Insight.

I want to continue with the thought from yesterday. I am still assuming the world is not real and I am imagining myself to be. Why do we hold on to things? Why this attachment to who we think we are? I have been holding on to many things in my life. I have been holding on to things I like because I think I can not live without them and to things I do not like because I was used to them and afraid of change. Why is it so hard to let go? In my life it has to do with the fear of the unknown. I like what I do, why would I change it? I really dislike what is happening but how will my life look like if I do things differently? Either way there is no space for change. Years ago when I used to see almost every spiritual teacher who came to the city one of these guys said: “How can your life change when you keep on doing the same things?” He had a point. How can things change if we do not change? Karma is action. Changing the way how we act changes our life’s. But who can initiate these changes? Who is in charge of the possibility of change? Only our minds can make that decision. But here lies the crux of the problem. Our minds are very complex. And our minds created an illusion about ourselves. A mind thinks it never stops to think. This is all it does, that is its job. My mind has been thinking for roughly 37 years for about 16 hours per day and that is just because I assume it sleeps when I sleep. It has been active for 243,090 hours. That is a lot of time. There is not enough going on for the mind to fill all these hours. That is why it came up with something to be able keep on thinking. It started to think about who Carsten is. It started to judge him and to praise him, to love him and to hate him. It decided if he was good looking or not, if he is no shape or not, smart or not. And all that only happened to keep it busy. And busy it was, constantly analyzing and judging. At a certain point it came to a conclusion. It had figured out who I was, it knew everything about me, my good sides and my bad sides. The decision was made this is who Carsten is. But what were the conclusions the mind came up with based on? On its programming. Growing up my mind was taught what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is bad, what is beautiful and what is ugly. My parent, my grandparents, kids in school, society, they all taught my mind its lessons. But what did these people know about life and what it is about? Absolutely nothing. The reality is that a mind that knows nothing came up with an idea about me that meant nothing and I lived my life based on this idea and still do so in parts. This to me why Sri Nisargadatta answered the question “What do you see when you look at me?” with “I see you imagining yourself to be”. The mind comes up with an idea about who we are and we accept it as our reality even though it is a total illusion. A life lived based on an illusion can only be an imagination it cannot be real. This is why change is so hard because our mind is set in its way and it does not want to change the decisions it has made about who we are. And we have believed it for so long that it is hard to imagine it could be false. Parts of us know it is not true, but what can we do? It is like somebody who has been 30 years in prison. He does not want to be released because he is so used to prison life. That is why we are holding on because change would change our life’s as we know them. Is there a life without the mind? How would life look like without us thinking?  How would we feel if we would not know who we are? How would our life’s look like?

Man without mind/self portrait. Williamsburg/Brooklyn 1-14-08 at 09:49 PM.

 

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