully: it is we ourselves, our
self-fixation and attachment to thought. As we are constantly preoccupied
with the extrinsic and the apparent, there is no space for the intrinsic to
be perceived. Thought itself is extrinsic — including all the mind can
experience even on the subtle planes — and so cannot take us to the true
essence. It may give us some reflection of truth in the realm of ideas or
imaginary experience — which for the ordinary mind can be quite pow-
erful — but that is no more than an intimation.
For the human being to ask what is the Divine is like a man hiding
himself in a cave asking where is the light. The more we really have a
sense of the Divine, the more we confront the colossal ignorance within
us and the fear and desire that rule us. Why are we so preoccupied with
the external, with our image of ourselves and of the world? This is not
some terrible sin but simply the nature of the mind as matter that can only
look outward. What is necessary is not to seek truth or reality but to learn
how to decondition the mind. As long as we are caught in the conditioned
mind, there can be no question as to what is truth.
The fact is we do not really believe in God, or in anything Divine or
transcendent. The mind cannot believe in God for what is immaterial is
outside of its domain. The God it may claim to believe in is not the infinite
being but some limited idea it can use to further its material, generally
political or commercial interests. To really believe in the Divine is to
recognize the sacred nature of all beings beyond any limiting or dividing
identities — to no longer believe in the ultimacy of any name, form, idea,
or belief. As creatures of the mind and living by thought and the self-
 — Discovery of the Divine — 81

image, believe what we may and do what we will, we are still materialists
and in no real position to speak of anything sacred.
Actually, we do not really wish to know the Divine at all because such
knowledge would put an end to our personal existence. The Divine is the
unknown that we do not want to face because it means surrendering the
known which constitutes our self-identity. What we are afraid of — the
unknown we are trying to escape from — is not something terrible but,
rather, the Divine itself. We prefer our ignorance and sorrow because it is
familiar to us. Even if we regard our experience as painful, we cling to it
because at least it is ours and it is all that we know. We cling to our cavern
in the dark and flee the sunlight, not because we could not live in the light
but because we are so ignorant and closed in our thoughts that we think
the cave is all there is and beyond it is only death or greater misery. We
are all fleeing the Divine, running away from the truth, daily, moment by
moment, by the very nature of our thought processes based upon the
separate self. What is important is to halt this flight, to turn the mind
around, not to continue running in the direction of illusion, and to ask
what is truth.
Why don’t we know the eternal? Surely if the eternal exists, it is there
all the time and should be obvious to us. The reason we don’t know the
eternal is because we don’t want to die, or rather, because we try to cling
to what must die as if it should not. What must die is matter, form, the
transient — our personal identity based on memory. We refuse to see that
the separate self, which requires acquisition and achievement to sustain
it, is itself fragmentation, disintegration and death. We cling to it as if it
were the essence of life, regardless of how much trouble we get into
through the illusions it gives us.
All that can die is only what has the nature of death; only what can
die will die and, moreover, it must die. The eternal cannot die and the
transient can never really possess life. Yet it is the compulsion of transient
matter to try to continue its apparent existence as long as possible. What
can die is really only what is already dead. Only the past can die, not the
present. What subjects us to death is that we seek our identity in time,
which passes away.
We have identified death with life, the past with the present, matter
with life, and the transient with the eternal. Finding this process limited
time.
and leading to sorrow, we imagine something enduring beyond
the field of the
However, what we imagine with thought is still within
and philosop hical
mind and so also bound by time. We invent religious
ity, to
theories and form social organizations around the idea of immortal
we are somehow saved or enlight-
give us comfort and make us feel that
82 — Beyond the Mind —

ened. We fail to understand the total process of thought and its limitations.
Instead we accept one side of it as leading to truth and another side as
falsehood, and develop a conflict between these two sides. There is only
one way to solve all our problems and that is to give up all sense of separate
knowledge and identity.
This is to enter into the state of inquiry, which is a kind of prayer, an
attitude of openness and receptivity. We must no longer think that we or
anyone else “knows.” We must give up convenient solutions or second-
hand knowledge and step aside for what is beyond thought and motivation
to manifest itself. We must comprehend how utterly materialistic our
nature is and allow it no disguise. Then when its superficiality becomes
apparent, it loses its importance and can no longer cloud the real. What is
necessary is not easy answers, but to live ina state of inquiry, which means
to accept no purely mental answers. It is to live with integrity and
simplicity in the labor of the birth of the awareness that is beyond the
mind.
This is to become a fire, as the ancients have said. In that intense state
of inquiry there is no room for speculation, argument or curiosity. The
flame of inquiry is itself the answer in which, all false answers being
consumed, there is no longer any question or doubt as to the nature of
reality. This inquiry of the silent mind is the real search, the real question-
ing, the real opening up to the Divine, not as some sterile idea but as the
essence of life, the fountain of creation beyond all ceremony and hypoc-
risy, in which all life is fulfilled and transcended.
For this reason the search for the Divine is ultimately unnecessary.
What is necessary is to understand ourselves and thus to become aware
of the limitations of our own thought processes. Apart from this, no special
seatch for the Divine is required, nor faith or belief of any kind. The wise
do not seek the Divine or have any belief. They see things as they are,
without division, in which unity is immortality.
Without self-knowledge, religion and the search for God is only
another fantasy of a mind. It will not bring enlightenment but rather the
conflict of differing beliefs. In reality it does not matter whether the Divine
exists or not, or which belief is right, for these are only mental constructs.
What is significant is not for us to find that which is the highest or the
greatest but to dissolve ourselves in the sacred nature of all existence —
to see the highest in the lowest, to return to the simple and be one with
the earth. All that is truly important is to be free of self-consciousness and
to cease being attached to the high and the low, the good and the bad —
all the limited and dualistic distinctions of thought. To know ourselves is
 — Discovery of the Divine — 83

to know God. But to try to know God without having seen through the
illusions of who we think we are is only to invite further confusion.
True inquiry requires that we allow the flame of awareness, the fire
of consciousness, to consume us. It requires that we offer ourselves to the
Divine, not as one known thing to another, but as the unknown returning
to the unknown.

May we have the power to make this offering!

May all beings have the power to make this offering!
 16
THE TRUE
BASIS OF CULTURE

Society is the manifestation of our inner values. As are the values of

a society, so it becomes. According to what a society holds as significant,
so it develops. The laws and constraints society places upon its members
are of secondary import, for people follow the unwritten and informal law
of social values. These values may not be the ideals a culture holds to.
They are those according to which the majority of people in the society
actually live, particularly its leaders. Our psychological motivation
springs from the actual values of society, not its ideals, which may be a
facade. What a society values can be determined by what the people in it
spend their greatest amount of time doing, and what they usually think
about.
Ultimately all values are of only two orders: spiritual and material.
Material values are based on outer appearance, possession and achieve-
ment. They emphasize pleasure, wealth, power and outward knowledge
of name and number. Spiritual values are based on the sacredness and
inviolability of the individual and all life. They cause us to seek liberation
from the realm of time and personal seeking. Materialistic values are based
on manipulation which leads to exploitation. Spiritual values are based
on non-interference and non-violence, which lead to understanding.
Material values emphasize the extrinsic, the finite, and the transient
and seek fulfillment in their accumulation. Spiritual values recognize the
infinite and eternal as the true being behind all forms and so find
fulfillment in what is given, existence itself as joy. Materialistic values
foster comparison and thereby create conflict and competition. Spiritual
values, in acknowledging the unity of all things, create harmony and
cooperation.
If all is unique and priceless — and there is such a sacred dimension
in everything if one would but look directly — of what possible value is
any sort of separative achievement or acquisition? Of what value is any
sort of separate possession or status? Materialistic values are based on
duality, on giving and taking, success and failure, self and other, and
thereby lead to division, fragmentation and destruction. Spiritual values
 — The True Basis of Culture — 85

are based on the consciousness of unity which brings integration. Out of

the sense of difference we create our separative and materialistic values.
Fear of life and of other people causes us to erect barriers and to
accumulate weapons — which is probably why weapons are the most
valued things in materialistic cultures. The same sense of difference
inevitably creates conflict and war and brings about the destruction that
we are trying to avoid in the first place, and in which not only our material
goods become worthless but our very life itself may be lost.
All societies are thus of only two orders — spiritual or materialistic.
Spiritual cultures are based on self-knowledge and self-understanding in
which inner perception is emphasized. Materialistic cultures are based
upon a formula, belief, authority, institution or ideology — a fixed pattern
to conform to, based upon the past which may be of a thousand years or
a recent invention. Materialistic cultures are based on emptiness, on
desire, greed and ambition which must lead to frustration, competition,
conflict and disintegration. They are based on the pursuit of matter, on
politics and on economics.
Both the capitalist and the communist cultures are materialistic be-
cause they are based on economic progress as the primary goal of human
life. They are trapped in time, in history as individual or collective
becoming, which gives rise to acquisition that sanctions greed and thereby
plunders the earth. As matter is only a surface illusion, such cultures
remain trapped in a facade that must lead to collapse. Such cultures are
built upon the sand of the transient and the finite, and so cannot endure.
While they may last some decades or even a few centuries, in the life of
humanity they must remain short-term experiments that will have to be
altered or abandoned. On the other hand, a spiritual culture is grounded
in the eternal and thereby has an unlimited capacity for renewal and
transformation, possessing the power of life itself.
In the course of history, cultures have existed that have claimed to be
spiritual or religious and not secular or profane. They have even gone to
war against cultures they considered to be secular. Yet most of these
so-called religious cultures, such as those which dominated the world in
medieval times, were also materialistic because they were based on
authority, belief and dogma, which evidences the rigidity of matter and
materialistic values of achievement, acquisition and status.
Cultures ruled by organized religion end up in conflict over beliefs,
saviors, churches and holy books. Their basis is the same greed, power,
conformity and control, the same material and mental coercion, condi-
tioned behavior and patterned thinking that we find in non-religious
cultures. Their actual values are worldly and what really concerns them
86 — Beyond the Mind —

is their secular power, the number of their converts and their psychological
possession of people, rather than the sacred nature of life. That purely
secular cultures have developed out of these pseudo-religious cultures is
not surprising; in fact, it was inevitable because their basis and actual
values are secular. Their forms may have originally been spiritually based
but their violence attests to their materialistic nature.
Organizations based on belief are the essence of materialism, which
is setting up a separate or exclusive identity that divides people into
warring camps. Whether the belief is in God or the state is of little import.
Therefore, we could say that there are two kinds of materialistic cultures:
the religious and the non-religious or secular. The former clothes materi-
alistic values in an apparently spiritual form. While this may provide a
transitional stage between a materialistic and a true spiritual culture, it
may also serve to cover materialistic values and give them the sanction of
religion. After all, it is easy to kill our enemies and steal their wealth if
we have first pronounced them to be heathens or infidels and have thereby
given ourselves the grace of God or the church to justify our plunder. Such
is the logic behind religious crusades, conquests and holy wars.
Hence it is of little value to return to such exclusivistic religious
cultures. It will not take us beyond materialism but only to an earlier stage
of it, from which the same evolution must likewise proceed in time.
Discovering a true spiritual culture requires going beyond all dogmas and
ideologies, all striving for achievement or acquisition whether in this
world or in another. It requires the freedom of non-religious cultures
directed inwardly toward self-knowledge, along with the faith of religious
cultures oriented beyond name and form.
The main values of materialistic cultures, whether they appear reli-
gious or not, are achievement and acquisition. Acquisitive values, whether
material, intellectual or spiritual must inevitably involve a methodology
of manipulation, exploitation and violence. They project a preconceived
pattern of achievement — which may be personal wealth, some collective
utopia, heaven or enlightenment — and try to mold life according to it.
This molding action is a subtle form of violence because it disregards
the intrinsic value of things and uses them merely as raw material to
achieve a desired end. Life, which should be an end-in-itself, is thereby
reduced to a means and is given only a utilitarian value according to our
motivation. Life, nature, and the individual who is the essence of life
become dispensable as they become secondary to our goals. Hence all
materialistic values must inevitably devalue life and the individual. Ma-
terialistic cultures fragment themselves and create boundaries, nationali-
ties and labels through which war becomes inevitable.
 — The True Basis of Culture — 87

This mentality of pursuing some preconceived and self-serving goal

(the form matters little) is the essence of materialism. The end creates the
means and reduces life to a utilitarian status relative to the goal. The goal
creates violence and ruthlessness, for it is only by ignoring the intrinsic
value of things that we can manipulate them according to our desired
result. We can only strip-mine the earth, for example, if we ignore its
sacred dimension and see it as raw material for our commercial require-
ments. Merely changing our goals to something religious will not take us
beyond the limitations of materialism. What is required is the understand-
ing of this whole goal-seeking mentality and its destructiveness. Without
first understanding ourselves and the ways of thought, it matters little what
we may seek or strive for.
The same manipulative view of life, which is materialism, occurs in
capitalism that exploits people commercially, in communism which sac-
tifices them to a utopian ideology, and in organized religion which
dominates them with a belief. All three are based on reward and punish-
ment, which is to treat human beings like animals or machines. All
rewards appeal to fear and desire, dominating the individual by an
external force or authority which denies the basic intelligence of the
human being. This appeal to the elemental conditioning of attraction and
repulsion denies awareness and keeps us stumbling in the dark night of
ignorance under the influence of subconscious urges and traumas.
Materialism does not teach us to understand our nature, to which it
gives no intrinsic value, but only to add some foreign accretion of ideas
and things to it. It breeds artificiality and perversions. In nature all is
overflowing. The intrinsic is everywhere. Everywhere is the beginning
and the end, the unique and the universal. Hence materialistic cultures are
artificial and stereotyped. They appear forced and unstable, and become
neurotic. They separate us from nature and exploit the natural world.
Materialistic cultures can never be truly creative. Materialism, what-
ever form it takes, cannot create or bring into being the new, but can only
recycle the old, which is our animal heritage of fear and desire. Hence
materialistic cultures must result in new forms of the satne old elemental
traumas without real evolution. They play the same old games, which are
largely unconscious, stimulating attraction and repulsion, expansion and
contraction, sex and violence in an outwardly more complicated form.
Society cannot go beyond its actual, intrinsic values. Our social order
cannot by its knowledge or power eliminate violence or inequality be-
cause of greed. It can try to limit greed to a field of normalcy, tolerating
and even encouraging it on a certain level that does not appear harmful,
may
yet it cannot control greed because it is based upon it. While a society
88 — Beyond the Mind —

educate its members as to what forms of greed are acceptable and

unacceptable, greed itself knows no such limitations and will ever strive
to overcome them. As long as our social order accepts greed as good and
sanctions it on any level, it comes under the influence of greed and must
eventually experience the full manifestation of greed with all of its
extremes. It is not sufficient to have stricter laws to prevent crime and
theft in a society based on greed. While society may impose some standard
of tolerable and healthy greed versus what is considered intolerable and
unhealthy, greed itself has no such standard and will make society corrupt.
In our modern society we adulate greedy people. We look up to the
tich and the famous. As long as we value greed and adulate the greedy,
we must have a society unequal, imbalanced, inhumane and destructive.
Socialist and communist societies try to limit individual greed but they
still emphasize materialism, which itself is greed. Society does not sanc-
tion greed overtly because greed itself is anti-social and inhumane, but
greed does not require overt sanctioning to function. As long as society
makes material possessions (wealth, money, property and the economic
side of life) its main or central preoccupation, it is sanctioning greed.
Whether it is done in the name of communism or free enterprise, materi-
alistic values must inevitably bring about violence and inequality, regard-
less of any intellectual idealism to the contrary.
This is not to say that it is wrong to possess anything or that any pursuit
of economic gain is a mistake. The error is in making wealth the prime
goal of life when it is merely something secondary, an adornment. What
has to be eliminated is the belief that there is any lasting happiness or
peace possible through material things.
We educate our children according to materialistic and sensate values,
rewarding them with food or toys or entertainment, and then are disturbed
when they turn to sex and drugs for happiness. In this regard they are only
following our example. If materialistic and sensate values like pleasure
and wealth are the main things in life, then it follows logically that the
strongest forms of sensate experience, which are sex and drugs, should be
the greatest sources of happiness. When our children resort to these things
they are not revolting against us, they are in fact following to their logical
conclusion the values by which we live. Without changing how we live
we cannot blame them for directly pursuing what we ourselves do with
hypocrisy and restraint.
Therefore there is no way for a materialistic society, a society whose
prime value is acquisition, to become free of inequality or violence. A
materialistic society is inherently anti-social because it is based on bound-
aries, frontiers, territory and possession, which serve to divide man from
 — The True Basis of Culture — 89

man and breed suspicion and exploitation. These problems cannot be

eliminated by merely changing the government, by the redistribution of
property, or by a shift of rule from one materialistic ideology to another.
There is no ideal state of materialism. All materialistic ideals are false
because the true ideal is not material but spiritual. The ideal cannot come
into being through shifting the material components of our lives, but only
by transcending them through constant awareness and inquiry.
The materialistic outlook on life is the denial of the ideals our societies
project. Democracy, freedom, equality, brotherhood and so on are not
possible through materialism, which is inherently an attachment to terri-
tory, identity and boundaries of various sorts. Until we awaken to this fact
and seek a spiritual foundation for our culture, we will remain caught in
superficial social orders that cannot truly flourish.
Materialistic culture, whether religious in form or not, is thus a
contradiction. Its basic values are in essence anti-social and breed conflict.
Materialistic cultures are involved in a basic self-conflict. The values they
use to establish society are the same values which cause society to
collapse. A society which gives emphasis to the self in any form is an
inherent self-contradiction. Just as the ego is a false self or obstruction in
consciousness, so an ego-oriented society is an obstruction in communi-
cation. Materialistic cultures must culminate in anti-social, anti-humane
action — the essence of which is war. Without changing these basic
values no laws, agreements or treaties will be of lasting benefit.
The basis of real culture is spiritual — the awareness of human unity
and the unity of all life. Self-knowledge enables us to understand the
dangers and limitations of self-focused values. This is not arrived at by
trying to change society according to an idea, but by freeing our relation-
ships from the patterns of thought which create attachment and posses-
sion. It requires that we open up to the power of transformation that is
existence itself, allowing the integration — which is intrinsic — of the
human being with the cosmic life. Such a society is built not by political
or group action but by right receptivity, the recognition of the sacred in
all life. If that receptivity comes into being even between two people it
has a power that goes beyond what any number of people may otherwise
do.
The divisions between man and man, man and woman, and man and
nature are inherent in materialistic values based on separative accumula-
tion. The breaking down of these barriers releases the real energy of
transformation in the world. Non-interference, openness and non-manip-
ulation alone dissolve these barriers, giving space for understanding
without trying to force a change.
90 — Beyond the Mind —

