Big mind, little mind?

We feel like a whole and integrated being, we have our hands, feet, legs, a heart and head, we know where they are and they all seem to be part of a greater being, separate, yet interconnected and integrated. However despite our searching there is nothing that is quintessentially self that we can point at, we can identify lots of things that are included in the package of who we are, especially if you think that what you do, your actions define the “who” part. They are certainly linked and entangled events, doing kind things over a long period of time indicate a kind person, and as humans are bad at lying over the long term it works well but is not fool proof, there are excellent liars out there, the best of whom can even lie to themselves, which is quite a trick if not to be admired. What is important is that whilst separate they are all part of a greater whole, so why it is so hard for the mind to admit that it is there is more than one mind, it is not singular and separate but that there more than one part of consciousness, there are smaller minds, the subconscious minds, and there is also a larger mind (or minds). For there to be a truly integrated being, we have to bring everything together, from our fingertips to the vastness of big mind, it turns out that life is a Russian doll with dolls within dolls, the little mind that we are aware of thinks that it is the greatest doll, whilst actually being just another doll inside of a giant mind with smaller minds inside it.

When we ask the question, “Who am I”, it is an attempt to find an even smaller doll, we are not our jobs, relationships, what we do, how we do it, or even the voice and asker of the question, we are not the thought that is, “Who am I”, that is a conscious voice, we hear it, and that is the witness, the core of our perspective, it is a view and nothing more, so even the witness is another doll within another. However it is the natural limit to the size of the small mind, the ego if you please, the process of thought that directs our important actions and it is the real world where your action get to have an effect. You might be thinking that if there is no one at home our moral responsibility slips away like a dress at the end of the night, but strangely if we are not driven by needs and wants, all that is left of any value is to care for those who are still mesmerised by the illusion of self, and to do so with real kindness and compassion, it becomes our duty to do so with elegance and skill, it would be like leaving a baby to weather on the rocks, which is not really enlightened behaviour.

Though thankfully we are not left in the darkness when we strip away everything that is unessential to self, or our actions in the world, it turns out that once these illusions are gone we are just left with presence, and presence is not empty, it has the characteristics of emptiness but it is not nothing. Zero turns out full of love, not loving action or romance but big love, the kind of love that only big mind has. It is by knowing the nature of self that we give ourselves the peace and emptiness that allows big love to shine through the lens of your being. Which is just as well as we could not contain all that love, it is the big bang that never stop shining and it is the only source of perpetual energy, it only grows stronger as it spreads out, the non-physical world is not ruled by the same rules as ours, it seems impossible in our physical world and yet the mind is capable of knowing itself as long as it gives up knowledge and it's need for possession, ownership and complete dominion over all knowing.

There are only two ways for small mind to know the world that is by attention and awareness, it only the big mind that can know the world by presence and it is a different world than ours. We are by nature little mind, we are able to act in the world through it and only it, we are able to think and improve our actions, this is only possible with small mind, it gets stuff done, it cleans, builds, creates, invests in the future, it takes care to learn from it's mistakes, and big mind can allow us to do so from a place of love instead of fear and greed, but it is little mind that still has to do the work. What big mind offers is the guidance that we are acting in alignment with our better self, when our hearts opens and feels love for the moment that we are living that is big mind knowing the world through those actions.

Though to dismiss this ability of the small mind to produce action is at best a mistakes, at worse an act of colossal distain against something that is incredible, the most advanced and unique kind of being in the history of the universe, consciousness is a miracle and completely unexpected, you would never have guessed in about 14 billion years that this was going to be the result of mere unthinking processes and the unfolding of the universe, carbon did not even exist for the first 4 billion years, that we are here is baffling at best. The idea that we should shed our little mind like the skin of a snake is stupid, it need our care just as much as the rest of the humanity, it is amazing that it happened that consciousness emerge, that there is intelligence capable of knowing the world and you possess it, that you have the chance to experience it and it is small mind that gave you that chance, it is not perfect but it did a great job the rest is up to you to realise that potential.

