living with a dead mind

[Guest guest]

Hi Tony,

 

Here is an exerpt from a David Godman interview about the

functioning of the dead mind in a Jnani.

 

 

Maalok: You have mentioned that final Self-realization is when the mind

actually 'dies' irreversibly in the Self. You have also mentioned how

Papaji used to sometimes give an account of his life based on memory of

his earlier narration. The idea of memories and a dead mind seem

contradictory. Could you please clarify this?

 

 

 

David: Many people are puzzled by this apparent conundrum. A dead mind

is one in which there is no thinker of thoughts, no perceiver of

perceptions, no rememberer of memories. The thoughts, the perceptions

and the memories can still be there, but there is no one who believes,

'I am remembering this incident,' and so on. These thoughts and

memories can exist quite happily in the Self, but what is completely

absent is the idea that there is a person who experiences or owns

them. 

 

     Papaji once gave a nice analogy: 'You are sitting by the side of

the road and cars are speeding past you in both directions. These are

like the thoughts, memories and desires in your head. They are nothing

to do with you, but you insist on attaching yourself to them. You grab

the bumper of a passing car and get dragged along by it until you are

forced to let go. This in itself is a stupid thing to do, but you don't

even learn from your mistake. You then proceed to grab hold of the

bumper of the next car that comes your way. This is how you all live

your lives: attaching yourself to things that are none of your business

and suffering unnecessarily as a result. Don't attach yourself to a

single thought, perception or idea and you will be happy.' 

 

     In a dead mind the 'traffic' of mental activity may still be

there, usually at a more subdued level, but there is no one who can

grab hold of the bumper of an idea or a perception. This is the

difference between a quiet mind and no mind at all. When the mind is

still and quiet, the person who might attach himself or herself to the

bumper of a new idea is still there, but when there is no mind at all,

when the mind is dead, the idea that there is a person who might

identify with an object of thought has been permanently eradicated.

That is why it is called 'dead mind' or 'destroyed mind' in the Ramana

literature. It is a state in which the possibility of identification

with thoughts or ideas has definitively ended. 

 

     Let me go back to Papaji and what I said about his memories.

Papaji said in an interview he gave in 1990 to two American dentists,

'When I speak, I never consult my memory or my past experience'. When I

asked him about this, he said that people with minds always go back to

the past in order to formulate their next sentence, whereas the words

of enlightened people are prompted by the Self in the present moment,

and are not the consequence of past memories or experiences. This is

the difference between using your mind to have a conversation and

allowing the Self to put the necessary words into your mouth whenever

it is necessary to speak. When there is no mind, words come out

spontaneously, as and when they are required. If those words happen to

take the form of a story from the past, one should not come to the

conclusion that there is an 'I' who is delving into past memories and

retrieving them. When we see an enlightened person do this, we assume

that this - a mind retrieving information from the memory - is what is

happening because this is the way our own minds work. We project the

mechanism of our own minds onto the enlightened person and assume that

she too must think and function in this way. We do this because we

can't conceive of any other way that thoughts and memories can be

articulated. Just for fun, I once asked Papaji how he managed to do his

shopping without using his memory or his past experiences. I should

mention here that he was a ferocious bargain hunter when it came to

buying vegetables. He always insisted on the best quality at the

cheapest price. 

 

     'How can you do this,' I asked, 'without a memory? To know whether

you are getting a bargain, you have to know what the price was

yesterday or last week, and to know whether or not a carrot is in a

good condition, you need to need to have a memory and a prior

experience of what a good carrot looks like.' 

 

     At first he just said, 'What a stupid question!' but then he

laughed and more or less summarized what I have just explained: that

there is no one who thinks, decides and chooses while he is out

shopping. The Self does all these things automatically, but to an

onlooker it appears as if there is someone inside the body making

decisions based on past experience and knowledge. 

 

     I heard U. G. Krishnamurti talk about his shopping habits in very

similar terms in the late 1970s. 

 

     He said, 'I push my trolley down the aisle and watch an arm reach

out, pick up a can and put it in the cart. It's nothing to do with me.

I didn't tell the arm to move in that direction and select that

particular can. It just happened by itself. When I reach the checkout

counter, I have a basketful of food, none of which I have personally

selected.'

 

from: http://davidgodman.org/interviews/al3.shtml

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