In ordinary usage, the word "mind" refers to thoughts, the thinking process, or the thinking apparatus. But there are other usages: in the East, for example, "mind" includes more than just the thinking sphere. And here in the West as well, the word often has a larger meaning. In fact, most of the depth psychologies and the social sciences in general, use the term "mind "to include all inner experience. The mind is then taken to be the field or sphere of our thoughts, images, feelings, emotions, sensations, and perceptions, plus the apparatus or agent that deals with all these impressions. This "mind" is connected not only to the brain, but to the totality of the nervous system. Here, we will use the term "mind" in this larger, more inclusive sense. We will also be open to modifications or extensions of this definition.

Ultimately, everybody loves absolute absence whether they know it or not. You know you love it when you become aware of pure consciousness. Before pure consciousness you are trapped within the differentiating consciousness, discriminating, rejecting, and prizing one aspect of consciousness over another. You want essence or are angry because there is pain; you reject this person because they don't like you, judge that person because they're different from you, and so on. Within the differentiating consciousness, you are busy within the knowable world, trapped within your own mind. To go from consciousness to absence is to break out of the cycle of birth and death, to escape the trap.

Different systems emphasize one of three descriptions: the primordial non-differentiated consciousness; the awakened state of mind which is also universal; or the peaceful state of mind which is at rest, in complete peace. The nature of mind can then be experienced as blue, clear, or black aspects of consciousness. Each one of these can be considered a state of the nature of the mind. But we can say further that the nature of the mind is complete emptiness. We can experience complete emptiness as non-differentiated consciousness or as translucency, or as the night sky. There is always a subtle consciousness that perceives emptiness. The subtle consciousness can be restricted by your own personal consciousness, so that you don't see it as it is, or it can be expanded completely.

If we can be without the mind even for a little while, many of the subtle obstacles and identifications, as well as the conceptualizations underlying our reifications, can be exposed. We can see the discrimination, the labeling, and how all of these activities are the natural activities of the mind—necessary for navigating our practical life but not necessary for us to be ourselves. To be who we are, we don’t need these things. To be what we are—just to be, just to be alive—we don’t need them. But many people think that if mind is gone, there will be no experience. In fact, the opposite is true: awareness continues with more intensity, more clarity, more transparency; colors are more vivid and forms are much more distinct. That is because everything becomes much more itself, since all the veils, all the projections, all the concepts are gone. We perceive without anything intervening, so everything is naked as itself. To believe that when the mind is gone, we won't see anything, we must believe that everything exists only in our limited, discursive mind.

So much is going on in the world and in our minds that it reminds me of being in a movie theater nowadays. You go there to relax and enjoy a film, and more often than not, you are assaulted by loud noises. You can't even feel anything about what you are watching because of all the clanging and explosions, all the yelling and screaming, all the loud action and intense suspense. It is like entering a war zone. Everything is turned up to the maximum. Living in our minds is actually like that. Have you noticed how busy your mind is just reading these words? The mind is always occupied with reactions, judgments, questions, associations, desires, and attitudes. And we have become like teenagers who are used to all that noise. We think the noise is what reality is and no longer recognize what is truly real. We are not feeling ourselves in that intimate, simple, relaxed way that we like but may have forgotten exists—the feeling we would like to have when we go to a movie to relax and watch something interesting.

And if I want to penetrate beyond my mind and see what is there, it is a mystery. It is unknowable, completely, one hundred percent unknowable. It is so unknowable that the moment you begin to get a glimpse of it, your mind is blown to smithereens. You realize that your mind lays a kind of curtain over things, a veil, a colored sheet with drawings on it that overlays our reality and says, “That is reality”. But the reality is beyond that: you open that curtain, open the window and it is unknowable. If you truly look, you do not even know you are looking, and you disappear. Your mind is there, but nobody is looking. The reality is there and you do not say there is mind or there is reality. And then, what you perceive, although it is mysterious, it is unknowable, we give it a name. We call it truth, we call God, we call it reality. These are just words, words to refer to the unknowable, to the unknown, to the mystery.

