Dear Rupert,
You said, ‘The answer comes as the true experience of non-duality, which is not in the mind’. How is it possible to have any experience which is not in the mind? When we experience anything at all, our sensory apparatus is bringing in sense data to mind, and mind is making a deliverance based on memory, causality, etc. (and possibly many more). Am I right? It is this deliverance of mind (certain parts of mind maybe) that we ‘experience’ as a representation of reality. Understanding is cognition of this representation, again by certain parts of mind. How is it even possible to have an experience that is not ‘in mind’, as you suggested? In what medium or through what sensory apparatus?
You said, ‘That substance may be called consciousness, “I” or, because it knows no otherness, love’. Why do spiritual masters use the term love to denote the Absolute? Isn’t love such a uniquely human experience? We experience love to other people, animals, the world and ideas. How is it possible to call the absolute ‘love’? Lizards, rocks, molecules or black holes do not experience love. Aren’t we using a unique human experience to identify something much bigger than that? Isn’t this anthropomorphism?
With love,
Biju
Dear Biju,
Experience is not in the mind. It is in consciousness. Objective experience does not appear inthe mind; it ismind. And mind – that is, thoughts, sensations and perceptions – appears in consciousness.
Imagine watching a film where a family are having dinner together. The action seems to take place in the dining room, but it doesn’t. It takes place on the screen. The action is the dining room; it doesn’t take place in the dining room. Likewise, the mind is not a container that houses all thoughts, sensations and perceptions. It is simply the current thought, sensation or perception, and all these take place in consciousness.
However, the experiencing or knowing element in all experience belongs to consciousness. That which illumines experience and makes it real, alive and knowable, is consciousness. In fact, it is not just an element of experience but rather allexperience.
It is like the sun that illumines objects. We do not in fact know objects; we just know light (relatively speaking), and that light does not belong to an apparent object. It belongs to the sun. Likewise, in experience, all that is experienced is consciousness, and it is consciousness that is experiencing it.
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You ask, ‘When we experience anything at all, our sensory apparatus is bringing in sense data to mind, and mind is making a deliverance based on memory, causality, etc. Am I right?’
Nothing is brought into the mind from outside. The mind issensory data. We imagine that there is an outside world and an inside self, and that the two are connected by mind, but that is not our experience. Our experience is that there is no outside world and no inside self. There is thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, tasting, and so on, and all these are suffused with consciousness.
In fact, they are not just suffused with consciousness as a sponge is suffused with water. If we go deeply into the experience of any of these, all we find is consciousness, knowingness. That is, consciousness finds or knows only itself.
You say, ‘It is this deliverance of mind that we “experience” as a representation of reality’. What you call a representation of reality is an image. The substance of that image is only the knowing of it, that is, consciousness. That knowingness is the reality, the onlyreality, of the image. That which is real in our experience of the so-called world is consciousness alone. Reality is the light in all representations but cannot itself be represented.
So there is no such thing as a representation of reality. The image that we see and that we think is the representation of a real world is itself all we know of the world. We do not see a representation of the world but just a presentation, an image, not a representation of something else, like a real world.
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You ask, ‘Why do spiritual masters use the term love to denote the absolute?’ It is because ‘love’ is the name we give to the experience of ‘not-otherness’, and as all experience is consciousness knowing itself alone, it alone merits the name ‘love’.
Love is not a human experience. There are no human experiences. There are no entities called humans that experience certain things. Consciousness alone experiences. All experience belongs to consciousness, including all the thoughts, sensations and perceptions that are normally considered to belong to humans. The human being is not an entity that owns, has, feels or knows anything. It is a known or felt object, that is, a thought, sensation or perception.
In other words, only the absolute merits the name ‘love’. You are confusing a set of feelings, bodily sensations and thoughts for the experience of love. Love is precisely the dissolution of all such objects in consciousness. Do we not know that? Do we not know that love is precisely the dissolution of everything that keeps us, defined, separate, apart? With respect, I would suggest that you are anthropomorphising experience in general by attributing it to a human entity. There is no such entity that knows or experiences.
Love is the experience of consciousness knowing its own being, un-apparently-modified by the dualising mind. That transparent, non-objective experience belongs to consciousness alone, not to humans, rocks, lizards, molecules, black holes, Ruperts or Bijus! And because all experience is ultimately consciousness knowing its own being, including the apparent modifications of the dualising mind, all experience is love itself.
With love,
Rupert
