So effort has to be made, not to gain anything new, but to wipe the slate clean and experience ourselves as we really are. To do that means we have to work on tossing out all the concepts and conditionings of our upbringing, and also the conditionings we have unquestioningly lapsed into in our present lifestyle. Whilst the intellect is still swayed by its inner tendencies and predispositions, then effort is necessary, if only to get rid of them. The first step then, is to take stock what those hidden and unformulated inner hang-ups are. Constant effort is needed at every moment to step back and watch our thoughts. Most of us are carried away by our thoughts, without realising there is watcher. We need to discipline our thinking processes by observing them, rather than being taken by them. If we are caught up and involved in its endless chatter-boxing to no purpose, we will always be at the mercy of what is called 'the mind'. If we are not aware of the nature of our incessant thoughts, we will not know what needs eradicating.

But man’s ticker-tape mind is so full of his daily doings, the price of potatoes, rice and beans, the newspaper headlines, the political situation, war and injustice, radio reports, television and films, bosses and boardrooms, sex and the social whirl, the family, the rent, the job, the future, the past, the harassment of the next-door neighbour - or his kids, or dog - or anything other than the thing that is closest to him: the blissful nature of his Real Self. He never has a thought-free moment to realise his true condition of existence.

Even when falling exhausted into bed there is no escape from the motions of the mind. Not only does it chatter away all night long, it even creates a phantasmagorical living film show of a dream-world for us to participate in at another level of reality. Whether we remember our dreams or not, they still go on and we are obliged to join in. But if I am fast asleep - then who is the dreamer? If I identify myself with my body, and the body is sleeping, then who is this entity who is participating in the dream? At the shallow end of sleep, when my consciousness is functioning on two different levels and I am aware that I’m dreaming, I say I-and-the-dreamer are one. But when I am totally involved in the dream experience (while seeming to be in a dream body) I have no knowledge of my physical body and no identification with it. I believe at that moment my dream body to be the ‘real thing’. Thus I cannot be my physical body; otherwise I - or it - would be aware of it all the time.

It is the mind - or rather, the mental space in which thoughts and images occur - which is completely involved in the dreamworld. Am I then the mind? If that is the case, then who is getting any sleep and rest? If I am the mind - then what is the use of going to bed if I am only going to spend the whole night gallivanting round in my own fantasies? But if the mind itself is only one of my fantasies - as the sages assert - then what am I?

Credits: Supplied Image; Author: Muz Murray;

At some point in the night comes that period of deep sleep without even dreams, when that peculiar entity we imagine ourselves to be, and think of as ‘I’ disappears without trace. My sense of ‘I-ness’ strangely dissolves into a blissful oblivion of no thought, no world and no dream world. The waking and dreaming ‘I’ has apparently ceased to exist. Where then is the ever-present ‘mind.?’

Without that I-idea there is no mind.

If that I-idea and what I take to be my own mind can disappear, then my whole existence is founded on an unstable illusion.

Now you have it, now you don’t.

How could such a will-o’-the-wisp mind or that ‘I’ be myself? For that ‘I’ which I usually believe to be myself to have remained in existence in deep sleep, there had to be that very ‘I’ remaining consciously alert to know it. Otherwise, I am forced to conclude that I pop in and out of existence like a cuckoo in a clock.

So, who was the eternal witness to my existence in deep sleep? No doubt something exists in that condition. Is there a ‘stable’ me at a deeper level, which does not fluctuate, some sense of ‘I-ness’ beyond what I normally take to be myself. Who am I? What is the real me? Am I some other I? With the extinction of the limited sense-of-I with which I am familiar, it appears that a thought-free ‘something’ beyond mind still exists, in a seemingly paradoxical state of ‘non-existence’ - a situation which is comparable to the mysterious condition the layman calls ‘death’.

Is not the nightly death of the I-sense a constant rehearsal for that state when consciousness leaves the body forever?

Part 4 follows next month:

From: Sharing the Quest: Revelations of a Maverick Mystic

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