Real change is there when we are receptive to it, not when we seek to
bring it about. The change that we seek, being based on preconception,
becomes the continuation of a bias and a further effort to limit life to a
pattern which is death. It is not necessary to try to change society, which
implies conflict and duality, but rather to be open to the transformation
which is at the unconditioned heart of every individual.
As long as our cultures are based on outer values of politics and
economics, history, belief and ideology — whether spiritual or worldly
in form — they will become corrupt and destructive. There is no way to
reform such cultures. What is needed is a radical change of values, from
false values based on the primacy of the measurable to true values based
on the consciousness of the unlimited. This change cannot come about
through any normal social channels, through organized activities or
revolutions, but only through the awakening of the creative individual,
which means going altogether beyond what we call society and its illusion
of appearances and names.
We cannot change society from the outside, by economic reforms or
by changing other people. Society can only be changed from within, by
changing ourselves. It is only at the source, which is the individual, that
there can be change, not in the periphery which is society. To try to change
society by changing others is to further social disintegration, because it is
the sense of difference from others that is the basis of all anti-social action.
The other is also our own self. Society cannot be changed through
division, through opposing one group or another, through blaming some-
one else, but only through each one of us taking responsibility individually
for the whole of life.
Transformation is in the simple, the silent, the unexpected and the
unmotivated. Those who try to force change are only maintaining the
outward mentality, the artificial motivation that has brought about the
present crisis. It is not a change of form that is needed, not a shifting of
which group is in power, but a going beyond the violence of power to the
transformation inherent in peace. What is done out of the sense of unity
transforms, not what we attempt through a faction or special interest group
or to rectify past wrongs.
Communion, which is the basis of all true society, must have no
boundaries; otherwise it is not real and becomes the formation of a faction.
It must be open to all life and existence, not just with human beings, or it
is still a process of isolation. Only in the universal is there the basis for a
society that is liberating. Such a cosmic order is renewed by the sponta-
neous movement of life itself. Only freedom from spatial boundaries,
from the sense of limitation, creates a true culture, not the setting up of a
 — The True Basis of Culture — 91

frontier. A society within the boundaries of a frontier becomes anti-social

and inhumane to those who are outside its boundaries.
Freedom from history — no longer using time to define who we are
— alone can create a real and universal culture. This requires opening up
to the eternal and the timeless. To give prime value to some separate
personal or collective history divides us from the present, which is eternal,
and places us under the disintegrating rule of the past. A true culture is
open to communication with all beings and gives freedom to all individ-
uals regardless of race, sex, nationality or religion. This requires that we
come to value the true individual, the inner being who is one with all, not
the outer appearance, which, being different, must divide.
This does not mean that history has no value. What is most important
in human history is the recognition that true human culture is based upon
the eternal, and civilizations only become great to the extent that they are
centered in the eternal and bring it into the daily lives of their people. Our
true history is in our aspiration for the eternal, not in our ability to control
the outer world.
Behind all cultures — and which alone allows any culture to endure
— are basic human values of love, cooperation, respect and non-interfer-
ence. In materialistic cultures these values are corrupted by various forms
of outward seeking. Yet without these spiritual values there would be no
basis for keeping people together under any circumstances.
Materialistic cultures can endure only because a sense of oneness is
intrinsic in human nature. All beings seek love, harmony and friendship.
Unfortunately we narrow this down as friendship with those within our
boundary but enmity with those who are outside of it. All our societies
are based upon spiritual values in some form or other — some sense of
the universal, the infinite or the Divine — but our societies fail because
we never actualize these values. We can never make our ideals actual
except by the self-knowledge that eliminates the self-centered thinking
which denies their manifestation.
The true basis of culture lies in the conscious and creative individual,
the individual left free to discover the truth. It is the creative individual
who alone can have profound insights and make great discoveries. It is
not committees or organizations which have this power. They will end in
politics and exploitation. The individual alone is the bearer of life and
carries the sacred flame of awareness. To give value to that conscious
being everywhere and to let it work in the world is the basis of all spiritual
values. This is the recognition of the Self — what the ancient seers called
the Atman or Purusha, the spiritual being or dimension of the sacred within
all
us — as the sole reality. Only when we see our self in all beings and
92 — Beyond the Mind —

beings in our own self is there the basis for real harmony, cooperation and
culture. At that source, in the heart which is everywhere, we discover the
basis of all true life and culture and all true values. Not in the upholding
of our personal rights but in the renunciation of desire lies the foundation
for a new world.
This does not mean that a truly spiritual culture will be empty or void,
sterile or rigid. It will have art, science, philosophy, medicine and yoga,
as in the rich mystical traditions of the world like the Vedic culture of
India. It will be a rich and diverse culture in all true domains of human
inquiry. These things, however, will not be imposed upon anyone and will
not be made into dogma. They will be part of an open field for creative
growth, free of boundaries. They will be part of our own greater self and
cosmic unfoldment, not an end in themselves. The culture of creativity
will be part of the culture of the uncreate. The immanent will overflow
into the transcendent.
It is of utmost importance that we have culture and that this culture
is as wide, variable and open as possible. However, a true culture is a
culture of the spirit, which is a culture of creative awareness. It elevates
our being and makes us more in harmony with the great beauty and joy
of existence. Our present culture is a culture of sensation, which is no real
culture at all, but a kind of drug or addiction. Unless we change our culture,
which is the field in which the individual grows, we cannot expect the real
soul in people to flower. Instead it will wither and die, like a seed that
does not receive sufficient water.
A true culture is like a rich field for the soul to grow as it requires.
Yet culture can only provide the soil. The seed comes from the Divine
within. If the soil is prepared correctly the seed will grow. But if we try
to force the seed to grow, we can only distort it. Hence we ourselves must
become open and receptive. We must make our own minds and lives into
the field for a new creation. To do this we must purify ourselves of our
own separative seeking. If we become the field, then a new birth must
occur within it. Yet if we seek to determine the nature or form of that birth,
we destroy the passivity and purity of the field and guarantee only a
process of decay. We can either be the matrix of a new spiritual civilization
or the final era of decay of materialistic culture. This is the challenge of
our age.
 PART II

THE CHALLENGES OF AWARENESS

Ali life is sorrow. This sorrow has its origin

in the cravings of the separate self.
— Buddha, from the Four Noble Truths

In whom the Self has become all beings,

where can there be any delusion, any sorrow,
for that wise one who sees only the Oneness?
— Isha Upanishad 7

The one who, abandoning all desires, lives

without craving, who is free from ego and the
sense of mineness, he surely attains to eternal
peace. — Krishna, Bhagavad Gita II.71
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 1
ACTION
AND TRANSFORMATION

Our actions are based on the seeking of results, on trying to produce

effects. We are engaged in a process of causation, trying to produce one
thing through another. Hence our action is, in a sense, dishonest. We are
doing one thing only to arrive at something else.
We seldom do anything for its own sake. Our action is not intrinsic,
direct and present. It follows some ulterior motivation, is mediated and
looking to the future for a result. Our action works through time, which
is the past and the future, and the denial of the present that is life. Action
that seeks a result, therefore, creates bondage to time. It attaches us to the
stream of causation, in which we ourselves, becoming part of the process,
can be moved, influenced, manipulated and disturbed according to that
which we seek.
Matter, time, space and causation are ultimately the same. We see
matter, an inert or raw material to be used, according to our seeking of
results. To seek results is to create matter, to turn things into manipulatable
and dispensable objects. For example, if I desire to become a political
leader, I must learn how to use the masses of people to give me power and
influence. I must turn them into a tool and mold them like clay according
to my ambition — which is exactly what most of our leaders attempt. In
that seeking of results, I turn living human beings into mere instruments
for arriving at what I want. Were I not seeking anything from them, I could
look at people directly as human beings. When we see others as human
beings, as ourselves, we cannot manipulate them. Causation, the seeking
of results, removes us from the present and ties us to a future based upon
the past (the past being our desire and the future its fulfillment). This in
turn binds us to a mentality of absence and want. Turning the world, which
is also our inmost self, into an object, alienates us and creates division in
space. The seeking of results binds us to time, space and karma, not as
some metaphysical theory but as a psychological fact. It creates our false
world-idea based upon the ego, the world of sorrow and confusion or
Samsara that is the denial of our true self and being.
From the ego, which is the central focus of the ignorance — the
original fissure in consciousness between self and other — comes our
96 — Beyond the Mind —
the
entire bondage to time, space, causation and matter itself. Apart from
ego, all life is spiritual , sacred,
seeking of results, which is the root of the
e.
or, to use an ancient term, Nirvanic — a pure and inviolable existenc
 2
ADDICTION
AND THOUGHT

Our lives are based upon ignorance, which is lack of attention. We

usually spend our time not in receptive awareness, but in pursuing things
in the world of matter or mind, thinking that they will make us happy.
This ignorance is essentially a preoccupation with ourselves — who we
are, what we want, where we are going and so on. Out of this self-focus
we create various attractions and repulsions, likes and dislikes, loves and
hates. Pursuing this personal becoming, we become attached to what gives
us pleasure or happiness. This results in some form of addiction, which is
nothing but dependency on something external to fulfill us.
We have many addictions, which we may call habits and interests, or
even skills and talents. Such addictions as drugs, alcohol or gambling are
but the most evident forms of the addictive pattern of our entire behavior.
Some of us are addicted to sex, others to food, others to business,
knowledge, or even religious practices. Whatever we become dependent
on to occupy our time or fill our minds is an addiction. All external seeking
— whether for pleasure, wealth, status or knowledge — is not essentially
different than the alcoholic looking for a drink.
Thought is our most basic addiction and from it other addictions
derive like branches. Thought is a habit, an unconscious mechanism of
the mind. If you do not believe this, then try to control your thoughts, try
to stop thinking. Obviously thought is not a conscious process but a
compulsion. As long as we are ruled by thought we are addicts and our
addiction must distort our perception of reality.
The addiction to thought is, of course, extremely difficult to tran-
scend. It is much more fundamental than any other addiction because it
is the root of all of them. Only if we think about something can we become
addicted to it. As long as we accept the addiction of thought, we place
ourselves in a life of unconsciousness, compulsion and blindness. If we
see the seriousness of this problem on a daily basis we can develop the
will and the energy to change it.
Do we really want to live asleep, to be creatures of habit compelled
by external forces and attificially-induced needs? Can such a life ever
bring us truth or happiness? The only way to wake up is to recognize that
98 — Beyond the Mind —

we ate asleep. The only way to get beyond addiction is to question its
origin in the separate self. This is the true way of deliverance that takes
us beyond birth and death.
 5
THE ALCHEMY
OF PERCEPTION

There is an eternal alchemy of awareness, an inner process whereby

our gross and mortal nature, the ego-mind, is transmuted into pure
consciousness and immortality. This teaching is hidden in many ancient
rituals, symbolisms and mythologies as it is the central movement of the
spiritual life. The purpose of our existence as human beings is not to
accumulate things or to become somebody but to give birth to a new
consciousness. This process is not something artificial that occurs through
effort. It is part of the natural movement of existence, of which all outer
energies and their transformations are mere metaphors.
There are two factors present in all that we perceive; the seer and the
seen, which are the conscious subject and the material or formed object.
The true seer is the state of seeing itself. It is not the entity created by
thought but the inner Self or awareness of transcendence that endures
behind all the fluctuations of our apparent identity. The seen is whatever
this consciousness illumines — all the movements of the mind and senses
— which includes all that we know of as the world.
All that we can know dwells within the field of seeing and, as the
manifestation of that field, is seeing itself. Everything, behind its appear-
ance, conceals an essence that gives energy to consciousness. Each thing
speaks to us and reveals some truth of life and reality. When the light of
seeing illumines the object seen, then the essence of the object comes forth
as bliss.
Perception distills the essence of reality, but for this to occur our
perception must be pure. It must be direct and unmediated by any
conditioned idea or belief, unclouded by any thought or intention, beyond
any judgment of good and bad, and free of any choice as to what we want
or do not want to see. True perception is beyond thought. It is not of time
or the mind. It reveals no object or anything that can be conceptually
that
known, but the energy of immortality — the substance of the eternal
is the ground of existence.
of
For this alchemy to work within us we must change the direction
reverenc e to all that we see rather then merely
our attention. We must give
into. the
use it for some personal goal. We must make our own minds
100 — Beyond the Mind —

crucible and the matrix for the coming into being of the unknown. Our
daily lives must become an offering and a prayer not limited to any name
or form. Then for us to see will be to be, and to be all and everlasting.
 4
BEING

Being, truth, God or whatever name one may give to reality, is not a
thing of thought. It is not the content of any conceptual knowledge and
cannot be comprehended through any thought process however subtle or
synthetic. It is entirely outside the domain of the mind, memory and
sensation. It is not in the known and the thinkable and cannot be arrived
at through extending their fields. It can only be approached through the
abandonment and surrender of the field of the mind.
The mind cannot know being or reality. It can only know the appear-
ance of name, form and becoming. It cannot know the essence of anything,
whether a rock, a tree, a person or an emotion. It cannot touch the presence
which is sacred but can only cognize the surface details of differentiation.
Living as we do in thought, we cannot know reality, though we may think
about it in many different ways.
The mind itself has no true reality, existence or being. The separate
self is a problematical entity, ever trying to be, endlessly becoming, but
never arriving at a state of peace or fullness. The mind has only thought,
name and form — a transient becoming or superficial knowledge caught
between two greater ignorances of birth and death. It is never present,
never simply existent or in unity with all. It is always absent, elsewhere,
isolated in its pattern of seeking and trying to be. It is ever caught in
inessential distinctions and cannot perceive the simple unity and love
behind life. The mind is too complicated and jaded by sensation and
memory to know the simplicity and innocence of the sacred. It endlessly
pursues differences of form and thereby misses the space of being which
is equal in all.
Whatever we think about is not the real. Whoever we think about,
once we have formed an image, is not the real person or conscious subject.
The real being, which is one in all, cannot be reduced to a thought but can
only be communed with in openness and silence. To approach anyone
through thought is to set their being aside and put a limiting form, idea or
expectation upon them. We can be open to the real, sutrender to it, but
once we set our minds on knowing it, we enter into the unreal.
Being is there and is ever open to us, but closed as we are in our
thought processes we cannot know it. Being is openness and beneficence
102 — Beyond the Mind —

that ever overflows its infinite nature into creation. If we do not perceive
that
this extraordinary reality, it is not because it is something mysterious
is elsewhe re — because we
is hidden from us but because our attention
are inattentive and involved in the distract ions of our own thought- pat-
are
terns. Being is self-luminous and self-revealing, but because we
hypnotized by our own personal becomin g we cannot discover its pres-
ence. The screen of our thoughts based on the sense of a separate self
blocks us from the unity of existence.
It is no use to search out what is real without first seeing the illusion
and suffering created by the barrier of thought. To know being we must
first be. Only being can know being. We are That by what we are, not by
what we seek or desire. We become That by no longer striving to become.
This is the offering of the mind into the flame of awareness that delivers
us into the eternal.
 5
BEYOND
SELF-ILLUSION

