Spiritual Blogs

What is the mind? It's really not complicated, the mind is simply a collection of thoughts that you're attached to. With everything that you believe is true, you make an emotional attachment to the thought and you keep it around. You hold on to it. All your memories, those are a part of the mind. What you believe about who you are, that's a subset of the mind called the ego. Your whole worldview, that's a section of the mind as well.

The mind can be viewed as a cloud of thoughts that surround the Being. Too many of these thoughts, and the mind is all the Being can see, just the same repetitive and limiting thought patterns. This is how the individual and society as a whole get "stuck in a rut". This is why people have so much difficultly really growing and evolving. The mind is what's responsible for ignorance, it believes that all it's beliefs are true, and thus automatically rejects new thoughts and different perspectives. The cloud of thoughts obscures the Being's vision, and pretty soon the cloud, the mind, is all the person can see. This is how people get so caught up in their separate illusions (sometimes foolishly called "your reality").

The mind is what creates the illusion, the mind is the reason people believe they're separate from God. Now I'm sure there's some people who will read what I just said and have a automatic reaction, believing I'm saying the mind is "bad". There's nothing inherently wrong about the mind, in fact it's the mind that creates "good & bad", "right & wrong", those types of dualistic thinking are what the mind does best. If you believe the mind, or anything else for that matter, is "bad" or "wrong", you're actually just strengthening the mind.

The basic patterns of your mind were not really created by you. The mind and its ego are not the source of your individuality, quite the opposite. The core of the mind and ego were given to you by society, they're the things that make you the same as everybody else. They contain this superficial "coke or pepsi" kind of individuality, you get to define yourself based upon these extremely shallow things like political party or what job you have. If you display any real uniqueness, you're outside of society's box (the collective mind) and you'll be largely ignored or rejected.

Sometimes people talk about the "god mind", "higher mind", or "divine mind", to me those are all oxymorons. The mind is what's responsible for the illusion of separation, the mind is the illusion that there's something other than God. When God Is Present, there is no more mind. There's even a common term for what happens when Divine is revealed to you, "mind-blowing". The mind wants to be God, but the mind doesn't understand God. The mind gets burned when God is near, so the mind created this imitation of God. The mind created a "god" in the mind's image, a rather psychotic and bipolar entity that's supposed to be in control of the whole Universe. This is the religious "god", a pale reflection of the Real Thing. The Real God Is All There Is, everything working together flawlessly. The "god mind" is some separate entity that reflects the individuals desires for power and control.

So what is Consciousness? Well, who's the one that observes the thoughts? Who is there watching them, hmm? Really look, don't just read over this quickly. It's something you have to witness for yourself. If you're just believing, you're missing It. Who's there watching your thoughts?

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I'm not kidding, really look at the mind, the thoughts, who is the Observer? Who is still there even when the mind is still? This is the whole point of meditation, to stop feeding into the mind and really connect with your Consciousness. It's also what is meant by being Present. What does this mean about who are you? When the mind and the ego are gone, you still remain. The nature of self is Consciousness, the nature of God is Consciousness. Consciousness Is Everything.

The mind likes to divide everything up into categories, to analyze and compare. The mind seeks knowledge of things the Being already understands intuitively. Ultimately, all the knowledge of the mind is still a limited view. You can't get to God through the mind, you cannot reach the Unlimited through what is limited. It's like using a stepladder to try to reach the Sun.

The mind isn't meant to usurp Consciousness, that's what creates unconsciousness, fear and suffering. The mind is like a servant who is holding its master hostage. The servant doesn't understand how to run the household, and it has created an absolute mess of the place. A society is built up around the internal mess, and the dysfunctional behavior is called "normal".

One of the major issues as to why people have so much trouble going beyond the mind is because their efforts actually feed into the mind. You try things like spiritual techniques, and you just replace one mental pattern with another, calling this "progress". It may be a slightly bigger mental box, but it's still not the freedom of real Consciousness. You can't use the mind to get to Consciousness, so despite the thousands of spiritual teachers and techniques, people still have a very difficult time seeing past their limited minds. It's not something you can read in a book, it takes a complete paradigm shift, a willingness to let go of everything you've ever believed. You don't really reach Consciousness, it's not someplace you get to, not something you do or achieve, It's Where You've Always Been. Love, and not the mind's imitation of Love which is really desire, but Unconditional Love, God's Love, that is the path back to Consciousness.

The Galactic Free Press
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http://soundofheart.org/galacticfreepress/content/limited-and-unlimited-mind-and-consciousness