Art Parablev
The following is a question posed to Jean Klein at Delphi, Greece about exhausting the mind.
When we say that we must come to the end of the mind, that we
must exhaust the mind, is it a necessary process, something which must
happen, or is it possible to have an insight without the mind being
exhausted? And secondly, is this process itself a meditation, or does
meditation begin at the end of the mind?
When the mind goes to its end – and it goes to its end when it thinks
of the unthinkable – we can call it meditation, because in thinking the
unthinkable, we are silent. Our thinking no longer starts from
thinking, it starts from silence. When the mind comes to the end of its
potentiality, it is a relaxed mind. This means that when there is
something to think, it thinks, and the rest of the time it is in
non-thinking, that is, a natural state of relaxed, non-directed
attention. If we do not come to the end of the thinking mind, we will be
bound to it, so that even when there are moments when there is nothing
to think, we are still in the mind and live in constant agitation. The
relaxed mind functions in discontinuity. Only when it functions like
this can we be aware of the continuity behind all functioning. The
continuity is timeless meditation. It is this presence which gives life
and reality to all appearing. Any other so-called meditation you might
do has no flavor. But really, meditation is praying, praying without
someone who prays or is prayed to. Real praying is thanking for the joy
of being. It is expressed at every moment. Experiences like joy,
transcendence, peace and holiness, are all expressions borrowed from the
mind. But the meditation we are talking about here is without any
qualification. Its only quality is that it is without qualifications. It
is the extinction of everything that could be a state.
As long as the mind is not exhausted, it will still be an obstacle to
any real insight. Because the uninformed mind, that is, the mind which
does not know its limits, will continue to try to understand what is
beyond it. It will be driven by will or unconscious reflex, in the old
patterns of becoming and attaining. The mind will still be looking for
freedom, but in trying to attain it, it goes further away from it.
Because there is no way to go to freedom, for there is nobody to go to
it. When the mind remains in the reflex that there is something to
attain, something to become, something to achieve, it cannot come to the
only useful perspective for the mind, the perspective of living in
not-knowing. When the mind abides in not-knowing, when it is, at every
moment, open to the unknown, it is a tool of higher reasoning. Any other
use of the mind is a nuisance.
The important thing is to realize that what we are looking for is the
looker, is our presence. To achieve something in the phenomenal realm
we must, of course, refer to something we already know. But regarding
that which can never be an object, we can never go away from it. We must
come to the organic memory of the body. This is important, because
through this organic memory we will come to the absolutely relaxed
state, where we have all our energy in our hand, so to speak. In this
relaxed state the body and the mind come more or less together. There is
no more duality. As we have said before, the relaxed body is dynamic,
not passive. Passive relaxation is still in duality. It is not
integrated because there is still emphasis on the object, relaxation.
Even in a relaxed state, the mind automatically creates pictures, or thoughts. How can we exhaust the mind?
These are residues, and these residues must also come to their
exhaustion. When we let them come to their exhaustion, we have a
forefeeling of the “I am.” Don’t go into the images or thoughts of these
residues. Some teachers say to observe them, listen to them, but don’t
go in, don’t follow them. My experience is that we must not observe or
listen or follow them because the moment we look at them we feed them by
creating a witness to them. Take your stand in the void, the “I am.”
From here, you ignore them. But I think that when you become aware of
the body, not the concept body but the feeling body, and you are at one
with the feeling, in this becoming aware of the true body feeling, the
residues of images and words and language have no more power. You are,
of course, still in subject-object relation, the perceiver and the
perceived body feeling, but there comes a moment where there is only the
“I am.”
When we are living in our tactile, global body, we are no longer in
our foreheads. Generally, we live in our foreheads, and this
localization prevents all global sensation. When we remain in our
foreheads, we are in the hands of the devil. So we must become free from
the brain. In the beginning there may be some difficulty to be free
from the brain, because it is partly activated by the taking and
grasping of the eyes, which are very connected with the brain. It is
important, therefore, to consciously relax the eyes, to sense the
hollows of our eyes, their heaviness. When this part is sensitive, there
is a deep relaxation in the brain. Some scientists don’t believe we can
sense our brain, but they are studying medicine in a superficial way.
We can sense and change our brain. For when the brain becomes relaxed,
we feel ourselves no longer localized in the thinking factory of the
forehead, but we feel ourselves behind, in the upper cervical vertebrae.
When we feel ourselves behind, in our neck, we can no longer see from
the point of view of the indivudual which projects individual objects.
Because the individual is a thought construct which comes from the
frontal area. From behind there is no longer any concretization. There
is only a vague cloud of objectivity. Then this subtle localization
behind the neck dissolves down into the heart, and the heart is the last
door, the last expansion. Finally, we become free also from the heart.
We become emptiness, emptiness without border and without center. We are
the universe and the universe is us.
But I would say, take note of all this and immediately forget it.
-Jean Klein
taken from Open to the Unknown – Third Millennium Publications, 1992
To read more from Jean Klein see: http://o-meditation.com/category/jean-klein/
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