To discover truth we must first have no illusions about ourselves. We

must become free of self-deception. The first illusion we must overcome
is the idea that we don’t have any illusions about ourselves. In fact, we
have all sorts of illusions about ourselves. Our whole identity is an illusion
sustained by our thoughts and their endless assertions and defenses. This
is not unique to any one of us; it is the nature of the conditioned mind to
project illusion.
We must realize that we are capable of projecting every sort of illusion
about ourselves. Any illusion that anyone has ever had about themselves
we are capable of having as well. Projecting illusions about ourselves does
not require any special or overt process but is inherent in our very way of
thinking. All thought is based on the “I,” the ego, and naturally places the
self or that with which we identify at the center. As long as we do not
question our thought process and its limitations we must project some
illusion of self-importance: that we are great, good, wise, holy, talented,
beautiful and so on. All of this is not our true nature, but the naive egoism
of thought and matter, its localization of truth and reality into its narrow
sphere.
What makes us susceptible to illusion is the subtlety and depth of the
drive to be somebody. This causes us to believe the suggestions of our
own importance that come from our minds or from the external world. Of
course our own thoughts tend to magnify us. Similarly, environmental
influences manipulate us through playing on our need for self-importance.
The sense of self-importance keeps us under the domination of matter, the
external world and the collective mind, because self-importance is nothing
but glorifying ourselves as material objects.
It is impossible to simply avoid having illusions about ourselves.
What is necessary is to see them for what they are. Illusion is inherent in
matter’s limitation of form, but we do not have to be deluded by it any
more than we are deluded into thinking a nearby tree is larger than a distant
mountain. We must have perspective in our awareness, detached obser-
vation.
104 — Beyond the Mind —

We cannot imagine what is beyond illusion or say what it might be.

To the extent that we see the full scope of illusion, there comes into being
the reality that is free from it. We do not have to pursue that reality but
merely be passively aware of all the illusions that obstruct it.
 6
THE BURDEN
OF MEMORY

The real possessions that bind us are our memories, which are our
inner possessions. Memory is an attachment, a holding on to something,
an accumulation in which energy is trapped. Memory is a form of matter,
a substance in the mind. It is the residue of an experience that has left a
mark upon the mind. The degree of our attachment to the past, to a
personal history, is the degree of our materialism. Our memories form the
landscape of the world of illusion and sorrow, Samsara, in which we are
caught.
This world of memory is revealed during dream and fantasy. It also
underlies our waking consciousness and distorts our perception. Hence
our fall into dream or fantasy is a fall into the inertia of our own minds.
The more we arte attached to the past and a personal becoming in time,
the heavier the weight of our ignorance. This is why, as we grow older,
our lives become more weary, more of a burden. It is easy, therefore, to
measure our ignorance in life: it is equal to our thoughts, our habitual
stream of memory-based considerations. Similarly, the knowledge we
cling to through thought is the measure of the matter in our minds that
obstructs us from seeing the truth.
We are not bound to the external world or the matter outside of us. It
is the world inside us, the matter within our own minds that binds us, our
memories which are the reflection of our identification with the external
world. Only when we take the world inside ourselves through thought
does it become a burden on us and cause worry and anxiety. If we let the
world be, it takes care of itself in the natural harmony and freedom of
existence.
Consciousness is immaterial and thought is matter. To think, to fall
into thought, is to introduce a foreign substance — matter — into our
consciousness and to weigh it down. Our thoughts are our matter, through
which we fall into the material world and its compulsions. To acquire
things mentally through name, recognition and identification is to add to
the ignorance within us.
The mind empties itself naturally — consciousness itself is empti-
ness, immateriality and boundless space — when we do not fill it with our
106 — Beyond the Mind —
is a
personal and social cares and anxieties. The realization that thought
burden is the ending of thought. All thought, worry and care is a useless
weight that only serves to separate us from the beneficence of existence
and draw upon us the very disharmonies we wish to avoid. When we
release the inner burden of thought through the perception of its foreign
nature we transcend the entire world.
 7
CAN ONE LIVE
WITHOUT THOUGHT?

Can one live without thought? By this we do not mean, can we live
thoughtlessly? because we already do, precisely because of our preoccu-
pation with ourselves through thought. Can we live without the constant
stream of mechanical thoughts, the subconscious flow of self-centered
considerations that makes up the substratum of our consciousness?
We are always thinking about everything: what we have done, what
we are doing and what we will do. Such thinking does not usually occur
because of any conscious reflection on our part but as a matter of habit
and compulsion. If we are sensitive, we perceive that thought — with all
of its worry, gossip and unfulfilled longings, its strange anxiety, restless-
ness and emptiness — is pain. It inhibits action, destroys communication
and corrupts life. “Can we live with it?,” we must also ask, because it is
destroying us.
Of course we can live without thought, except where it is practically
necessary. We do not have to think about things except on a basic level,
like how to get from one place to another. Practical thoughts are not a
problem and make up very little of our thought stream which is psycho-
logical in nature. In fact, thoughts about personal happiness and sorrow,
the fixation on the separate self, make practical functioning more difficult
as they bring a confusing ego element into the picture.
How then are we to free ourselves from thought, and why is it that
we are unable to do so? We meditate and struggle to quiet thought but it
keeps going on. Despite our every effort and intention, thought continues
as if by some strange will of its own. Our very effort to silence thought
appears only to strengthen it.
There is really no mystery behind this. Thought continues because
we want it to continue. Superficially, intellectually, we may decide to end
thought, but on a deeper level we remain attached to it. We have a vested
interest in our beliefs and opinions — in some image, idea or person that
keeps thought in motion. Though we may try occasionally to get beyond
thought, we more frequently allow ourselves to fall into its habitual stream
of considerations and thereby allow its momentum to continue. We may
superficially want to end thought but inwardly we are clinging to a
108 — Beyond the Mind —

self-image and the world-view based upon it — still sustaining thought

at the deepest level of the mind.
Thought comes to an end when we no longer seek or expect anything,
and no longer try to force life into any pattern. This occurs when we are
free from all manipulative attitudes and no longer use thought as a means
of controlling life. To end thought requires that we remove the blockage
of energy from which it springs, the separate self and its desires.
 8
CHANNELING
AND MEDITATION

Channeling is not a new phenomenon. It is another form of opening

the mind to the subtle or astral plane, which is a realm of vision and
creativity but also of illusion and fantasy. Such an interest in mediums,
trances, seances and similar phenomena is as old as the human race. While
it can be helpful to know that there are subtler realms of manifestation
than the physical universe, and while these domains can afford us greater
knowledge or power, they still fall short of reality, which transcends all
appearances.
To perceive the truth we must silence the mind through meditation.
This is something that we have to do for ourselves. For meditation to be
efficacious we must develop the power of our own attention and conscious
perception, not give our awareness away to some other force, even if it
appears to be a higher entity. Meditation is not a trance in which some
other entity speaks through us, but a heightened state of self-awareness in
which we are conscious of our eternal nature.
Actually we are always channeling because nothing really belongs to
us, nor is any identity we assume really our own. Our thoughts and
feelings, even the sense of self, come from outside of our true nature.
Channeling only comes to an end when we dissolve thought and the ego,
which keep us dependent upon an external source for our reality. Yet to
stop channeling some person, entity or ego, we must channel the truth.
This is to turn the mind into a vessel for consciousness. Such a mind does
not see name and form, self or other, this world or another, but only the
sacred itself.
While inwardly we should seek to connect ourselves with the Divine
and with spiritually realized teachers, we must be careful about opening
ourselves up to the influences of the subtle or astral plane, because subtle
matter also contains a subtle or concentrated ego and has many allures for
a mind that is not trained in meditation. This does not mean that there is
anything wrong with exploring the astral plane. We should, however, not
confuse exploring a subtler realm of manifestation with the search for
truth that is beyond all worlds.
110 — Beyond the Mind —

Channeling is often a substitute for a guru or for direct contact with

the guiding force of consciousness itself, for which there can be no real
substitute. If we seek such direct guidance by making ourselves receptive
to it, we will find it. But if we are content with indirect guidance we may
only fall into further illusions. We should not confuse channeling, which
which
is at best a way of accessing subtle information, with meditation,
alone is the sovereign way to go beyond thought and sorrow.
 9
CONSCIOUS
WILL

Many of us see the need for enlightenment or Self-realization, yet we

are unable to go far along the way of its practical attainment. We find it
extremely difficult to change ourselves. We simply lack the will to do so.
Our will has no focus or concentration. We decide to do one thing, but
soon another idea or desire intrudes into our minds and takes over.
Most of us have no conscious will in life. We have habits, compul-
sions, obsessions and addictions, but we are seldom able to hold to any
project consistently and energetically. Thought is the destruction of will,
which is awareness. Becoming is the ending of will, which is being.
Assertion is the negation of will, which is surrender.
Will is nothing but the power of attention. It can only be gained to the
extent that we do not give ourselves over to entertainment and self-indul-
gence, which requires consistently remaining mindful of who we are.
Desire fragments the will and scatters it into the outer world. True will
relinquishes desire, seeing that it arises from an external compulsion
rather than an internal creativity. We regain our will when we cease to
throw ourselves away on outer forms of pleasure and achievement. This
requires that we maintain the integrity of our awareness by not seeking
fulfillment from the external world.
Without will we cannot go far on the spiritual path. Yet will is not
gained by effort or struggle, but only through the cultivation of attention.
Will comes through presence, not through the desire to achieve, which,
positing a result, fragments our energy into time. True will is to surrender
to what is, to merge into the energy of existence itself. This is the greatest
achievement and the greatest power, but it also requires the greatest
sacrifice, the surrender of our personal seeking. Our true will is to manifest
the eternal being itself. To discover this we must cease letting ourselves
be dominated by transient pursuits.
To regain our true will in life we must learn to stand above desire, not
to take its compulsions as our own. The problem is that we confuse will
and desire, and create a will to get what we desire. The will to get what
we want is no true will at all, but only heightened desire or sharpened
craving. To be able to succeed in getting what we want does not show
HA — Beyond the Mind —
we are free
strength of will but only persistence in ignorance. Only when
y to endure the
of desire do we have any real will at all. Will is the capacit
and loss,
vicissitudes and fluctuations of life, to remain at peace in gain
ss of
joy and sorrow. Otherwise we are slaves to the outer world, regardle
what we may accomplish.
 10
THE CONSUMER
AND THE CONSUMED

The materialism of modern culture is nowhere more in evidence than

in our consumer-oriented society. Most of the time we function as
consumers, taking some product from the external world and using it in
some way. We are not creative or productive, but spectators and consum-
ers of things given to us from the outside world. We are consumers not
only in the material realm with food, clothes, cars and new relationships,
but also in the intellectual and spiritual realms, with new books, tapes,
seminars and so on. We bring the consumer mentality with us everywhere
we go. All consumption is a kind of eating, wherein we ingest some
product from the external world. In the process we ourselves become more
material, more heavy, more dense and dependent.
The consumer is the consumed. To be a consumer is to be involved
in a process of destruction. Consumption is the inertia of matter to feed
on itself. Eventually we ourselves are thrown away like yesterday’s
newspaper. In the process of consuming things, our life and creativity is
eaten up by commercial forces and worldly interests. We gather nothing
enduring but merely eat up temporary sensations or ideas to keep us
distracted, which state we call life.
This consumer-oriented mentality we project into the spiritual world.
We try to get the right spiritual information, to go to the right places and
experience the right things in order to consume our way to God or
enlightenment. The ego is the consumer. Consumption is the logic of the
material ego to feed itself, to expand and grow. To be a consumer is the
most primitive level of being in the world. It is to be a mouth, an eater, a
devourer of things. It is not to see, but to eat or be eaten.
To discover the truth of who we are, we must discard the consumer
mentality and reclaim our spiritual dignity and detachment as observers,
not as manipulators. Our true being is in consciousness. It is immaterial,
empty of things, devoid of all that is outer. It cannot be arrived at through
any form of consumption or accumulation but only by allowing ourselves
to be consumed by it.
 11
THE CREATIVE
STATE

Thought is not creative, though the creative can manifest itself

through mental or material forms. The basis of thought is karma, which
is reaction, the continuation of the past according to lack of awareness in
the present. Therefore we cannot become creative through thought. We
may fabricate all kinds of things through thought but they will remain
artificial.
To become creative in consciousness, rather than in some particular
field, requires going beyond thought. This means not accepting the false
creativity of thought as legitimate. We must cease to throw our creativity
outside ourselves in the pursuit of sensation and information. Creativity
arises naturally when we are sensitive to life which no thought can limit.
This is not a matter of technique or effort, but the natural capacity and
power of attention.
True creativity is found not in the effort to be creative or in the
cultivation of talent. Talent itself is not creative, but a form of training, a
special conditioning arrived at through thought. True creativity does not
display itself or seek recognition. It may not even express itself at all. It
reveals itself in silence and emptiness. It finds itself in all existence and
does not rest upon a product.
To live in the creative state alone brings transformation. The creative
state is consciousness and is one with being itself. Any product that arises
from that state is secondary and cannot substitute for it. Awareness is itself
the highest form of creativity where there is no thought. All the universe,
all creation resides in it but cannot limit it.
In the surrender of thought is the opening of the floodgates of creative
reality, which takes us to the origin of time and space and beyond.
Producing something for others to respond to leads only to a constriction
of energy. We need not seek to be creative, but only cease clinging to our
identity and achievement, which, as the past, matter and time, is the denial
of real transformation.
 12
DIRECT AND
INDIRECT KNOWLEDGE

There are two main sources of our knowledge of the world. The first
is the senses, through which our main contact with the world occurs. The
second is through thought, which organizes sensory impressions into
logical patterns. The senses themselves do not provide direct knowledge.
They do not reveal any thing-in-itself but merely give various impressions
ot appearances, which can be interpreted in any number of ways. The
senses relate to a particular point in time and space. They show only one
side or aspect of things. We can improve their knowledge by extending
their field or by considering additional perspectives. Yet no matter how
we expand our field of sensory knowledge, there remain further appear-
ances that we do not have an adequate means of comprehending.
Thought itself is not a direct means of knowing, but only of organizing
knowledge from other sources. Thought allows us to analyze sensory
impressions and put them into an orderly perspective. Thought allows us
to question the knowledge given by the senses and validate it further. For
example, thought which understands the effect of distance tells us that the
senses do not give an adequate view of distant objects. In this way thought
gives credence to sensory knowledge, without which the inherent bias of
_ sensory knowledge would be glaring.
Conversely, sensation supports and upholds thought. Without sensory
perception to verify them, thoughts may be no more than imagination.
Without a sensation to prove a thought, thought has little meaning. If a
man says that he was hurt but his body shows no evidence of injury, his
statement lacks credibility. We use the limitations of thought to correct
the limitations of sensation, and vice versa. We expand the field of
limitation but our knowledge remains inherently questionable and indi-
rect. ;
We have no direct knowledge of the world. Therefore the question
arises as to whether what we call the world really exists or is merely the
product of the limitations of our instruments. Is our world-idea valid or is
it a distortion of reality caused by the indirect nature of our knowledge?
Do our instruments of knowledge reveal an objective reality or do they
create the very knowledge that they appear to discover? Many scientists
116 — Beyond the Mind —

are also asking these questions. Is the data revealed in an experiment a

product of the circumstances of the experiment rather than what is actually
and naturally there?
We all see the world differently. Different individuals, cultures and
ages have radically different ideas as to what the world is. Some people
think the world is a great and marvelous place, others see it as a realm of
misery and sorrow. One generation’s firm conclusion as to the nature of
the world becomes the fantasy and superstition that a future generation
ridicules.
Apart from a general agreement that the external world is real, which
is an assumption of thought, there is a limited agreement as to what that
reality is and very little agreement as to what its value may be. Hence such
knowledge calls into question the reality of the world. The world is a
product of our indirect knowledge which distorts the reality reflected
through it.
Our self-idea, ego or self-image is the idea or sensation of ourselves
as an object in the world. Hence most of what we call ourselves is also
indirect knowledge, something second-hand, and perhaps only an opinion
picked up from someone else. Through our senses we know our body but
we do not necessarily know who we really are. There is no sensory
impression that we can equate with a self, and our body is constantly
changing. Through thought we fashion the impressions of our body into
an idea of a self. But the self remains problematical, constantly changing
and never lastingly happy or at peace.
The additional question therefore arises as to whether there is any
kind of direct knowledge at all. Is there only appearance, indirect knowl-
edge, and therefore only illusion but no true or absolute reality? We all
possess an intuitive sense that there is a reality. Without reality even
illusion is not possible. How then can we know reality? We can only
discover direct knowledge when we set aside all forms of indirect knowl-
edge.
Indirect knowledge cannot lead us to direct knowledge. Direct knowl-
edge is the nature of consciousness which is not pursuing indirect forms
of knowing. What we directly know is our own existence. If we peel off
the layers of thought from that direct knowledge, we will discover that
our being is one with all that is. The only way to do this is to empty the
mind of thought and sensation, which is the process of meditation.
 13
DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN
SUBJECT AND OBJECT

