Disidentification Only Arises With Presence

I like the comparison -which is absolutely spot on- of the brain as just another organ. While it might have given human their competitive advantage, it ultimately is a mind that thinks in the same way that the heart is a pump that moves blood through the body… essential to life but also not what you are.

We wouldn’t be alive it wasn’t for the liver functioning but we don’t derive our identity from our liver.

The mind is admittedly different from the rest of the body since awareness of the senses, emotions, memories, plans, etc. are generated and stored there. There seems to be a hierarchical advantage. You need your heart but if it stopped beating, for a bit you’d be alive and conscious. If your brain stopped working, nothing would be as far as the world of form and/or an ego identity is concerned.

This superiority over more physical and less philosophical part of our body leads us to the gravest error, though: the idea that our mind is who we are.

We then let ourselves be trapped in the natural momentum of the mind and the idea that it is not only normal but essential for our survival that it should run continuously — Our mind not thinking thoughts, for most people, is akin to death, similar to a heart that would stop beating. People that have meditated deeply, though, will know that in fact one can be alive and conscious and also thought-less.

This is so important. There’s a triple realisation that:

• left unattended, the mind will do what it’s meant to do and think all day long,
• that while it’s left unattended you are essentially identified completely with it,
• but that in fact who/what you are is not it, who/what you are is awareness below or surrounding thoughts, perceptions, and the world of forms.

As you catch your mind and notice this built-in function of continuous thinking, you create an opening for yourself -awareness, presence, being- to shine through and come to the forefront instead of the back of the screen.

Awakening or enlightenment is that state of enduring consciousness that severs the identification with continuous mind chatter, severs the idea that you are your mind. It shines the light on your true essence, which is the light itself, the consciousness that realises there is nothing that needs to be thought of, nothing to be resolved or attained, that realises that it already is whole, complete, at peace and now.