How do you find the end of the mind?
FleaMarket
Veteran
The self-bundle can be pulled apart into the five aggregates revealing no bundled self to be found.
Everywhere are ample examples of the changing and impermanent nature of things.
Conceptually these can be understood without too much difficulty. Experiencially they can be a bit more of a challenge but a noble endeavor.
Is the end of the mind found within that experience somewhere?
Someone can cultivate wholesome bodily, verbal, and mental volitions while stymieing unwholsome. They can see the absurdity in holding on to a grudge and the triviality of holding on to a joy past its due.
It's all temporary like plogging the path to the market. There will be more trash tomorrow. I don't mind plogging. It feels helpful and sometimes people appreciate it, but the mind is still there. It's not ended.
So reflecting on @Jeroen's quote, where or how do you find the end of the mind? What's it like? Because it doesn't appear to be in pulling it apart.
Comments
"How do you find the end of the mind?"
You don't
If you try, you fail.
exactly so @Lionduck
in Mahayana 'Emptiness is foam … and bubbles are empty'
The quote says that the mind is made up of many layers which are the remnants of past lives, and that only in enlightenment do you drop the mind entirely and does it come to an end. I thought it was interesting because I had an experience a few weeks ago relating to this.
I’ve always had a strong instinctive dislike but also a kind of fascination for Gallipoli, which is a peninsula on the coast of Turkey south of Istanbul. I was wondering about this, and when waking up a few weeks ago I asked myself ‘why’ and to my surprise got the reply “because I died there”. So I did some reading up on it and found out about the Allied campaign to take the peninsula from the Turks in the first World War. Something clicked, I seemed to recognise a few things.
There are other things I can’t explain, like a fascination when I was very young with guns and pistols. I loved them and was always after having more toy pistols. I think there was quite a lot of violence in my past lives, soldiering and gunslinging in the Wild West. It also explains certain of my likes and dislikes in my hobbies.
Anyway, this has made me consider whether Osho was right to say that traces or ‘vibes’ relating to past lives are still visible in the mind, and that in getting to know these traces we can be released from them and perhaps the entire mind.
All that you can ever find is the ending of phenomena or things.
The rays of consciousness alight on things other itself. That is all that can be noticed.
It is not that the rays can turn back and illuminate itself.
Much like the finger can only feel things other than itself.
Alight means "land on," or "step on," or "stick to momentarily."
Consciousness keeps landing on things -
it is that landing that creates a name and form or an object.
There is no ending of this until one has completed all that needs to be done.
Manopubbaṅgamā dhammā manoseṭṭhā manomayā
Mind precedes created things; mind’s their chief; from the mind they spring.
It's an interesting perspective, your Gallipoli story. I have a story too. I told it to myself a lot growing up that I was a polar bear in a past life and died of starvation. It was pretty peaceful just the flat ice and the sun. There aren't a lot of details other than that but it's something that's followed me.
It's really difficult to say with much confidence that I made up a story about an actual past life of mine but if there were to be one it would probably be that one. Some of my first impressions of Buddhism and rebirth were that I got to be a human by luck or that I wasn't supposed to find the Dharma but use up my good kamma from past lives here. Mara certainly uses that to their advantage like a rude child messes up a good sand mandala half way finished. It was going to go anyway but could you let me finish it first?
In this case Mara would actually be doing you a favour.
You were never ever going to finish the sand mandala.
The rude child that messes up your dream party is the actually the Buddha.
Everything can be pulled apart until you arrive at that which cannot!
Touché!
I’ve found it really hard to deal with strategy and violence as inclinations. For me they have not manifested as anything other than playground rumbles, likings for toys and games with a lot of combat. But it calls to something atavistic in me. I think this is partly due to the influence of past lives, but I’ve been getting really conscious of the presence of violence in all kinds of things lately. My life has been peaceful, but I am not always at peace.
I think a human birth is a thing of good fortune, because of the ability to contact the dharma and other advanced teachers. Having past births as a predator can be a burden if you do not cope with it, as can other negative impulses from the energetic sphere. The thing is, lately I have let go of certainties such as science and sanity and logic, and this has allowed me to look more deeply within.
Osho often says that when these things such as past life experiences start coming up it is a sign that you are moving in the right direction, that one should practice awareness and witnessing, that good things will become clear and merge with you when observed with awareness, and that bad things will dissipate. Meditation is certainly a key.
Concepts can be limiting at times but in my view can be a useful framework to prevent untethered experiencial drift when searching. Science, sanity, and logic sound like those framework structures which, at the very least, have some grounding in the great compounded efforts to understand this world.
I recall a story of either the Buddha or of a great diety that would meditate with one hand draped downward in the lap, fingers touching the earth. I also recall some of my own mental exploring of patterns leading to other patterns without much framework behind them. It can be like examining the patterns of the continuous zooming in or out of a mandlebrot visualization. A sense that you have to know where you're going but also that it doesn't matter where you go because it's all the same anyway.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that it can be enticing to let go of those conventional concepts when they've presented themselves as obstacles but without some other structure or aim, what keeps it from just being aimless drifting?
Does Osho say anything about being hyper-aware it's 11:11am or pm? Accurate awareness of time likes to accompany periods of good meditation.
They might both be Maras. The kid making the mandala and the one messing it up. They're both doing stuff. Maybe one conventionally good and the other conventionally bad. Both volitions out of desire to do something other than nothing.
Depends on what is behind the action ... Is it driven by greed, hatred and/or delusion or out of compassion for the deluded?
Who takes center stage - the one arrowed? What's so special about it?
What is behind all this? A no thing which contains everything.
Where does it begin and where does it end?
Does it have any shape, color, age, or location?
This is a very particular image, I’ve come across it before but I forget the name of the artist. It is usually held to be a pointer that we are not the body, that what comes in through the senses and through the body is going to the consciousness.
Oh thank god, that makes way more sense than what I had going. I could have sworn it was pointing to the hidden polar bear in the coat pocket.
In psychology, he studied the relationship of our sensations to external stimuli. Space, time, color, sound, once the domain of physics, were now also being studied by psychologists and conceived of as not only the stuff of the physical external world but also the elements of our inner experience.
Nisargadatta Maharaj said one should follow the thought of ‘I am’ to its origin, and there you find one end of the mind.