We are conscious of ourselves as subjects. This is what it is to be an

individual, a perceiver. We revolt against being treated as an object, being
used, and yet this is exactly what we are attempting to do most of the time.
We treat others as objects for our pleasure, material gain or social prestige.
We use people to get what we want, though often with a certain guilt or
by granting them certain favors along the way. And, even more strangely,
we view ourselves as objects, we allow ourselves to be used by others if
it furthers our aims. ,
We have an image of our self as an object in the world. This self-image
is how others see us, or how we think they see us, as if we were no more
than an object. We live in this subject-object contradiction. We find our
value and dignity on one hand in being a conscious subject, in being
treated like a conscious subject (which is generally what we mean when
we ask to be treated like a human being). On the other hand, we seek
fulfillment in life through the attainment of prestige and status, through
becoming successful objects in the world.
All unethical actions spring from this treatment of people as mere
objects. We cannot manipulate or abuse another person if we see him or
her as a human being or conscious subject. It is only possible when we
‘view people as objects, as means of getting what we want or of protecting
ourselves (as if ours were the only legitimate subjectivity in the world).
We do not understand our own subjectivity or that of others because
we ate too engrossed in this process of objectifying ourselves. Yet to
become an object is inherently painful because it puts us under the
limitation of name, image and identity. It places us under the power of
others, and causes us to take various roles which are never authentic. It
turns us into a commodity for consumption by others and makes our
behavior dishonest, motivated and calculated. As a conscious subject, we
cannot find fulfillment as a social image or material commodity. Even if
we are successful outwardly, inwardly we will feel empty, guilty at having
betrayed ourselves and others, having used others and allowed ourselves
to be used. When our moment of glory has passed, we will suffer the pain
of having been.
118 — Beyond the Mind —

There is no fulfillment in being an object, in achieving any social

image, status or prestige. It is to condemn ourselves to domination by the
external, to fall into time and end up a thing of the past. True fulfillment
is found only in being a conscious subject. Consciousness is existence
which is the present. To abide in consciousness, in the state of seeing rather
than as an object seen, is to abide in the endurance and renewal which is
the origin of life. Whatever social image or role we choose or succeed in,
even that of being holy, is a denial of our true Self which is free of all
images, pretensions and strivings.
To bea true subject or real human being is to hold to the primary value
of subjectivity and thus to become free of the duality of subject and object.
It is to see all things, all beings as subjects, to perceive the unity of
consciousness that is everywhere. It is not to see an “other,” but to see the
other as oneself. This sense of objectivity, of the “other,” causes conflict
and sorrow in the world because it is only according to it that we can strive
to gain or control. Only when the appearance of materiality, of an object
or an other, is perceived to be a surface illusion can we find peace and
happiness. Then the world is found to be within us and all life unfolds
itself as an expression of the heart.
 14
THE
ETERNAL

For most of us the eternal is a vague idea, distant and unattainable,

quite apart from the real things of the temporal world which are the objects
of our daily experience. Yet if we look deeply, it is not the eternal that is
illusory but the transient.
The observer is different from the observed. The subject is not an
object. The characteristics of the seer are different from those of the seen.
The eye is not blemished by the imperfections in the objects it sees.
Similarly the consciousness which observes time must not itself be of
time. To perceive the transient, consciousness itself must be eternal. We
are always in the eternal. It is thought that creates the idea of time which
is constantly changing. The real present is that of the eternal, not that of
the constantly changing moments which we experience through the mind.
It is not difficult to step out of time and find the eternal. Whenever
we cease to identify ourselves with the objects of our consciousness, our
awareness naturally returns to its eternal equipoise. We are continually
experiencing things as beginning and ending. This shows that our con-
sciousness itself does not begin or end. Yet instead of opening up to this
natural wisdom of eternity, we instead try to find something lasting in
external objects, which only breeds sorrow. To find the eternal we need
only give up our seeking in the realm of time.
Time is an escape from the eternal. The eternal is the death of time,
which is the mind. However much we immerse ourselves in time, it must
come to an end, and all that we succeed in avoiding is the Divine.
 15
FEAR AND
THE UNKNOWN

Most of us are afraid of the unknown. Yet if we look deeply we will

see that this is an illusion. We cannot be afraid of something if we do not
know what it is. If we do not know what is in a room, we cannot really be
afraid of it. What we are actually afraid of is that the unknown may be
something that we already know and do not like. Hence we cannot really
be afraid of death because we do not know what it is. Behind our fear of
death is the pain of losing our connection to what we know and are
attached to. What we are afraid of is pain, suffering and loneliness. We
are only afraid of the unknown because we think that it will give us these
things. It is not wrong for us to not want these things. No one likes to
suffer or to feel pain. But this fear should not paralyze us. It should get us
to seek a real means of going beyond sorrow.
The real cause of pain, which we should be afraid of and seek to
remove, is our clinging to the transient forms of things. Pain is bred by
attachment to the known, which must pass away. Only by removing that
attachment will the cause of pain be eliminated. Attachment to the known
creates the fear of the unknown, but what we fear in the unknown is just
the pain and sorrow that is part of the known.
All the things that we fear — pain, grief, unhappiness, loneliness and
poverty — have an inner teaching for us. They are pointing out the limited
nature of the life we are leading and the goals we are seeking. Attached
to the known and the transient we must feel fear. Fear is telling us that our
idea of reality is limited and unreal, that it is uncertain and must come to
an end. Fear reveals that the way we think is blind and self-centered. We
need not learn how to avoid or overcome fear but how to understand it.
Fear is the nature of the mind that is attached to the self. The ending of
fear comes only through the ending of our seeking for fulfillment in the
outer world, when we merge the world into our hearts through the power
of self-vision.
 16
THE FLAME
OF AWARENESS

The quality of our attention is our guiding force in life. We feed it

with the kinds of thoughts, feelings and impressions with which we
concern ourselves. Whatever we do is an offering of our attention to some
object or quality which either furthers it and brings us greater awakening,
or obstructs it and puts us further to sleep. According to the nature of the
object of our attention, so does our consciousness develop. Whatever we
most give our attention to in our daily thought and action shows the
movement of our mind either towards transformation or decay.
Awareness is like a flame that reveals the essence of truth. How we
cultivate this sacred flame determines who we are and what we will
become. Most of the time we do not regard our awareness as sacred. We
flee the acuteness of its light. We feed it with impure and unclear emotions
and thoughts. We strive to put it out. We do not cherish or protect it but
waste it away on whatever provides immediate pleasure, self-importance
or mere distraction. We must treat our awareness as sacred. Nothing else
in life is truly meaningful or enduring. Nothing else is intrinsically our
own.
This flame, if we may employ a further metaphor, is the Divine Child
within us, the offspring of our aspiration and creative work in life. It is
the pure residue of all that we are and wish to be, the core feeling of the
heart in which is oneness and compassion. This Divine Child is born of
the Divine Mother who is the receptive mind — the mind free of thought,
choice and ulterior motive, beyond the taint of the separate self. Without
first cultivating the field of the receptive mind — which is to be passively
aware like the light of the moon — we cannot generate anything that is
true and authentic.
This flame takes us to the Divine Father which is Being itself, beyond
name and form — the awareness of the infinite and the eternal which
shines like the sun. The transformation of the flame of our attention into
the sun of awareness is the process of enlightenment. It takes us beyond
122 — Beyond the Mind —
that is ever
birth and death to a continual coming into being of the new
presenc e. To bring this about we must be very patient,
one with the eternal
It is not arrived at by any dramati c action but by dwellin g
subtle and silent.
in emptiness, timelessness and peace.
 17
THE FUNDAMENTAL
QUESTION
There is only one fundamental question: “Who am I?” Without
knowing ourselves, nothing has any validity and our thought must breed
illusion. In the inquiry into our real nature is the whole meaning of
existence. All else is preliminary or superfluous.
Most of the questions we ask regarding the things of the world or what
we should do in life are illegitimate questions because they are based on
the assumption that we know who we are. All our outer knowledge and
action is based on the assumption that we are who we think we are. If we
understand that we really don’t know ourselves, and that the process of
our self-image is a misconception, what would we feel confident in doing?
A man stricken with amnesia will first find out who he is before he tries
to figure out who other people are.
This is the colossal ignorance of our lives and our entire culture. The
entity all our actions are based on, the self, is the least critically examined,
is in fact unknown. We have accepted as our true self what other people
have told us, what it is customary in our culture to be, or whatever self-idea
our momentary thought patterns may happen to project. We have allowed
our identity to be molded by external influences, and we cherish this
fabricated entity as who we really are, seeking to make it happy at all
costs.
All of our thoughts are based upon the thought “I:” “I am this” or
“This is mine,” “I need to do this” or “Tomorrow I will do that.” The “I”
is constantly associated with an object or action, given a name and form,
a becoming in time. The “I” is thus mixed with an object, an outer identity
or self-image. But the “I” in itself is not known to us, and is never directly
approached.
Our knowledge of who we are is thus indirect and mixed. It is not
self-knowledge but self-illusion. We have imposed various outward roles
and functions upon our inner self and subjectivity. What we call our self
is thus nothing but a series of appearances or pretenses. It is a being for
others, not a manifestation of who we are in our own nature. As long as
we project our self upon some object or quality, we are not understanding
ourselves but projecting our identity into the realm of appearance, illusion
124 — Beyond the Mind —
which must
and materiality. We are losing our self and becoming a thing,
result in sorrow.
who
The biggest block to self-knowledge is the idea that we know
we think we are is merely what we have experien ced, the
we ate. All that
burden of our conditio ning. This cannot indicate the nature of our con-
sciousness but only the degree of our identification with the external. Only
living
when we realize our ignorance about ourselves, and the danger of
in that ignorance, can we gain the will and the insight to progress along
the path of truth.
 18
THE INFLUX OF MATTER
INTO THE MIND

We are continually bringing matter into the mind. Whatever things

we open up to in life, we bring some portion of their energy into us. The
primary influx comes through sensation. Whatever becomes a sensation
for us creates an imprint, a scar on the mind, which distorts our perception
and creates a propensity to seek or avoid the same sensation again.
This influx of matter via sensation occurs when we react to the objects
of the senses through thought. Sensory perception itself does not involve
any conditioning of the mind or accumulation of impressions, but for this
unconditioned perception to occur we must lookatthings directly, without
like or dislike, fear or desire — seeing the thing itself rather than its name
or our opinion about it. For example, if one looks at a beautiful jewel and
wants to possess it, there is an influx of matter into the mind, which
increases desire and distraction. The impression of the object enters into
the mind and motivates us toward some action to gain it. If, however, one
looks at the object with openness to life — as if one were to look at a cloud
or a flower, without any desire to possess — then there is no impression,
the mind is not agitated or burdened by the experience.
It is easy to observe the difference between these two types of
perception. When we look at something with attraction or repulsion, there
is a feeling of contact. The awareness of the field of perception is lost and
we become contracted around the particular object. We look at the object
rather than merely observing what is going on around us. This moment
of contact is when the influx of matter comes into the mind. It is
experienced as a kind of blow or disorientation, a subtle form of pain.
Such contact dulls the mind and builds up a density within it that blocks
direct perception and communication.
The second level of influx of matter into the mind is through thought
itself, which can occur even in the absence of sensation. To think about
something is to link up with its materiality, to take some portion of it inside
ourselves. Subtle material energies are given off by all things, and these
we take upon ourselves to the extent that we think about them.
Hence we should be very careful as to what we ally our thoughts with.
To think about something, positively or negatively, is to become shaped
126 — Beyond the Mind —

by that object. It is to connect with it karmically, to fall under its influence

and to give it the power of our thoughts. In this way our leaders or famous
people gain power from the minds of those who look up to them. This is
not something imaginary but an actual accumulation of energy around
their personalities.
Whatever energies we take into ourselves through thought or sensa-
tion must have an effect. We gather energy from the thoughts and
sensations we dwell on during the day. These accumulate to a certain
threshold until they have the power to compel us to act. We may not think
it is important when our mind wanders off to think of something trivial
or negative. While these things may not affect us immediately, they create
a propensity which must eventually cause us to act according to their
influence.
Our thoughts are the reality that we are creating for ourselves. They
are the raw material of what we will become. They are the perfume we
are giving forth, which is our message to life as a whole. Unfortunately,
we value outer things — wealth, pleasure and information — and don’t
take our thoughts very seriously. We are content to live with a mind in
disorder, though we may keep a clean house or balanced bank account.
Unless we understand the importance of our thoughts and what they are
breeding for us, we cannot find anything real.
For this reason it is important that we align our thoughts with truth.
We should inquire into truth and meditate upon the being of things. We
should open ourselves to nature and the sacred presence in life. If we
cannot orient our minds directly into silence and meditation, we should
at least engage them in some spiritual teaching or practice which leads to
meditation. As a culture we should also direct our thoughts toward
spiritual teachings or devotion to the Divine. Without such a conscious
direction of thought, the energy of our attention will fall into the uncon-
scious and create more unnecessary difficulties for us.
 19
KARMA

We are not under any necessary bondage to karma or destiny. As

conscious subjects, as spiritual beings, we are inherently free of time and
matter and its compulsions. In the present moment all is open, free and
creative. Nor is our future in any way necessarily limited by our past. Only
in so far as we blindly continue our attachment to the past do we remain
bound to any pattern of karma.
To be attached to the past is to inevitably repeat it. It is to react in
terms of it and structure our lives according to its fixed patterns. To be
attached to the past is to be bound to an identity, a personal becoming
through time or a separate self. It is to fall into the domain of time and the
stream of tendencies and impressions of the entire material evolution,
particularly those of beings with attachments similar to our own. This
places us under the influence not only of our individual karmic latencies
but also those of the collective mind. It opens the door of our minds to the
dark forces of what once was, and what should be no mote.
Through memory we come under the power of death and mortality
because the past is inherently devoid of true life, duration and creativity.
We only gain the repetitive continuity of a material thing, not the dynamic
creativity of a conscious subject. To be attached to the past is to be
identified with the external, because only the external can leave a mark
in time. The internal, the state of seeing, is the presence that cannot pass
away. Karma is the inertia of matter to which we become bound to the
extent that we identify ourselves with time and the external world and
thereby fall under their domination.
We fall under the influence of karma when we attach ourselves to the
past or try to plan our future. Only our lack of awareness in the present
binds us to a destiny. What particular karmic pattern we fall into is not
that significant. It may be little more than an accident, and to analyze it
or seek the meaning of it in time, even in past lives, is only to perpetuate
our bondage to karma. All karma is an ignorance of the present that binds
us to the limited pattern of the past, a hypnosis of matter which compels
us to act mechanically and compulsively until we fall into some misfor-
tune. The details of our karma are not important but, rather, why we allow
ourselves to fall under the influence of the external world in the first place.
128 — Beyond the Mind —

As conscious subjects, we have no karma, which only belongs to an

object. Only when we throw the integrity of our awareness away to
become somebody or something in the material world do we come under
the forces of time. When we cease to define ourselves in terms of action,
which is karma, we will discover that we have no duties, no obligations
and no destiny of any kind. This does not mean that we cannot act but that
our action will be free of desire and external seeking, and therefore an
expression of liberation, not further bondage.
 20
KUNDALINI