We have seen so far that awareness of the self-image brings about the experience of space, or of the mind as openness. In other words, dissolution of boundaries imposed by the self frees space. It literally expands the mind. Understanding this dynamic relation between self-image and space, we can theorize about the development of psychic structure: The development of the self-image simply represents a gradual building and structuralization of boundaries in the mind space. Here we see the relationship between mind as content and mind as ground. Space is mind as ground. Mind as content is a result of boundaries in this space. In fact, these boundaries are the mind as content, are what constitutes the psychic structure.

This is an important difference between the mind and Being. The mind can absorb and identify with any psychic material it believes to be true. It does not have the capacity, on its own, to discern what is objective truth and what is not. In other words, the mind can be deceived, even by itself. Being, on the other hand, is pure reality. It is the actual stuff and consciousness of truth, and cannot be deceived. It does not try not to be deceived; it is simply truth by its nature, a self-conscious medium made of pure sensitivity.

As the mind understands more and more, it reaches a place where it knows that not everything can be known conceptually. It knows definitely, absolutely, that something is there, but the mind, itself, cannot know it. Beingness, however, knows itself, and knows itself not by a reflection on itself, but just by being it.

The nature of the mind is emptiness, and the subtle consciousness that perceives that emptiness is the heart of the mind. But this relationship of the heart to the mind is even more complex. There is also the mind of the heart, the consciousness of the heart, the knowingness of the heart, the curiosity of the heart, and the sensitivity of the heart. The heart is seen as the sensitive organ, the knowing organ. It is conscious and perceptive. The heart is sometimes called the mind because the heart is the source of the heart of the mind. In this way, one could also say the mind is the mind of the heart. But their unity goes even further than the mind of the heart or the heart of the mind. They are the same. At the level of understanding the mind as a subtle consciousness, as an aspect of Essence, there is no heart and no mind, there is only one thing. It is experienced as one consciousness with no separation of the centers.

So we're seeing here another meaning of mind, which is pure consciousness. There is perception, but that perception is not anything but the perceptivity itself. At this point we go into mind, not in a sense of it being just space, but of it being perception, consciousness. We see that we always have that consciousness. Every person, and every living thing, has this consciousness. In our everyday experience, there is always a consciousness of something; we never know consciousness by itself. There is always consciousness of the rug, my foot, my mind. The consciousness and the content of consciousness are never separate. The consciousness is always taken to be the content of consciousness, because that is how we operate with our limited consciousness. We never see consciousness itself, in its purity.

There is an inner consistency and order for the process of essential development. There is no need for the mind to direct the process. In fact, directing the process by the mind can only lead to difficulty, for the mind does not know. Commitment to the truth is sufficient for the process to unfold. When the essential aspects are discovered and freed, when the incomparable pearl is realized, the process spontaneously unfolds in the direction of the instincts and ultimately of the survival issue.

The conceptualizing mind is of its very nature conducive to suffering. A world created of good and bad entities encourages comparison, preference, judgment and attachment. The concept of a separate self is nothing but a collection of these sensations and feelings that have been lumped together and labeled in a certain way. But what if we don’t look at things this way? What if we stop labeling things, stop saying this is different from that and simply experience what is there without concepts? When we perceive without concepts, we realize that there isn’t a separate self, an essence, an I, an other. There is only consciousness, the presence of consciousness.

To throw away your mind means to throw away what you think you are, what you think the world is, and what you think is there, what is not there, what is good, what is not good – to throw it away, all of it. Otherwise, what you will perceive, and what you will be experiencing, is nothing but parts of your mind, a continuation of the past coming from your own memory. When I say the world is old, or what we see is old, I do not mean old in the sense that it has grown in time. I mean old in the sense that it has stopped growing. It is dead in its old form, the way you constructed it years and years ago. The mind perpetuates ghosts, dead things; there is no life in them. They are not light – they’re heavy, dark, dank, old, and musty. They are stale. In that dark, old, dank world, you suffer. The suffering is felt mostly because we still believe that old, dark, dead world to be reality, and we live as if it is reality, wanting one part of it, not wanting another part of it, putting part of it against another part of it. You are putting this dead body against another dead body, not liking this dead thing, liking the other dead thing. When you want something because you have experienced it in the past, what you are wanting is a corpse. It is already dead.