Reflection 52

Welcome!


Locating Your Mind

Where is your mind?

How big is your mind?

Is there a dividing line between your mind and your world?

These are questions that many of us never ask, never mind actually look into. We automatically accept what society tells us, that our minds are inside our heads, small, and separate from the world. Who would ever think of questioning this?

Why is this important?

Experience severe or even just mild psychological pain – which we all do at some point - and the question of the nature and location of your mind becomes relevant.

Why?

Because if your mind is central to you, and small, and separate from the world, you are caught in that distress. You are that distress. You feel trapped, under pressure, at your wit’s end.

But if you discover that your mind is not central, not here but there, not small but boundless, not separate from the world but woven into the world – not your mind but the world’s mind - then in the moment of being aware of this you are free of your mind, you are relieved of its stress and distress, since you are viewing it from the peace and freedom of who you really are.

Overlook the true location of your mind and you are plunged back into your distress, into your prison. Look again and see where your mind is and you are, in that new moment, free of your mind and its distress - because you are seeing that your mind is there and not here. The name of the game is attention. It’s not a matter of learning where the mind is, but of attending to and re-discovering the truth, again and again – the truth that is deep and wonderful and profoundly liberating.

Warm regards,
from this wonderfully mind-free, peaceful, liberated Silence that we all are.


The trouble with the mind is its supposed abstraction from the world, its supposed imprisonment, its supposed condensation into a nuclear thing here. The mind goes wrong by misapprehending where it is and to whom it belongs. (1977 interview with Douglas Harding)


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