The highest energy belongs to consciousness itself, not to any form

or process material or mental. Consciousness itself contains the energy
that has created this entire universe and yet is in no way limited or
diminished by it.
Where there is awareness, energy must follow in its appropriate place.
Hence if we wish to have more energy in life, we need only expand the
field of our awareness. This is not brought about by thinking about more
things or having more information about the world but by developing the
power of attention. This occurs when we cease to allow our minds to
wander in the pursuit of stimulation and distraction.
Kundalini is a name given to the energy of consciousness. While
energy follows consciousness, energy can also be used to direct us to
consciousness. For this purpose yogic procedures like mantra and
pranayama (breathing exercises) can be used. Yet such processes must be
done with awareness for them to really work. They are meant to assist the
process of meditation, which should unfold naturally of its own accord.
They are meant to harmonize the outer aspects of our being, like breath
and thought, with our inner consciousness. They cannot produce that inner
consciousness but merely aid in our attunement to it.
To pursue energy, particularly Kundalini, without devotion or inquiry
into truth can be a dangerous process. The subtle energy of the mind is
not something to be toyed with or used for personal ends. Nor can it be
developed properly if our emotions are turbulent or if our life-style is
impure. We must honor the energy of consciousness and allow it to work
through us. While certain organic tools and methods like breath and
mantra can help facilitate its unfoldment, they are only gentle aids, not to
be used forcefully.
For this reason, Kundalini has always been revered as a Goddess or
Divine power to which we must surrender, not try to manipulate. Ac-
knowledging her as such will ensure the right usage of her force.
Yet surrender to the inner power is the same as inquiry into our own
nature. It is a movement in consciousness, not a striving to gain an
experience, which can only be transient and illusory.
 21
LIMITATION
AND THE UNLIMITED

Life presents us with both the limited and the unlimited. On one hand,
there is no limit to what we can see or experience. On the other hand, there
is a definite limit to what we can do, and the time that we have to live.
If we examine any object in nature we discover that there is no end
to the details of its appearance. Take a walk in the woods and try to see
everything. Examine the endless detail on a rock, the bark of a tree, the
many insects, the pattern of the dew or the movement of the clouds. The
unlimited is everywhere. Yet we also find limits to things. Each thing has
restrictions as to its size and duration. Hence the world presents us with
both the limited and the unlimited. How do these factors relate? Which is
primary or real? Have we ever examined this issue, or have we merely
accepted the limited as the real?
If we pursue the limited we will find it everywhere. We will find ends,
limits or boundaries to everything. If we pursue the unlimited we will also
find it everywhere. We will find no end to the beauty, uniqueness and
variety of things. If we pursue the limited we ourselves will become
limited, trapped in time and matter. If we pursue the unlimited we
ourselves will become unlimited. We will open into the eternal and the
infinite.
Unfortunately, in our human society we emphasize the limited side
of life. We establish boundaries, territory, distinctions and definitions. We
price and label things and people and thereby lose contact with the
indescribable richness of perception and awareness. Rather than possess
all the universe in consciousness, we strive to hold to a few petty items
on the physical plane which itself is vicarious. Hence we miss the
unlimited and thereby never find peace.
The world is the unlimited in apparent limitation. If we look superfi-
cially we see the limited. If we look deeply we perceive the unlimited.
The unlimited abides in seeing, not in any object seen. Thought focuses
on the limited and pronounces it to be real. In this way we limit our own
reality. Awareness reveals the unlimited, not as a theory but as the fact of
perception. Which of these directions in consciousness we choose deter-
mines our own reality or unreality, and our happiness or sorrow.
 22
MANTRA

Apart from meditation, the most effective way to decondition the

mind is through the practice of mantra. However, mantra is both an art
and a science and is not something that can be done mechanically and
really work. It must be the product of an intention to develop awareness,
not the seeking of personal power or gain.
Mantra originally refers to the movement of the mind which is
generated by the perception of truth. Mantra is thus the vibration of truth
perceived. It is the impression on the mind created by the state of seeing.
The perception of truth energizes our thoughts in a special way and gives
them focus, clarity and power. This state of the concentrated and attentive
mind is mantra.
Mantra also refers to the repetition of certain sacred sounds, usually
seed-syllables or bija mantras like Om, which have a vibratory affinity
with the state of seeing. Using such mantras, or any words of truth and
wisdom, can help reorient the mind to its original state of awareness.
True mantra is not a sound repeated by the conscious mind, though
the practice of the mantra may begin on this level. One does not merely
repeat the mantra, one sets the mantra in motion and then listens to it,
allowing it to mirror one’s deeper consciousness. One then learns to
perceive the mantra as the vibration of truth or presence in all that one
observes.
The mind is composed of distracted thoughts, through which the
power of our attention or energy of consciousness is dispersed into the
outer world. It is not always possible to directly bring this confused mass
of thought directly to an end. We must work to develop the power of
attention or seeing that is inherently unified. This requires focusing on
one thought or keeping our consciousness concentrated on a single point
or issue.
Thought is composed of words or sounds, which become the means
of identifying ourselves with external objects and qualities. Mantra is the
mind concentrated ona single vibratory sound that has no external referent
or meaning in terms of time and space. Mantra is thereby able to break
this grip of our identification with the external and bring us into contact
with our own reality in consciousness that is not attached to any form.
132 — Beyond the Mind —

The mind possesses a mechanical nature. Mantra works directly on

the mechanical mind. It turns the mind’s process of calculation and
repetition into a means of generating the energy of attention. Mantra is a
way of engaging the mechanical mind in the pursuit of truth. Once the
mechanical mind is absorbed in the mantra, it loses its attraction to the
outer world, and can be gradually immersed in silence.
How then does one practice mantra? One must continually return the
mind to a single thought or mantra, which represents the remembrance of
truth or our real nature. Any name of the Divine can be used, as such
names reflect our connection to our inner consciousness, or any insight
into truth can similarly be followed. The mantra should be offered to the
Divine or our inner nature, who should be invited to enter into the mantra.
We should learn thereby to perceive the mantra as the disclosure of being,
the door to silence. The mantra should not be viewed as a means of
achieving anything but as a way for this inner reality to disclose itself to
us. Without this energization by devotion or inquiry, mantra may not be
effective.
One may ask, how can mantra, which is based on thought, be used to
negate thought? Thought must be integrated before it can be negated.
Mantra serves to integrate thought through the development of attention.
The attentive mind can then be dissolved through meditation. Hence until
we are in control of our attention, such practices as mantra may be useful,
or even necessary, for us.
 23
MEDITATION
AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

In the waking state, our social and rational mind screens, selects and
represses much of the contents of our consciousness. What it does not
want to recognize becomes the unconscious. In the waking state we do
not wish to admit the chaotic fears and desires, based mainly on fantasy,
with which our mind is filled. However, in the dream state, when the
conscious mind and its selective function is in abeyance and there is no
sensory perception to color the mind, the actual contents of our conscious-
ness arise for what they are, which is chaos. Our dream state reflects the
actual confused state of our minds.
As we begin to meditate, we come into contact with this deeper chaos
of our thoughts. We try to control or discipline our thoughts and emotional
reactions. Yet in spite of the control we may achieve over our fantasies
and desires in the waking state, we find they remain firmly rooted in the
unconscious and may become more tenacious by our opposition to them.
The division between the conscious and the unconscious becomes deeper,
becomes a kind of war, with the conscious mind seeking to conquer the
unconscious and the unconscious retreating to secret strongholds and
waging a costly guerrilla uprising in return.
Consciously, intellectually, according to the persuasion of an idea,
authority or belief, we decide to change, not to be violent or lustful and
so on. Yet this does not affect the unconscious, which still mirrors
confusion, attachment and violence — an obstinate clinging to the very
emotions we have decided to give up. We begin to suspect some evil or
alien will behind the workings of the unconscious and thereby increase
our resistance to it. This only increases the division between the conscious
and the unconscious, which is our own inner fragmentation. Such an
approach leads ultimately to a dead end of conflict, in which the uncon-
scious overcomes the conscious and we give up the worldly life and
struggle to enjoy the pleasures we have denied ourselves; or the conscious
mind so strangles the unconscious that we lose all life and spontaneity and
become cold and rigid mental beings.
Whatever exists in our minds, even the most careless fantasy or
distracted imagination, is there for a reason and reflects some truth of our
134 — Beyond the Mind —

state of consciousness. There is no real division between the conscious

and the unconscious. There is a duality whereby one tends to mirror or
show the opposite of the other, but each thereby sustains the other. The
unconscious is the shadow of the conscious mind, reflecting what we do
not want to admit about ourselves. Conversely, the conscious mind is that
portion of the unconscious we are willing to admit and accept as our own.
The unconscious is not really unconscious; it is that portion of conscious-
ness we condemn to darkness by our narrow self-consciousness or ego-
focus in life. Similarly, the conscious mind is not really conscious but a
more tefined creation of the same elemental forces that we see in the
unconscious.
Superficially we may wish to change, but deeply, inwardly, we do
not. The desires and ambitions that persist in the unconscious mirror this
fact. Or our attempted changes, like the attempt to sublimate desire, may
be the desire in another form. We may substitute ambition in the spiritual
realm for that in the material realm. However, ambition is ambition, and
so we will find that its violence will persist in the deeper layers of our
consciousness, in dreams and fantasies. The unconscious is merely more
honest than the conscious mind as it presents uncensored thoughts, the
raw material of what we are.
Therefore we should not fight or resist the activities of the uncon-
scious. We should patiently observe them as the revelation of the igno-
tance behind the rational mind. If we continue to be plagued by fantasies
and desires, it is because we are still caught in some form of pride and
ambition, which is reflected into the unconscious. The tenacity of the
unconscious to hold on to desires is only equal to the ignorance of the
conscious mind, its projection of these same compulsions in a more noble
and self-glorifying form. The real test of what we are is not in our
conscious thought process but in what our unconscious mind spontane-
ously reflects. To abide in self-observation is the ending of both conscious
and unconscious thought processes, which reclaims for us the infinite
energy of awareness.
 24
THE MESSAGE
OF ANXIETY

Our lives are filled with fear and anxiety. Anxiety, we could say, is
the very way of our culture. We are made impressionable to it at a young
age as a means of social control. Anxiety takes many forms, like the
anxiety to be loved, to be happy, to be well off or to be somebody. And
there is the anxiety of possible loss which breeds insurance companies
and churches. We invent all kinds of guarantees and securities to protect
us. And yet there is no end to our anxiety.
It is no wonder that we are anxious. We have based our whole
mentality on the outer factors of life which are intrinsically transient,
limited, uncertain and unreliable. As long as we are caught in the realm
of outward seeking, we must suffer anxiety. We are always trying to figure
things out, to plan and control them, to make them go our way or bring
us what we want. The very action of thought must result in anxiety because
we cannot really figure anything out. Life is beyond our control, and even
when we succeed in getting what we want, we find that it is really not
what we thought it would be. Our effort to control life and plan the future
separates us from life and its beneficence. In trying to take care of
ourselves, we lose the care of life and so cease to care for life. As there is
no one, no reality to sustain us except what we create by our own personal
and collective efforts in the face of the unknown and the certainty of death
and limitation, we find anxiety lurking everywhere.
There is no overcoming of anxiety; there is only its postponement or
its palliation. Anxiety is the inevitable effect of the way we live, and the
effect cannot be removed without the eradication of its cause. Non-sur-
render to life, non-perception of truth, and the imposing of our personal
will upon existence must cause anxiety. Our isolated center of separate
existence, the personal self or ego, is a constriction of energy, an alienation
that must remain problematical, uncertain and anxious because it has no
true basis in reality.
Anxiety is only evidence that our lives are out of harmony with reality.
the
We should feel anxious because we are placing our sense of reality in
anxiety unfold its signific ance
uncertain, the petty and the fleeting. Letting
through receptivity to it will reveal to us all the illusions of the mind. The
136 — Beyond the Mind —

problem is not anxiety but our dependence on thought which breeds

anxiety, our attachment to the self which is ever in turmoil. To see the
anxiety inherent in the way we think is the ending of it. The things we use
to suppress or escape anxiety, or the people who assuage our anxiety with
hope or comfort, only postpone our inevitable facing of the unreality and
emptiness of the self. Anxiety is the mirror in which the inadequacy of
the separate self is revealed. We should not destroy the mirror but
understand its message.
Each thing is teaching us the truth of what we are. Pain and anxiety
reveal to us how we are creating sorrow for ourselves. They are our friends
who are exposing the error of our ways. There is no escape from them
unless we recognize the truth of what they are revealing to us.
 25
OPPOSITION
AND UNDERSTANDING

Opposition is not the way of understanding. It does not resolve our

problems but only intensifies them. It does not resolve conflict, nor
through it can conflict be overcome. Opposition is the way of conflict,
through which conflict must increase. Why do we oppose things and what
kind of consciousness does opposition breed?
The opposer is the opposed and both are opposition, which is resis-
tance, duality and conflict. We try to arrive at security in the outer world
by overcoming our opposition, the enemy. Yet this creation of the enemy
destroys security and denies the resolution of our problems. We can only
solve our problems when we face them together as the common human
problem, not when we see the other as the problem. To see others as the
opposition, the enemy, is the denial of the unity of humanity through
which alone humane action is possible. As people become of negative
value to us, so we become of negative value to them, and thereby we also
posit our own denigration and destruction.
We use this same mentality of conflict and opposition to solve our
inner problems. To get rid of anger we oppose it, struggle against it and
try to end its existence. We treat it as the enemy, an alien force to be
overcome. We end up becoming angry with our anger, as the effort to end
anger only creates more anger. It is the same with desire, fear or whatever
psychological state we try to change.
Opposition is the way of matter, which is built up by dualistic forces
from elemental attraction and repulsion on upwards. Hence opposition
renders us more materialistic, dull and insensitive. Opposition is the way
of division. To see something or someone as other, opposite, is to divide
up our own consciousness, to split up reality, and results in fragmentation
of every sort. We cannot end the existence of anything. The existence of
all things is eternal and sacred. It is the failure to recognize this that creates
evil. Negative emotions exist because we do not live with reverence.
Feelings of opposition only come to an end when we treat them with
reverence, when we liberate the energy of existence caught within them
by not seeing them as other, when we no longer seek to either stimulate
or suppress them.
138 — Beyond the Mind —
emotions, includ-
For this reason many spiritual teachings symbolize
or fear, in the forms of various Gods and
ing negative emotions like anger
are truly Gods and Goddes ses; that is, they are
Goddesses. Our emotions
— and not per-
great powers of the collective psyche — cosmic forces
them with reverence
sonal possessions that we can control. To approach
mean to accept
affords them the space of transmutation. This does not
ive to the truth they
them or fall under their influence but to be recept
conse quenc e of all personal
convey. Negative emotions teach us that the
seeking is suffering, which to see frees us from them.
we approach
Whatever we approach with unity can be resolved. What
duality can only cause further conflic t. In the unity
with opposition and
to the sacred. They
of the perceiver and the perceived, all things are doors
or understand
show not only the futility of the mind, its inability to control
reality, but also what is beyond the mind.
 26
THE PAIN
OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Whatever we become conscious of becomes a source of pain because

to be conscious of something means to become engrossed in its finitude.
Our ordinary consciousness is pain because it is a fixation on the limited
and the transient. This constriction in awareness is the root of all psycho-
logical suffering, not any particular thing we may lose or be deprived of.
Usually, however, we associate the pain of consciousness not with our
awareness itself but with our inability to control or possess the person or
object to which the mind is attached.
There is, for example, the pain of love. We are conscious of loving
someone and in that is the pain of the wish to possess them or the pain of
not wanting them to hurt us. We associate this pain not with the nature of
consciousness as desire — which as a state of want must be painful —
but with difficulties, limitations or failures in our relationship. There is
also the pain of hatred. We may despise some opposing political group
and what they do. Hence we become fixated upon them and become
sensitive to their every action, which easily upsets us. Our life devolves
into little more than a reaction to theirs. Thus in the fixation upon anything,
whether positively or negatively, is the constriction of our awareness
which is pain.
To be conscious of something with the mind, therefore, is to suffer.
All mental consciousness is an awareness of limitation against which we
can only strive in vain. Our very effort to overcome limitation is the
outcome of the thought that posits it in the first place and so can only
sustain it. What brings us pain is our consciousness of things, our
awareness of the details and limitations of the external world. Whatever
we struggle with, for or against, removing us from the peace of being to
the agony of becoming, must bring us pain. As long as we see matter as
the main reality — as long as we follow outer values of possession,
achievement and acquisition — so long will we suffer the agony of the
finite, the transient and the divided.
There is no possible resolution of pain on the material plane alone,
for such is its nature. The only resolution is in seeing the superficial and
destructive nature of materialistic thinking and to awaken to the sacred
 140 — Beyond the Mind —
there is no
nature of existence. Consciousness is free of pain only when
an other, when all is seen as oneself.
consciousness of an object or
whole plane of psychol ogical striving is the
- Perceiving the pain of the
transcending of it into the benefic ence that can never be hurt.
 27
POSITIVE THINKING
OR NEGATION OF THOUGHT?

