Nonduality teachings are about trying to go beyond the mind. But it’s more effective to think of it as coming from underneath the mind. In awakening your true self rises up through the mind and embodies your full being.
We let our minds capture us in ways that aren’t necessarily healthy. It’s not good to constantly be analyzing everything—it causes stress.
One of the big problems in our society today is that everybody is so fake. We’re constantly coming from the mind, and the mind isn’t real. So we end up being fake.
You can put all sorts of concepts into your mind about who you think you should be, and our society is very good at doing this. It constantly fills us up with ideas of who you should be. You literally go to school to become somebody, right? We all start out as somebody; you don’t have to become somebody! You can become a thing, like a doctor or a nurse.
What we’re trying to do in nonduality is locate the actual person. To stop identifying as the mind.
It’s the training of the mind that gets defined in our society as becoming something. So, what is this mind? If you sit, close your eyes, and meditate, it reveals itself as noise that goes on and on. It’s thinking, arguing, worrying, and it feels very real. But a really good exercise, a really good nonduality exercise, is to try and grab it while meditating. Try to manage it—it can’t be done. If you sit there and actually try to find your mind, you can’t. It’s like air floating, like a river running by, constantly moving. You can never really grasp it.
Sit still and try to form an idea, particularly a really important idea. You can’t. It’s like a free-flowing commentary on your life, isn’t it? The trick with nonduality is realizing that you’re not your mind. When you do, all of reality opens up because there is so much more to us than just our mind. It’s you, the actual embodied you, that has this mind that does things.
A good nonduality exercise is to focus on your mind. Rather than trying to get rid of it, give it some attention. What is this thing? What is your mind? Who are you? Who is the one experiencing this mind?
If you can step back into yourself as a fully real, embodied human being, then you become a real human being. At that point, your mind is a tool you can use, just like your emotions are tools to help you navigate what’s going on. Being human is very complex; we need all parts of ourselves. You don’t want your mind to completely go away—you’d be a vegetable.
So, the mind. What is it like? I can’t tell you what your mind is. That, right there, is a very good nonduality teaching because you have to discover it for yourself. The more I try to define it for you, the further I take you away from what it actually is. Sit down and experience it yourself. Your mind—what is it really? Dive in and find out because you are the one that’s searching for it.