It is our responsibility to give little mind needs all the teaching and training that it requires, but it does not happen in isolation, we need the knowledge, resources and safety that our society for it's full potential to be released, it needs all the experiences can give it. A good and liberal society is the necessary first step that gives us a chance of raising our consciousness up, to open our minds to new ideas and concepts that can liberate us in a way that just sitting on the cushion can not, it is a different form of big mind but no less important to us. We can not past above the stages of our time, when there was only judging gods to be fearful of, it was not possible to see beyond them, to see that gods could be the source of love rather than judgement, that took a jump from being subjects, parts of the whole under the rule of the gods, to being an individual capable of having a relationship with god as equally aware consciousnesses. If you are unaware that such a possibilities exists what are the chance of stumbling upon it by accident, it can happen, it did happen more than once but they were usually dismissed as madmen and dangerous fools, they were almost certainly excluded from their society which was certain death.

We might think we are beyond such tribal brutality, but try and not have job in this world and see how long it is before you are excluded and put on the street to die slowly (your life expectation will drop by half), to ignore the collective is to wither, there is no future in a singular life despite the hopes that individual greed would produce an utopia, we need to be part of something. It seems like madness from the outside that it would ever work, of course there individual needs and wants, we want to enable and empower the most productive people, we want them to have more resources so that they can do the most amount of good in the world (or at least use the resources productively). However the individual and the collective whole are not separate, they are not the same or different parts of the same thing, rather they are interconnected in everyway imaginable, in the same way that the body/mind is, tied together so that there is not really a start of one and the end of the other. When the individual acts as if there is no collective it automatically acts out of alignment with it's self, and the only way to bring thing back into balance is to reconnect with that collectiveness, and the progress of the world is a history of swinging between the individual and collectives.

As the same is true for societies that pretend the individual does not exist, that the individual are separate units of a single whole, that way lays madness and cruelty, if you need prove of this just read a history book and you will see the slaughter of million for the idea that the collective is the most important thing and worth dying for, which it might be but the individual is worth living for. Two things can be opposite and true at the same time, it is not a simple view of the world but reality is complex (though no one could accuse it of being boring), and one of the ways of living with this conflict is by spending time in the company of your big mind if you can understand yourself you have a chance of seeing the world clearly.

The way we access big mind is by having presence with ourselves without the distractions of little mind, by viewing ourselves as a process that we have learnt through the whole of our lives, it is the habits, our reactions both to any stimulus or even to itself, it points out everything like a mother with a child, and it never stops unless we train it to. As there is only two ways of knowing the world, by our attention and awareness, it is our attention upon which we have the most control, though not as much as we think, though we can learn to stabilise it by practise (by paying attention to the physical feeling of our breath in our diaphragm or inside of our nose). Which once it is stable it means that we have stopped being distracted by our thoughts as we no longer pay attention to them just our breath, then we can turn that attention to our presence.

That is the moment that we learn what is left when we are not distracted, and it is not nothing, it is everything else and that includes big mind, the feeling that it generates is beyond words but in the language of little mind, it is bigness, vast, emptiness, the kind of big that only emptiness can possess, everything has to include all emptiness and that emptiness contains itself and everything else. For one to exist the other has to as well, emptiness contains all forms, and all form has to include emptiness, and this can only be experienced through big mind, that is why it is such a special experience to even touch upon it.

The strange thing is that big mind is already here, and you do experience it everyday in every moment, it just that you do not pay it attention, it is in flow, in the moment of recognising a friend, sunset, when you experience joy and in the moments before you fall asleep, but if you ever get a taste that is enough to get you hooked, to sustain the long struggle to actually have real presence with it. I think that maybe it is the reason that so many people seem to be unhappy, maybe they have had a taste and want more, but without realising what they need, they just sit with a feeling of lacking with no way of knowing what it is they lack and no means to find it. Though it only by feeling this lack that you can find the drive to pursue what your little mind has gotten a taste for, it is what the big mind has to offer and it seems to be the only escape from the pain of the sweet parting that happen when you were born, when big and little mind was seperated like a raindbow from sunlight, and it is only by finding big mind again that we can be complete.