What we call thought is essentially negative because it is based on

desire, which as a state of want remains negative to the natural fullness of
existence. '
Through positive suggestions we may try to visualize the fulfillment
of our desires (which we may idealize as what is good for humanity). We
imagine getting the job, partner or spiritual experiences that we are
seeking. However, such emphasis on desire, whatever form it takes, must
give continuity to the inner emptiness and unrest behind desire. Even if
such thought brings us what we want, it keeps us trapped in desire and
must lead to eventual frustration. What we may call positive thinking
therefore may only be negative thinking in disguise. It is the negative state
of thought further emphasizing itself and its self-focused goals.
All thought is dualistic and strengthens its opposite. For example, one
only projects the positive thought that one is happy if one actually feels
sad. All positive thoughts are based on negative thoughts, which they
reinforce on a subtle level. Repeat to yourself, “I am so happy,” and you
will soon feel sad. Repeat to yourself, “I am so miserable,” and you will
soon begin to laugh. We try to escape one state of mind with its opposite,
like the thought of happiness to escape that of sorrow, but opposites
sustain and become each other. Through the pursuit of happiness we gain
sortow. The thought of goodness creates evil, and to fight evil may cause
us to adopt its method and its mentality and become evil ourselves. As
long as we do not understand the dualistic nature of thought, we will
remain trapped in illusion.
The more we try to escape the negative, the more we attract it to us
because we attract whatever we think about. In fact, it is the nature of the
mind to pursue the negative (which is why prohibitions are of such little
value). What we are told not to do becomes a temptation for us and thereby
gains a positive value for us. We cannot escape emptiness and sorrow
through thought because thought itself is emptiness and sorrow. What is
necessary is not positive thinking but the abandonment of thought, which
is positive awareness beyond manipulation and desire.
142 — Beyond the Mind —

Meditation is not positive thinking (which may be self-hypnosis) but

rather clearing the mind of thought. True prayer is not asking favors from
some deity but surrender without motivation to the unknown, the infinite,
the Divine within the heart. True faith is accepting what is as the Divine
will, not believing that we can get what we want if we think about it hard
enough.
It is of no value to pretend that we are happy, healthy or enlightened
when we are not. We must understand what causes our sorrow and
ignorance. The cause is the same thought process we use to overcome it.
What is necessary is to face the truth of what we are, not to try to become
something else. What saves us is to be willing to be who we are, not to
try to be or get something better.
There is a kind of positive thinking but this is not trying to get
something better for ourselves. It is to affirm our inner reality that in our
nature as consciousness we ate beyond all fears and desires, which only
pertain to the outer world. True positive thinking states,
Rise above thought, be beyond desire, have no fear, regard it
as beneath your Divine dignity to worry about anything. Give up
all plotting and calculating and come to rest in your true being that
is infinite and eternal and compared to which all the universe is no
more than a grain of dust.
It is also necessary that we project good wishes into life, that we manifest
a good will towards all — that our concern is no longer with our own
desires and their fulfillment. Generating compassion, however, cannot be
done artificially or to gain something. It must be based upon a real sense
of the sacred, which is only possible through the awareness of unity as a
fact of life. Truth and happiness are always there. We need not bring them
into being with our thoughts but need only remove our attachment to
falsehood, our seeking of personal happiness and the sorrow that must
arise from it. Universal good wishes are not the product of personal
thought but the beneficence of being that affirms the fullness of our true
nature. What is necessary is to attune ourselves to the positive nature of
awareness that cannot be found in thought, which is inherently negative.
 28
POWER
AND ENERGY

Most of us are pursuing power in one form or another. It may be power

for ourselves or for some group to which we belong. It may be material,
mental or spiritual power. We want our power, what belongs to us, our
rights.
The pursuit of power, if we look into it deeply, is violence. To give
value to power is to invite exploitation. It does not matter who has power;
the violence and partiality inherent in power must manifest. Power is an
accumulation derived from the outside, from external seeking. It is the
pursuit of a result or an effect. As such, it creates division, dependency,
manipulation and paranoia.
We seek power because we believe we are weak and must compensate
for our weakness. But the effect must be of the same nature as the cause.
From weakness we can only arrive at further weakness. The accumulation
of power is an extreme form of weakness in which we must dominate
others to prove our strength, which has no validity of its own. The power
we achieve makes us vulnerable to the power of others and puts us in
conflict with them. The higher we rise in the achievement of power, the
greater becomes our potential and inevitable fall.
The pursuit of power derives from the separate self. As a separate self
we must pursue power because as a separate self we are nothing, a mere
point of weakness and alienation. Power does not dissolve this sense of
separation but only gives it a false strength.
Power is a negative energy that is fixated in a center, which belongs
to someone or some group. It is preserved within a boundary or a barrier
and creates sects and divisions. Power creates authority, which in turn
engenders fear. Power creates position, status and prestige which only
means that somewhere, someone is being trampled under foot. The
principalities of power, in whatever form they may be, are the principal-
ities of darkness. To change one power group for another, or to change
the pursuit of power from one form to another, is only to insure that the
drive for power continues. Power forces a conflict in order to triumph,
wherein both energy and life are lost. Those over whom we seek power
144 — Beyond the Mind —
the
are also our own Self and so, in dominating them, we only destroy
unity and integrity of our own being.
What is spiritual does not operate through power, does not seek or
work
display force but, rather, lets things be what they are. It does not
accumula tion of power — which is of the same mentalit y as
through the
sense of
the hoarding of wealth — but through the giving up of the
possession and identity. The accumulation of power is a densific ation and
stagnation of energy, a blockage. The giving up of power is the entrance
into the true power of giving which is the real energy of creation.
Power is not true energy. It leads to conflict and disintegration, as we
can observe wherever it is emphasized. True energy is not an accumula-
tion, does not belong to anyone, and cannot be taken, achieved or
assumed, won or conquered. It is not our right to have power but, rather,
our duty to give energy. In the possession and accumulation of power is
an atrogance of energy which leads to collapse. In the giving of energy
— which is the giving up of power — is natural renewal and regeneration.
There is no power which is truly our own that we can claim to have
rights to, that we can assert or defend. Power, energy, is one and belongs
to all beings without division. There is only one true energy in life: the
energy of being, of silence, of the simple. It can only function where there
is no center to delimit or possess it. Giving is the greatest power, the energy
of love beyond all intimidation.
Those who assert power deny love and operate from fear. Life is love
but power is fear, death and darkness. Power is the negative energy of
matter trying to be, which as a material force must decay. Energy is the
positive power of the spirit, which is the love that enlivens all beings.
Power repulses and destroys, but energy attracts and creates. It is because
we value power or force, whether materially or mentally, that we must
die. To transcend death we must awaken to the infinite energy of existence
that is everywhere and in all beings, the energy of consciousness in which
all beings are exalted in the unity of our deepest self and nature.
 29
PRANAYAMA

The energy of the breath and the energy of thought are directly related.
As the breath moves, so does thought. This we can observe for ourselves.
When the mind is disturbed, the breath is disturbed and vice versa.
Hence by controlling the breath we can aid in controlling the thought
process. By developing the energy of the breath we can help develop the
energy of consciousness. For this reason various breathing practices or
pranayama have often been used to help facilitate the practice of medita-
tion. Once the breath is calm, it becomes easier to move into a state of
meditation. Hence pranayama is often practiced as a preliminary to
meditation.
Our thoughts move outward into the external world by the movement
of the breath. We can observe this for ourselves. We cannot be aware of
our breath and lose our attention to any external object. Awareness of the
breath checks the outward impetus of thought and keeps the life-force
within us. It introverts the mind and allows us to contact our true nature.
The breath is thus the link between the inner and the outer worlds of
experience and can be used to take us in either direction. In the process
of breathing we not only take in the air from the outer world, we also
contact the life-force within us, whose origin is in consciousness. By
conscious breathing we can connect with consciousness, which is the true
energy behind the breath.
While it is often very difficult to get a handle on our thoughts, which
do not abide even for an instant, it is quite possible to work with the breath.
Yet the breath is only a door to the mind. To belabor ourselves with our
breathing process without inquiring inwardly through meditation is no
more than a physical exercise that cannot take us beyond the ordinary
realm.
 30
PRESENCE
AND THE PRESENT MOMENT

Many spiritual teachings emphasize awareness in the here and now

or being in the present moment. This has often been misunderstood. For
most of us, being in the present means getting into what is happening
immediately around us. It is getting caught in the moment and its imme-
diate pleasure and pain, which is the pursuit of sensation. It is to become
engrossed in the events around us and driven by the stream of events like
a leaf by the wind. To be such a creature of the present moment is to have
no will or enduring values in life.
The true present is not of time. The present which is between the past
and the future is an insubstantial moment that has no reality of its own. It
is the most fleeting and insignificant of things. The true present is the
presence of consciousness which observes time but is not of it. In that
presence the images of time appear like bubbles or clouds that can never
be grasped. We need not try to hold on to the present moment, which does
not endure even for an instant, but to remain in the presence of conscious-
ness. The true presence has no form or motion, though it is reflected in all
things. To open up to that presence is to no longer be disturbed by the
transient events around us, but to embrace all time in the being of the
eternal. In that is peace and liberation.
What is necessary is not to dwell in the present moment, but to dwell
in presence. Presence is being which is in all things, in all time and beyond.
 31
PURITY OF MIND
AND GOING BEYOND THE MIND

We cannot go beyond the mind if our mind is not pure. For this reason
various systems of yoga emphasize right diet, conduct and livelihood.
Whatever we do in life, we are absorbing various influences and impres-
sions. If these are heavy or agitated, our minds will not have the subtlety
to approach the real. This does not mean that we have to follow some
artificial religious standard but that we must be truthful, honest, simple
and non-violent — that our life must reflect the integrity and discipline
of awareness. If our life-style does not agree: with our ideas and aspira-
tions, the latter are of little real value.
We cannot step outside of the chaos of our thoughts without bringing
clarity to our function in life. If we are addicted to sensation and stimula-
tion, anxious about the outer world, if we are ambitious or acquisitive even
for spiritual knowledge, the mind will be weighed down and our inner
light veiled. The vibrations created by these actions, like the effect of
alcohol, will obstruct us from any higher perception. As long as we are
ingesting the forces of illusion and confusion, we cannot talk about going
beyond them.
Therefore the spiritual life always has two aspects: to purify the mind
and to go beyond the mind. To purify the mind it is necessary to live
righteously, with integrity and compassion. For this many practices can
be helpful like vegetarian diet, yogic postures, yogic breathing, study of
spiritual teachings, repetition of mantras, visiting sacred places or spend-
ing time in nature. To go beyond the mind it is necessary not to believe in
any illusion of thought or stance of the ego, even attachment to the good
or the holy. This is beyond all practices and nothing can directly bring it
about.
Yet it can be easy to theorize about what is beyond the mind, even
when the mind is not pure or clear. It can be easy to put down spiritual
and religious practices as illusory while in our daily lives we still live in
a worldly and sensate fashion, dominated by outer events and attached to
opinions and judgments. This remains wishful thinking and only distorts
our ability to approach the truth. While practices to purify the mind have
their limitations, they are of greater value than continuing in a distracted
148 — Beyond the Mind —

state of mind. Hence even if we cannot enter into meditation directly,

which is not always possible owing to the weight of our impressions, there
is always something we can do to bring greater harmony into our lives,
even if it is something as simple as taking a walk in the woods.
 32
PURSUIT OF
SECURITY

Our main worry in life, if we look deeply, is for our welfare in the
material world: whether or not we will have enough income to get by,
whether our job or relationship will be secure, whether our health will be
good, and so on. This problem constantly gnaws at us and keeps us
disturbed and disoriented. It may fall into the background for awhile,
particularly in periods of good fortune, but it never leaves us and recur-
rently surfaces with the various difficulties that life brings to all of us. To
assuage this fear, we look to improve our position in the world: to get a
better job, to save more money, to have insurance, property and so on. Yet
however much we have, we are never able to conquer this basic fear.
Greater income means greater expenses and more possessions give more
to worry about. And there are always obstructions and enmity from one
side or another. We gain in one area but lose in another. We may, for
example, gain wealth but lose our friends.
Most of us are plotting to maintain or expand our position in the world
to gain more security. We look to friends, family, employers, banks and
governments to guarantee our status or to save us if we are poor. We seek
our refuge in life in something outside ourselves. Yet no matter how
apparently secure a few of us may become, there remain depressions,
wars, revolutions and natural calamities to fear — as well as disease, old
age and death, which are our inevitable lot.
Even those of us who are spiritually or religiously inclined become
easily disturbed by financial, legal, political or health problems, or we
look to the ashram or the guru to provide for our welfare. Our prime
concern in life is material security. And when this is threatened we feel
our whole life is threatened. We have established our personal welfare in
the outer world as our prime value. Then we may find the leisure for some
higher pursuits like art or meditation, or we can afford to be charitable.
However, the very outward powers we rely upon for security are
themselves insecure. The government, the insurance companies, our
family, whoever we have made our refuge, becomes a threat. Our looking
to the material world for security merely places us under the rule of the
external, allows us to become unbalanced by the changes and fluctuations
150 — Beyond the Mind —
security,
which are part of the very nature of life. Our seeking of outer
insecuri ty. It makes us depende nt upon
which does not really exist, breeds
unreliab le, and causes us to lose our innate integrit y
the external, which is
and independence in awarene ss.
There is no security in the material world. The nature of matter is
give us
corruption, dependency and relativity. How can what is transient
outwardl y there is
support? The pursuit of security is endless because
nothing that we can really hold onto. The only outward certainty is death.
Yet most of us are not concerned with what death is. We are worried about
will
how we will get by in old age — whether our family or someone else
take care of us, whether we will be sick or not — but we seldom consider
the fact of death itself which nullifies all personal happiness and sorrow.
As long as we are seeking outward security we must create misery and
insecurity for ourselves.
All life supports the one who is aware. This is the law of life: all beings
further the one who sees his unity with them. This support is not a
dependable income or freedom from tribulation, but the peace and love
which can transcend even death and sorrow. The spiritual life does not
depend upon material security but sees in all life a grace of learning in
which all things aid in the unfoldment of self-knowledge. The spiritual
life does not bow down to those who have power, wealth or prestige. It
realizes that those who hold the power externally are no more than puppets
in a stage show, pulled by strings they do not see.
 33
REALITY
AND APPEARANCE

Appearance is never reality and reality never appears. They are two
different dimensions altogether. Whatever appears is bound by duality
and relativity, whereas reality is only one and absolute.
This is not a statement of abstract philosophy. Both our reality and
that of the world cannot be found in the realm of appearances as revealed
by the senses, or by any extension of sensory knowledge including the
most subtle scientific instruments. Reality is of the inner consciousness
and can never become an object of examination by the externally-oriented
mind. Similarly, whatever can be observed or seen must be ultimately
unreal, as it is not the awareness within.
The world and how we appear within it can never be the truth. We
will never find reality in the world of appearances, just as a light cannot
be found by its shadows on the wall. Appearance is name, form and
limitation, which remains trapped in alternating waves of pleasure and
pain, joy and sorrow, birth and death. Appearance can never become
perfect. It remains relative, bound by duality, shifting up and down but
never arriving at any lasting condition.
Whatever world we appear to be in, and whatever body we appear to
inhabit, is never real. They are merely reflections of our inner conscious-
ness, like the waves that rise from the sea. They are products of an
outgoing view based upon thought in ignorance of our true Self. We
cannot find peace or fulfillment in any appearance, however great. Only
in the world of reality or consciousness does our innate happiness abide.
This is not to denigrate the outer world but simply to see it as it is.
Appearance is like an image, symbol or play — a magic show lasting a
few days. It has its wonder and beauty but it is wrong to think that it has
any reality of its own. To believe that any appearance is real is to be taken
in by appearances. To see the illusory nature of all appearances is to allow
the real to shine through the veil of appearance, through which we pass
beyond all time.
Yet it is not so much that the world is an illusion as that what we call
the world is a misconception. The reality of the world is quite different
than our idea of a world. It is not that there is unreality but that reality is
152 — Beyond the Mind —

not what we have thought it to be. We misconceive reality, which is

spiritual, as the world, which is mundane. Appearance lends itself to
misconception but is not itself the cause of this error. The cause of this
misconception is our own desire or wishful thinking which makes us read
into things a value that is not there, like confusing a sea shell along the
shore for a silver coin. Hence to the inquiring mind there is only reality,
but the mind that does not inquire is inevitably deceived by appearances
into the idea of some separate reality that leads to fragmentation and
sorrow.
 34
THE RELIGION
OF TRUTH

