By Amaya Gayle Gregory
It’s quite unsettling, and that’s not a bad thing, to recognize that this is all mind and what most call mind actually knows nothing. Another frickin’ paradox. Yup. It’s all paradox. Isn’t that a hoot! What we think of as ourselves is actually living, breathing paradox.
Now that statement is bound to piss off a few people, but not as much as what’s coming. If you want to blow off a little steam, and have people to blow it off with, just tell folks that they have no mind, that the idea of a mind is backwards, and that rather than the mind being located within the human, the human is located in Mind, that the human isn’t at all what they think. Most will walk away (quickly). Few will hang around to take a closer look.
Maybe I should clarify what I mean when I say, ‘It’s all mind’.
Mind: my experience of life, what I believe life to be, how I think it acts, why it behaves the way it does, who’s right and who’s wrong, who’s stupid and who’s smart, the fact that I may or may not believe there is ‘an it’ to be-act-behave. Even the idea of ‘an I’ who thinks she or he knows, has thoughts, exists.
It’s all mind.
Did I say contentious?
What exactly mind is, now that’s up for grabs. The material world view says the mind is a brain ensconced in the body. My current best understanding would smile at that simplistic, rather remedial idea, but I can definitely see why it is comforting to hold it. I held onto it as long as I possible could, right up until the moment that nothing was left to hang on to.
That one unsubstantiated, unprovable idea maintains the sense of self, that which we hang onto for dear life, that which most seekers seek to demolish while refusing to let the wrecking ball swing. Thank goodness, they don’t have to — let it, that is. Life does that. Life, the outpicturing of infinite aliveness, that which can be seen and experienced but only inadequately named.
Mind, as I use it is simple, basic awareness. Some call it consciousness. I’ve been known to as well, although lately I’ve taken to calling it infinite aliveness. It’s stage face appears to be bodies with minds, life riddled with death, separate individuated forms, but that is simply exquisite make-up slathered on emptiness. It is pure potential, the potential to be anything. It is infinity at play.
The word ‘mind’ works when broadly applied, well, works as well as words do. They always fall short. Some like to differentiate between mind and Mind, between the human mind and infinite Mind. To me, that is even more confusing. It automatically sets up a separation that doesn’t exist. It’s only necessary when thinking is tainted with the idea of separation in the first place, when the human body is seen as something to reckon with, to justify or explain, when mind is seen as in control, as located in a human seat of power.
If it’s all mind then there is no separation, no bodies, no brains, no thinking, no believing, no anything other than mind appearing as all these things, the ten thousand things, the material diversity of the universe.
But we like our stories and the story we love best is the hero and his heroic path, the story of walking that path even when our path looks nothing like the hero stories of old, when ours is simply a story of getting by, of learning to grieve fully, of surviving what life throws our way. In each of our stories the odds are stacked against us. There are good guys and bad guys, wrongs to be righted. We don’t always win against bad odds and return the conquering hero, but the chance that we might endures, and that seems to be enough to keep us in the story.
Sometimes our story is of getting by, of not quite having enough to pay the bills, of bombs blasting our world apart, or of children sacrificed to the gods of war. There’s nothing that says stories have to be pretty. In fact, as much as we want the strong finish, we gravitate towards plain or flat-out ugly tales. Like most convincing storytellers, we’re pretty creative and consummately seasoned. We’ve been doing this forever, literally.
To willingly set the wrecking ball free isn’t something we would, or could, ever do. There’d be no story without its characters and storyteller … or so we believe, until we don’t, until the story wakes us up to its illusory nature. It’s all mind so infinite aliveness manifests as it does, as it will, regardless of whether I appear to agree or not. Waking up isn’t a choice. Perhaps that’s what Jesus meant when we said, Thy will be done, why most mystics point to surrender as our only real course, why love is the only answer, the only solution. The story writes itself.
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