Original Face – In Gita Verse 14.21 Arjuna inquired: O my dear Lord, by which symptoms is one known who is transcendental to these three modes? What is his behavior? And how does he transcend the modes of nature?
Arjuna is asking in simple words what is the difference between Mind and Consciousness.
In my Bhagavad Gita Verse 2.56, blog I wrote – Mind means the borrowed, mind means the cultivated, mind means that with which the society has penetrated you. It is not you.
Consciousness is your nature; mind is just the circumference created by the society around you, the culture, your education.
The world is a cosmos, not a chaos. Then why do we experience it as chaotic?
Because we experience worlds as chaotic we also have a similar question like Arjuna asked Krishna. The simple way to understand the question and not seek the answer. Understand – Because we experience the world through our mind, and the mind is by its very nature chaotic. The way out of this chaotic mess is through meditation. It is through meditation that you can experience life in all its mystery without the filters of the mind. Through cathartic meditation techniques in particular you can dissolve the chaos and create space for more celebration. In the world of consciousness, nothing helps like celebration. Your energy has to be creative. If you don’t use it for happiness, your energy will move to unhappiness and worrying.
In Zen they say: Find out your original face. The face that you are using is not original; it is cultivated. It is not your face; it is just a facade, just a device. You have many faces, each moment you change your face. You go on changing it. The changing has become so automatic by now that you don’t even observe it, you don’t notice it.
When you meet your servant you have a different face from when you meet your boss. If your servant is sitting on your left side and your boss is sitting on your right, you have two faces. The left face is for the servant and the right face is for the boss. You are two people simultaneously. How can you have the same face for your servant? Your one eye has a certain quality, a certain look. Your other eye has a different quality, a different look. One is meant for the boss and the other one is meant for the servant. This has become so automatic, so mechanical, so robot-like that you go on changing your faces, you have multi-faces, and not a single one is the original.
In Zen they say: Find out your original face, the face you had before you were born, or the face you will have when you are dead. What is that original face? That original face is your consciousness. All your other faces come from your mind.
Remember well that you don’t have one mind; you have multi-minds. Forget the concept that everyone has one mind. You don’t have, you have many minds: a crowd, a multiplicity; you are poly-psychic. In the morning you have one mind, in the afternoon a different mind and in the evening still a different mind. Every single moment you have a different mind.
Mind is a flux: river-like, flowing, changing. Consciousness is eternal, one. It is not different in the morning and different in the evening. It is not different when you are born and different when you die. It is one and the same, eternal. Mind is – flux. A child has a childish mind, an old man has an old mind; but a child or an old man have the same consciousness, which is neither childish nor old. It cannot be.
Mind moves in time and consciousness lives in timelessness. They are not one. But we are identified with the mind. We go on saying, insisting, ‘My mind. I think this way. This is my thought. This is my ideology.’ Because of this identification with the mind, you miss that which you really are.
Dissolve these links with the mind. Remember that your minds are not your own. They have been given to you by others: your parents, your society, your university. They have been given to you. Throw them away. Remain with the simple consciousness that you are pure consciousness, innocent. This is how one moves from the mind to meditation. This is how one moves away from society, from the without to the within. This is how one moves from the man-made world, the maya, to the universal truth, the existence.
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