There is only one truth or reality that we all must come to know. Just
as there is only one set of natural laws governing the workings of the
physical universe, so there is only one set of spiritual laws governing the
workings of the mind. Just as there is only one science or domain of outer
knowledge, so there is also only one religion, spiritual science or domain
of inner knowledge. This religion of truth, however, is not a belief, nor
can it be organized. It is not limited to any book, group or person. It has
no specific or final revelation. It is beyond beginning and ending, and
cannot be delimited by name or place. It is eternal, universal and fully
revealed only in the silence of the mind.
This one truth or reality is our own essential nature. No one can give
this truth to us, and no one can take it away from us. No one can persuade
or influence us — or convert us to some identity that would allow us to
discover who we really are.
All truth, reality, happiness and peace is our own nature. It is not
something that we can gain externally. In fact to look for it externally is
to lose it within ourselves. No one can discover truth for ourselves, any
more than another person can eat or breathe for us. To arrive at this truth
requires the utmost labor and patience to understand the workings of the
mind.
The religion of truth is the religion of self-knowledge. It is not a
religion in the sense of a defined dogma but as a way of recognizing that
which is sacred. The highest religion is to know oneself. For this even
God is not necessary, for if God is apart from ourselves, how can it be of
any value to us? Yet to truly know oneself is not to know oneself as a mere
body, mind or person, but to come to understand one’s essential reality in
pure consciousness. Nor is it to know oneself as some separate or special
entity. It is to see all beings in the Self and the Self in all beings.
The separate self is the source of all sorrow, which is only thought.
Our true nature or real Self, which thought can never touch, is the essence
of joy. These two truths form the basic core of the religion of truth.
 35
RENUNCIATION

It is necessary that we renounce everything. Yet the nature of this

renunciation has usually been misunderstood and its sense of freedom
up
lost. Renunciation does not mean giving up something, like giving
material things in order to gain something spiritual. Renuncia tion means
not taking things up in the first place, not trying to manipulate things or
force our preconceptions onto life. What we must give up is our personal
will to control life. To do this we must be open, receptive and responsive
to things as they are. We must be in harmony with the movement of life
that clings to nothing. Renunciation is not an intended action of giving
something up, but the freeing of the mind from ulterior motives. There is
nothing we have to give up other than our own anxiety to control things.
Renunciation is thus natural and easy, the casting off of all stress and
tension to achieve and acquire in a state of openness to life’s natural
beneficence. It is the realization that there is nothing to lose, that what is
truly ours must come to us of itself if we do not obstruct it. Trying to force
things may have some result but it will be artificial. It will have to be
maintained by force and in the end will revert to its original state.
Whatever we try to give up or try to renounce we are really picking
up and becoming attached to. We are still attached to the idea that we can
control things. We remain bound by the thought of the thing and it makes
little difference whether that thought is positive or negative. In reality it
is impossible to renounce anything, as the intention to renounce perpetu-
ates the mind’s fixation on things and sustains the worldly state. As long
as we think there is something to renounce we have not renounced
anything at all because it is the sense of separate action that has to be given
up, which includes the idea that we can change ourselves. We try to gain
through taking things up or setting them down, but this very effort to
acquire and achieve causes us to lose. Whatever we divide ourselves from,
either to acquire or avoid, defeats us because we are dividing a unitary
reality into conflicting opposites.
Renunciation thus is not rejection or avoidance, not trying to get rid
of anything or to live up to some standard of austerity. It is being open to
what is intrinsically ours rather than trying to make something belong to
us. All things come to us when we no longer seek them, just as if we seek
 — Renunciation — 155

them they avoid us. This is like a man and his shadow. All creation is our
shadow that will follow us if we do not follow after it.
The nature of matter, which the mind also shares, is to expand or
contract. As long as we are caught in our materiality, which is the
movement of thought, our main project will be to expand or contract. The
giving up of this blind intention of matter to expand or contract is the true
renunciation, which is incalculable, spontaneous and unmotivated. It is
the acceptance of all existence as sacred, in which all sense of gain and
loss born of memory dissolves in the beauty and bliss of perception and
awareness. Only if we think there is something to gain can we lose. All
existence is ever full and overflowing when we set aside the idea of
possession. There is nothing to acquire or discard because there are no
“things,” because matter is a superficial construct of the mind ina creative
reality where all is one.
 36
THE ROLE
OF THE GURU

Spiritual teachings generally emphasize the role of the guru, teacher

ot spiritual guide, though this is defined in different ways. Yet the guru is
primarily an inner reality, though it usually has a referrent in the outer
world. The guru is the guiding intelligence of life present behind the veil
of thought. When we are no longer engrossed in mental activity, no longer
thinking about the world and its objects, this guiding intelligence comes
into function and points out the way to truth.
Just as the student who studies on his own is more likely to gain
additional help from his teachers, so the true guru-consciousness comes
more easily to those who are self-reliant. Hence there is no division
between following the guru and self-reliantly looking into the truth. Those
seeking the truth do not pursue personalities. On the other hand, they do
not reject the truth simply because it may be taught by another human
being.
It is not necessary to seek a guru as a physical entity. It is, however,
necessary to be receptive to truth. This may bring us into contact with
various teachers and teachings, outwardly or inwardly, of the past or the
present, who can be instrumental in changing our consciousness. When
the nature or role of the guru is perceived, in whatever form it may appear,
we must honor it or deny our own inner truth. Hence we must become
real disciples of truth by being open to truth in whatever form it appears
to us.
The mind tends to reflect the reality of the external world. Hence we
create an image of ourselves as a worldly entity or mind-body complex.
When we come into contact, whether inwardly or outwardly, with the
guru, then we are able to reflect ourselves on the world of reality. The
guru mirrors back to us not the reality of a person or a bodily identity, but
the pure consciousness hidden within us. This radically changes our idea
of who we are and reveals to us our true being in consciousness. This is
the true meaning of seeing the guru, which is the same as seeing our Self.
 — The Role of the Guru — TST

The intellectual mind cannot find the truth. Therefore it is also

important that we respect the words of wisdom of men of spiritual
realization. To do this we must put their teachings into practice in our own
lives, not merely adulate them as personalities. This is the meaning of the
guru as a presence in human society.
 37
SELF-INTEGRATION
AND THE ABANDONMENT OF THE SELF

Part of the spiritual endeavor is to integrate oneself, to put together

unity.
the various parts of one’s being and thereby arrive at wholeness or
integrat e heart and mind, body and spirit, the conscio us
We struggle to
unconsci ous, or the consciou s and the supercon scious. We strive
and the
and
to integrate the conflicting parts of our personality like our thoughts
individual
emotions, or to link up our lower self with the higher Self, the
of
with the universal. In this process we use effort, intention or the power
will to achieve some unity out of what we are.
Whatever is put together must fall apart. Whatever is integrated must
eventually disintegrate. Unity cannot be atrived at through putting to-
gether fragments. Whatever is composite must return to its elemental
constituents. Whatever is material, has name or form, must eventually
come to an end. Consciousness alone is integral, intrinsic and indepen-
dent, and alone can harmonize the different parts of our being. Yet merely
trying to harmonize the outer aspects of our nature cannot produce
consciousness.
The One cannot be found through the many. The unity that is put
together by a combination of fragments is an illusion. It will fall apart of
itself once the effort to maintain it is slackened. Whatever is the product
of struggle and effort is artificial and will disintegrate once the effort that
sustains it, which must be temporary, comes to an end. Unity or integrity
is self-existent in the nature of awareness and cannot be arrived at through
thought or will. It is there when we observe things as they are. In the
observation of fragmentation is the honesty and integrity of awareness
which is wholeness.
What is necessary is not self-integration but the abandonment of the
self. What is separate and fragmented, thought and the ego, cannot atrive
at wholeness. Integration occurs naturally when the disintegrating action
of thought comes to an end. The effort to integrate oneself may be another
fixation on one’s own personal becoming. The unreal cannot be integrated
into the real; but with the surrender of the unreal, the integrity of the real
is revealed.
 38
SENSATION, EMOTION
AND THOUGHT

Sensation is not true perception. Emotion is not real feeling. Thought

is not true consciousness.
Sensation is a limited and personal reaction to some aspect of the field
of perception. It is a selective fixation on certain perceptions and their
repetition in which the total field of perception is broken up and distorted.
Sensation is an abstraction through memory of particular sensory impres-
sions which dulls us to the inherent beauty and wonder of all things seen.
Emotion is not true feeling but mere conditioned reactions of like and
dislike, love and hate. It does not unite us with life and humanity but with
a faction. It is dualistic and so, attaching us to one thing, must repel us
from another. Only when we are free of emotion and its reactions for or
against can we have a real feeling of oneness with life, and come to know
the other as ourselves.
Thought is a subconscious process, a fall from conscious perception
into words, images and ideas. It is a form of sleep and dream. Thought
does not awaken us to consciousness but drives us deeper into the obscure
and latent tendencies of the unconscious.
This entity of sensation-emotion-thought, which is the separate self,
is not a real person — an independent, responsible and intelligent indi-
vidual. It is a confused product of environmental influences and mechan-
ical subconscious reactions. When we see the limitations of this false
entity, our true being, which is cosmic and eternal, can manifest.
 39
SERVICE

to
The purpose of human life is not to gain personal happiness or
usness
assert our individual rights. It is to further the evolution of conscio
in the world, which is to work for the good of all. This requires service
and self-sacrifice.
there
True service can only be done where there is no thought, where
recognit ion. It is action done for its own
is no seeking of results, reward or
sake, which demonstrates the intrinsic being and value of awarenes s. If
our action is not a form of service it must generate karma or bondage to
the external world, and must eventually become destructive.
This does not mean that we must engage ourselves in charity or other
social and political works, though these do have their place. It means that
we should not act out of self-interest but out of self-surrender to truth. The
practice of meditation is the highest form of service in which we surrender
all mundane and outward activity to the inner power of seeing.
Often the mind is too disturbed or disoriented to meditate, or even to
chant mantras or do yoga practices. In this case the best way to calm the
mind is through work or selfless service. When the body and mind are
engaged in work of a service nature there is no longer the space of
distraction for our mind to continually fall into its own problems.
It is only because we are attached to our own problems that we have
them. If we accept all the world’s problems as our own, we will find that
our own problems cease to be important and, no longer being fed by our
thoughts, naturally dissolve themselves. It is only because we are not
looking to serve but to get things for ourselves that we can be frustrated.
Yet even if we are able to meditate, the performance of work or selfless
service can be very important to help integrate that awareness into our
daily life and action. As long as our action is self-promoting our medita-
tion cannot be truly effective.
 40
SUFFERING
AND AWAKENING

It is not necessarily sad that we suffer, that we experience pain, disease

or even death. What is sad is that we have lost the consciousness of our
true nature in which there is peace even in the midst of pain, misery,
misfortune and iniquity. The loss of true awareness is the basis of our
psychological and emotional suffering, which in turn makes physical
suffering hard to endure. Nor is it necessarily good that we experience
pleasure, happiness, health and longevity. These may only afford us a
greater bondage to the outer world. 1
Our human, creaturely drama is no more real than any other drama
or show. Our identities are little more than masks. Our joys and sorrows
are those of dream creatures. We must see our insignificance and no longer
be taken in by appearances. Our joy and sorrow are equally unreal. It is
the separate self, caught in its self-projected drama of gain and loss, from
which we need release. Our great collective dramas — our wars, revolu-
tions, great social progress, or religious revivals — are also not the real.
Groups, like individuals, come and go in the nature of creation like waves
on the sea.
Suffering is not itself an evil but an energy to awaken us to truth, to
get us to question who we are. The sad thing is that the sufferings which
are inevitable in life do not serve to awaken us to the falseness of our
personal seeking. Matter is inherently suffering because it is the limited.
To experience suffering is to experience the inherent limitation of material
existence. Hence we should not try to flee suffering but to understand it,
to discover the truth of life. Then suffering liberates us. Only when we
allow suffering to liberate us can we become liberated from suffering.
Suffering is the breaking of the boundaries of the known and the familiar.
If we are open to the truth of it, suffering cleanses and transforms us.
 41
THOUGHT
AND CONFLICT

Our thoughts inevitably lead us into conflict because the nature of

thought is conflict. Thought is a process of division, separation, and
duality which in essence is strife and friction. Thought is an attempt to
influence, manipulate, or alter reality according to our fear or desire,
which breeds difficulties and obstacles.
The mind is built up by conflict. It is composed of the scars of past
conflicts as the memories and impressions we use to protect ourselves.
The ego is our identity formed in the state of conflict, a self-defensive
reaction mechanism. The mind is the creation of eons of evolutionary
struggle and bears within itself the mark of that conflict which drives it
further.
Conflict creates, sustains and sharpens thought, making us more
judgmental and opinionated. It produces a cunning that may result in a
certain practical or intellectual capacity, yet it remains trapped in the
narrow sphere of fear and desire. Sharpening the mind through conflict
(and any struggle between thoughts or opinions is conflict) makes the
mind dull to existence, even though the conflict may be in the name of
God, peace or freedom. Conflict only arouses the ego further because
nothing is more self-justifying than opposition. It awakens the primal
instinct to survive wherein our motives no longer need to be questioned.
The ending of conflict, therefore, is not simply a matter of disar-
mament or putting our weapons aside. However much we limit our outer
violence, our inner violence will continue as long as it is not understood.
The ending of conflict depends on understanding the conflict inherent in
the way we think. As long as we accept thought as our true nature we open
ourselves up to the negative influences of subconscious fear and enmity,
which must eventually draw us into agitation and violence. We thereby
abdicate responsibility for ourselves and fall into the disintegrating force
of the external and its local limitations which breed division.
As long as our values are outward — wealth, fame and knowledge
— we will live in conflict and our society will be drawn to self-destruc-
tion. This is no mere political or social problem. It is the problematic
nature of a thought-based consciousness which exists only through dual-
 — Thought and Conflict — 163

ity. This violence begins not with the picking up of a weapon but with the
inertia of our own self-consciousness and its automatic emphasis on the
me and the mine.
Violence, the conflict of opposing forces, is the way of matter, which
is a resistance to light, existence and love. Violence is the nature of the
mind functioning through attraction and repulsion. Thought itself is
violence, which is the imposing of a pattern on existence that cannot be
reduced to a pattern. To go beyond violence we must go beyond the idea
of a separate self, from which all thought springs.
The details of various conflicts are not important. Nor does it matter
which side wins because the ending of one conflict will merely be the
beginning of another. Where there is thought and the separate self there
must be conflict. To take one side or another in a conflict is to become
caught in the stream of conflict that can have no end. Conflict cannot be
resolved into right and wrong, the winner and loser, but only into the true
and the false, into what is aligned to the universal and what is attached to
a limited point of view.
In this regard conflict is always the false id peace alone is the truth.
This state of peace cannot be arrived at through resolving conflicts but
through returning to the thought-free state wherein violence cannot arise
in the first place.
 42
THE TRUE
SELF

