Freedom from the Mind Is Already Here
La libertad de la mente ya está aquí
A student expresses a desire to be free from the mind, and the teacher uses direct inquiry to reveal that the freedom being sought is already present in this very moment.
Freedom from the Mind Is Already Here
A student expresses a desire to be free from the mind, and the teacher uses direct inquiry to reveal that the freedom being sought is already present in this very moment.
I want to fully experience something like a sense of lacking, that sort of sensation.
Something lacking might not look the way you expect it to. The simplest way in is when I ask you: what's the problem right now?
What do you mean? What sort of problems do I have?
If you could get any question answered that would solve the deepest issues for you, what are the questions, and what are the issues? And if you could distill that to one thing?
I don't quite understand that point at the moment. I suppose I would be free of the mind.
Free of the mind. Okay, stay with that.
Yes, and not feeling like I'm living inside this idea of what reality should look like: no time, no space, the body doesn't exist.
The mind as construction
I just suddenly thought of something. Even the body is a construction of the mind.
So, free of the mind. What does the experience of being a prisoner of the mind feel like? When you say you want to be free of the mind, it means you're not free of it right now. So right now, in this moment, you are not free of the mind. How is that experience? How does it feel?
It's peaceful.
Right now, the experience of not being free of the mind is peaceful?
Yes. There's no pain, nothing. I am speaking, but it's just speaking.
Knowing the mind is not the mind
Whenever you refer to the mind, whenever you experience being trapped by it or not free from it, you know the mind. And that which is knowing the mind is not mind. It's already free.
But this will come back. Right now it's been exorcised for a moment. When it returns, just do the same process: what's the problem, really?
Yes, that is my way of self-inquiry.
Forget about self-inquiry. Do problem inquiry.
I guess it's problems for no one.
Are there actually any problems? Where are they? What's your problem, specifically, at any moment?
Problem inquiry in daily life
For the last two days, I thought I had a problem. I just meditated throughout, and I thought I should be doing something else, like studying or something more energetic than meditation. These are ideas about what should be. And there is no "what should be." It just happens the way it happens. As you said at the beginning, there's nothing that needs to change.
That's a natural process. There's a concern or a worry around how to live. It could be just a natural way of reflecting, but it becomes something that bites, a problem, because then there's the idea that maybe if you studied instead of meditated, your future would be better, and you might be going in the wrong direction. Now we're talking about fear.
Yes, it is fear.
Getting closer to fear
It's important to recognize that immediately: "I'm worried" or "there's fear." Then you can get closer to that sensation. It's a sensation of fear. And then you can quickly understand that this whole thing you're describing ultimately is this fear.
And the deep desire is also to see the truth. That could be why, although I have the idea to do something else, I still meditate, thinking that I could meditate my way to the truth.
Desire for truth as love
See if your desire for the truth is not in fact actually just love. Truth isn't something somewhere else that you can desire and get to. The desire implies something somewhere else. You might actually be relating to a love for truth, and that no longer requires truth to not be here. In a sense, this will kill the desire, because the desire implies that you don't have truth, that truth is somewhere else, that you can get to it if you try hard. "Freedom from the mind is somewhere else; you can get to it if you try hard." It's not. It's here right now. It's already here.
As you tasted a few minutes ago, when you saw what happened around the mind and you were experiencing peace, that's already the freedom. It's that simple. We know it. It's nothing new. The only thing that shifts is that at some point, this just becomes where you go all the time, or most of the time. But it's not something new. The shift that is described happens differently for different people.