The Self is the Self. Its identity is intrinsic. “I am who I am.” “I am

that I am.” The Self has no identity. It is pure identity, Being itself. In the
Self we are all that we see and to see is to be. This is the ultimate equation,
the solution to all questions, which is their dissolution, in which all things
become equal, all existence becomes One. The Spirit is always of the
essence. Consciousness adheres to nothing, though it is transparent
through all things.
The true Self can never be another. It can never be a thing. To think
that I am this or that is to lose identity as the pure “I am.” To think I need
this or that is to fall into dependency on the external, to become caught in
a stream of dependency, as the external can never be intrinsic or indepen-
dent. To have an image of one’s Self is to lose the Self, to make it into
another, to become an object for others and a commodity in the world. To
become something is to lose one’s identity as the pure Subject and become
an object among objects in an uncertain world.
We suffer because we do not have a Self. We have no intrinsic identity
but depend for our feeling of being on some thing or person with which
we are connected: Identity which is dependent, which is given by another,
like a name or title, is a fiction. It is a superimposition of thought and,
though it may distract us for a time, it cannot afford us peace.
We suffer because we seek the Self in the not-self, the Subject in the
object. We try to find happiness by achievement and acquisition. But
achievement is becoming a bigger or better object. Acquisition is the
accumulation of objects around our assumed objectivity or materiality.
But to be an object is to be insentient, gross, dull, dependent and transient.
Objectivity is not a state of happiness or fulfillment. Happiness is only
possible in eternal existence, and this is only possible in the pure Subject.
As long as we think that we need something to be ourselves, we will
always be dependent on another. We will always be somebody else or try
to please someone else. We will never be ourselves but will be trapped in
the conditioned responses of the minds around us. We will be victims of
other people’s thoughts.
 — The True Self — 165

The true Self is not the ego. It is not the “I am this” or the “I want
that.” It is devoid of any self-image. Even to call it a self can be misleading
as it belongs to no one and nothing belongs to it. Yet it is who we naturally
are. It is the state of pure seeing devoid of any objectification of self or
other.
There is no need but that we be the Self — that we not be another and
that we do not become somebody for others. We need only be as we are.
Moreover we should not turn other subjects, which are but different views
of our Self, into objects either. All is the Self or intrinsic being. In that all
beings are redeemed, all life is delivered, as existence itself is fulfillment.
The Subject can never be an object. The Self cannot be the body, the
senses, the mind or emotions. It cannot have any role, status, or appearance
in the outer world or in the world of thought. A subject which is also an
object is a misconception, a falsehood that breeds illusion and suffering.
It is an idea that cannot be trusted or accepted. It is a false logic, the logic
of ignorance that equates the subject Consciousness with an object, form
or quality. It is the cosmic blunder, the great error of the soul, the fall that
creates all evil and misery.
Whatever has form or quality, name, image or action is an object.
Whatever has consciousness is in essence the pure Subject and is not
affected by the modifications of the objects in its field of perception. Just
as a cup falling from a table and breaking does not hurt us though we
observe it, so the qualities of our body and mind do not affect or hurt the
true Self, though we observe them more intimately.
Hence we must question this objectification of ourselves and of
others. There is no identity in anything because all objects are transient,
dependent and composite. They have nothing intrinsic. Identity is only
possible in Being itself. There is only one pute or absolute identity which
is to be all. Any relative or limited identity is a fiction of this confusion
between subject and object. Only when we have divested ourselves of all
objectivity can we know who we really are.
 43
THE UNIVERSAL
RELIGION

Organized religion is primarily a legacy of the medieval mind, whose

divisions are regressive. True religion is universal and eternal. It is life and
truth, existence itself. It is not something one can join or be excluded from.
It cannot be possessed, and those who claim to own it have lost it.
What is spiritual is not material and hence cannot be known or
organized. What is organized or codified is not the spiritual, which is life,
but matter, which is death. Religion is usually the spiritual petrified, made
into another formula or slogan. Hence to discover what is truly spiritual
we must set the divisions of organized religion behind.
There is no such thing as a separate religious identity. What is truly
spiritual is only entered into to the extent that we go beyond all identifi-
cations of class, creed, sect and nationality. This requires that we perceive
the oneness of all, not as a theory but as a fact of life. The truly religious
is in the ability to identify with all things, to be one with truth. To the
extent that we have a particular or exclusive identity we fall from the
spiritual — which is everything and nothing — and become a mere thing,
label, proponent or propagandist.
All religions have their heart in the universal truth that is the life
beyond the mind, the intelligence beyond the division of words and
thoughts. But this we must discover for ourselves. It requires the patient
labor of awareness for which there is no quick or easy substitute. To the
extent, therefore, that we discover the truth of any religion or spiritual.
teaching, we see through its particular formulations. We are not attached
to its particular indicators — limited as they are by time, place and person
— but see the universal truth which is self-existent and does not need to
be asserted or defended.
A spiritual teaching only has value to the extent that it does not make
itself an end in itself, that it does not fixate anyone on any particularities
of time, place and person as reality. Religion in the ordinary sense is a
hindrance more than a help to the search for truth. The goal is to enter into
our true nature, our existence beyond the division of thought and the need
for achievement, acquisition or identity in any form.
 44
mwas
-
OF LIFE

That which is true life is not a material thing. It is not an object, energy
or idea. It is not physical, emotional or mental. What alone is true life is
consciousness and awareness where there is no division, for division is
death. Consciousness is the ocean of immortal life. Those who are aware
alone have the power of life, alone can give life and make things endure.
The true place of man in creation is to bring the waters of immortal
life into the garden of the natural world. The true place of the spiritual
man, the seer, is to bring the waters of life into the garden of human
culture. This garden, however, owing to the lack of that true consciousness
in human beings, resembles now more a desert in which fierce dust storms
blow.
To be is to give life. It is not any action or idea that gives life, it is
only being itself, the consciousness of existence. The creative products of
the natural or human worlds are the plants that grow from this water of
of
life which is the awareness of existence. These plants do not grow
or significa nt they may appear in them-
themselves, however beautiful
selves. It is from the water that they grow, which is drawn spontaneously
without even recognizing it. For a true culture, therefore, there must first
of all be the waters of life. All will follow naturally from that, and without
it growth will be artificial and self-destructive.
Because we seek results and value productions, we have lost contact
, without
with the streams of life. Thus our work is superficial and transient
real nourishm ent. Greater
any firm foundation and incapable of providing
and
effort or efficiency will not suffice. It is the patience, restraint
ion with the
quiescence of the essence that is required, the silent commun
arises a creation that is not bound by the
depths of the heart. From this
past or the future, which is both yesterda y and tomorro w.
 45
WONDER
AND AWE

All life is a mystery; this is self-evident. It can never be explained. Its

mysterious nature is its being, its fullness, its transcendence. If it were
explainable it would be nothing, a piece of information, little more than
a cup upon a table.
Explanations are possible only for inert and mechanical things, but
where there is life and consciousness, explanations are a violation. Why
explain a flower? Its self-evident beauty, which is a mystery beyond all
explanation, is enough. In the seeing of life, the seeing which is life, all
things are full and need not be described or defined to have value. We
seek explanations because we are not aware of the self-evident mystery
of the eternal. This seeking brings no certainty or true perception but only
consigns us to the chaos of our own minds.
All existence is abundance and grace that results not from effort but
from letting go. All is mystery, grace and giving. There is no one to thank,
no need to look back or to try to hold onto anything. One can only respond
with wonder, awe and reverence as part of the magic and mystery that is
our own existence beyond the boundaries of thought.
Because we seek explanations, which are merely words, our lives
have lost their meaning. It is because we have lost contact with the mystery
and are no longer open to it that we need to be entertained. Reality is the
unknown that dwarfs all that we know, however endless and erudite. Only
what transcends the mind, what cannot be measured and is inherently a
mystery, can have real value and be worthy of reverence.
There is no dilemma in the mystery of existence. There is a dilemma
only when we seek to explain existence, for that is to fall from its plenitude
into the narrow groove of thought which is always problematical. Let us
dare to be unknown and to be one with existence which is the unknown.
Anything else is not to be a real human being but to be a formula that can
be figured out. The mystery of life is a self-evident joy.
Falling from that joy into the sorrow of separate existence, we must
seek something more because we are empty inside. But emptiness cannot
be explained away. Thought as the known is emptiness in which there are
only problems or, at best, limited and questionable solutions. What
 — Wonder and Awe — 169

silences the mind is not any mental conclusion or theory, but the energy
of mystery that is the energy of consciousness, the flame of awareness in
which all is direct vision, full in itself and ever free.
 46
YOGA
AND MEDITATION
nded. It
Yoga is the process whereby the mind is silenced and transce
l posture s or breathi ng practic es. Its chief
is not merely a set of physica
method is meditation, not any outer action.
breathing
Yogic postures bring calm and balance to the body. Yogic
are of great value,
brings harmony and energy to the breath. While these
must be used as
they cannot in themselves take us beyond thought. They
the foundation for meditation, or their use is incompl ete.
to help
Mental techniques like mantra and visualization are also tools
aids to meditat ion. They serve to stablize
calm the mind and are additional
to rest.
the thought process, which is necessary to allow it to be put
not look beyond them to the Divine conscio usness
However, if we do
within ourselv es, they can even become obstacle s.
e the
While many tools and practices have been invented to facilitat
It is to no longer
practice of yoga, the main process of yoga is very simple.
free
look outward to find truth or happiness, but to rest in our real nature
inquiry and surrende r, which are
of all other considerations. This requires
s. Inquiry means giving our
the two main aspects of all yoga practice
in
attention to the thought process and tracing it back to its origin
er means opennes s to the inner reality and a
consciousness. Surrend
relinqui sh all outer seeking s in order to enter into it.
willingness to
we
Without some sort of practice of yoga, which means meditation,
es, however
cannot get beyond our human problems. All other approach
in
secondarily useful, will not prove sufficient to bring about real change
return to the science
ourselves or in our society. Hence we must once more
and practice of yoga as the basis of our lives and our culture.
Meditation requires that we learn to give space to what is beyond
name and form to reveal itself, that we set aside our opinions and come
give
to commune with things as they are. This is only possible when we
or the known, and give our prime value to
up our belief in matter
meditati on we enter into a different dimensi on
awareness itself. Through
 — Yoga and Meditation — 171

of existence wherein fulfillment is in seeing and we no longer require

either sensation or thought to make us feel alive. This state of seeing
allows us to merge into all the universe and what is beyond all manifes-
tation.
AYURVEDIC CORRESPONDENCE COURSE
and one of
Ayurveda is the traditional natural healing system of India
of over five
the most holistic forms of medicine in the world. This course
all the
hundred pages, based upon the book Ayurvedic Healing, covers
the student the
main aspects of Ayurvedic medicine in order to give
foundation to practice this ancient healing art.
of
PART I consists of Introduction, and an in depth examination
Malas, Srotas,
Ayurvedic Anatomy and Physiology (Doshas, Dhatus,
Kalas and Organs).
Pro-
PART II is Constitutional Analysis, Mental nature, the Disease
is (includ ing pulse), Patient Examina tion, Yoga and
cess, Diagnos
Ayurvedic Psychology.
PART III is Therapy include Dietary and Herbal Therapy in depth,
Modal-
Therapeutic Methods (including Pancha Karma), Subtle Healing
of Yoga
ities (gems, colors, aromas and mantras), Practical Application
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The course is affiliated with Ayurvedic schools in India. Certification
is granted upon completion, as well as options for further study.

VEDIC ASTROLOGY CORRESPONDENCE COURSE

Vedic (Hindu) Astrology or Jyotish, is the traditional astrology of
India, used along with Yoga and Ayurveda.
This course of over five hundred pages, based on the book The
Astrology of the Seers, teaches the primary principles of Vedic Astrology
and shows the student how to give a Vedic Astrology reading. Topics
include planets, signs, houses, aspects, planetary yogas, harmonic charts,
planetary periods (dasas and bhuktis), Nakshatras, Ashtakavarga, horary
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The course also explains the Astrology of Healing including the use
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The course presents the Vedic system in clear, practical and modern
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For information on courses send a self-addressed stamped envelope
to:
AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF VEDIC STUDIES
PO. BOX 8357, SANTA FE, NM 87504-8357
BIODATA
Dr. David Frawley is a modern teacher of the comprehensive system
of Vedic and Yogic Science, and has been compared to the Vedic seers of
old. He is acknowledged as an Ayurvedic healer, Vedic astrologer, teacher
of Yoga and meditation, and a Sanskrit scholar. Over the past twelve years
he has written many books and articles on the different aspects of Vedic
knowledge for publication both in the United States and in India.
His Indian books include Hymns From the Golden Age (1986),
Beyond the Mind (1984) and The Creative Vision of the Early Upanishads
(1982). His American titles include Ayurvedic Healing, A Comprehensive
Guide (1989), The Yoga of Herbs (1986), From the River of Heaven
(1990), The Astrology of the Seers (1990), Gods, Sages and Kings, Vedic
Secrets of Ancient Civilization (1991) and Wisdom of the Ancient Seers,
Mantras of the Rig Veda (1992). He also has a doctor’s degree (O.M.D.) in
Chinese medicine and is a published J Ching scholar both in the United
States and China.
Dr. Frawley is the director of the American Institute of Vedic Studies,
which aims to provide educational material for a modern restoration of
Vedic knowledge, including Ayurveda, Vedic astrology, Vedic studies and
Yoga. His forthcoming books through Passage Press are: Tantric Yoga, the
Worship of the Goddess; and The Upanishadic Vision.
 VEDIC ASTROLOGY COMPUTER PROGRAM
PC-JYOTISH, a Vedic (Hindu) astrology computer program for IBM
compatable computers, is now available. Its features include:
e South & North India chart styles
Rasi (sign) and Bhava (house) charts
Navamsa and other Varga (divisional) charts
Shadbala
Summary Tables — relationships & locations; Sign/house
qualities & relationships
Nakshatras — lords/sublords & pada lords
Vimshopak
Planetary Significators
Ashtaka Varga — complete
Vimshottari dashas, bhuktis & sub-bhuktis (365V4 or 360 day
year)
Pop-up Transit window with Ashtaka Varga & Nakshatra divisions
Aspects Table
Range of Ayanamshas or your own
Easy to use, user driven program
Mouse support
Changing input data immediately alters on-screen tables & charts
Pull-down menus
Print to file or any ASCII printer
Complete on-screen functions
As many charts & tables on-screen as user desires
User arranges windows on-screen
Chart storage limited only by disk space
Manual with glossary by David Frawley
Program range: 1500 BC to 2200 AD
Requires 420k ram
Color/mono, hi-res mode — no graphics card required
The Outer Planets, and more
DEMO program $5.00 (refunded if program purchased) plus s/h.

For more information call or write:

Passage Press
PO. Box 21713
Salt Lake City, UT 84121-0713
(801) 942-1440
 BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST
The Astrology of the Seers
A Guide to Vedic Astrology by David Frawley
ISBN 1-878423-05-3 342 pp. $18.95
Ayurvedic Healing
A Comprehensive Guide by David Frawley
ISBN 1-878423-05-3 342 pp. $18.95
From the River of Heaven
Hindu and Vedic Knowledge for the Modern Age by David Frawley
ISBN 1-878423-01-1 180 pp. $12.95
Gods, Sages and Kings
Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization by David Frawley
ISBN 1-878423-08-8 396 pp. $19.95
Wisdom of the Ancient Seers
Mantras of the Rig Veda by David Frawley
ISBN 1-878423-16-9 260 pp. $14.95
Myths and Symbols of Vedic Astrology by Bepin Behari
ISBN 1-878423-06-1 278 pp. $14.95
Fundamentals of Vedic Astrology
Vedic Astrologer’s Handbook, Volume I by Bepin Behari
ISBN 1-878423-09-6 280 pp. $14.95
Planets in the Signs and Houses
Vedic Astrologer’s Handbook, Volume II by Bepin Behari
ISBN 1-878423-10-X 258 pp. $14.95
Aspects in Vedic Astrology
by Pandit Gopesh Kumar Ojha and Pandit Ashutosh Ojha
ISBN 1-878423-15-0 181 pp. $13.95
Astrological Healing Gems by Shivaji Bhattacharjee
ISBN 1-878423-07-X 128 pp. $7.95
Natural Healing Through Ayurveda
by Dr. Subhash Ranade
ISBN 1-878423-13-4 195 pp. $12.95
{| Interacting With Society
Life Strategies Series by Edward F. Tarabilda
ISBN 1-878423-03-7 176 pp. $7.95
Happy, Healthful Longevity
Life Strategies Series by Edward F. Tarabilda
ISBN 1-878423-02-9 —_ 160 pp. $7.95
The Spiritual Quest
Life Strategies Series by Edward F. Tarabilda
ISBN 1-87842 3-04-5 = 125 pp. $7.95
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PSYCHOLOGY / PHILOSOPHY

V. Ganesan, Editor, The Mountain Path

Sri Ramanashramam (Ramana Maharshi)
Tiruvannamalai, South India

Georg Feuerstein, Ph.D.

Author of Encyclopedic Dictionary of Yoga

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ISBN 1-878423-14-2

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