96. Minding ‘within’ and ‘without’.

Normally it is said that the mind is always engaged in projecting itself outwards and that it should ‘somehow’ be turned inward. So we need to use the mind like ‘an eye’ to look within. The mind is similar to an eye. The eye is used to choose the area of looking or seeing and the mind is used to choose the area onto which attention can seem to be focused. So when we meditate, we put awareness or focus of awareness on hands, legs, frontside, backside, centre of the chest, head etc.

For a while, like breathing on purpose, it feels like, such focus is with a freewill. But such a governing force, soon escapes, leaving the mind wandering on its own. It’s not possible to keep control on the mind, as there is a controller and there isn’t a mind. It only seems probably possible to have control on mind.

The looking within is specifically interesting. For a year or two, we are trying to put our attention inside the body, as if within and without are addressed to the frame of the body. In any case, one fine day, you would know, how mind keeps playing its tricks.

To focus anywhere, inside the body, or at the right of the heart or between your eyes or at the far off landscape, is called without. Its opposite is ‘within’. The word ‘within’ seems to refer as related to the body, but in this case, it is pointing to look within the mind, as if the other sense awareness were as if happening outside of the mind. You cant look outside of the mind, because one does not know much about the boundaries of the mind. So to know what is being pointed, we have to use the nature of ‘projection’ of the mind.

The outside world is termed to be the projection of the mind. The world or Universe includes our body frame, so that the whole featured world, with the ’we’ as a body based entity in it, is actually the outside world or just World. However, the mind interprets the world as different from what we are, so as to make an outside world vs an inside ‘me’. This is the world as we normally know it or the world of ‘duality’. The mind knows the world with the sense of non-duality, but interprets it with a sense of duality. So sensing the world as a bundle of sensations and interpreting the world in terms of ‘me’ here and a world of objects out there, making sense to such a ‘me, is totally mental work or the work of the mind, which is said to be a projection.

The difficulty is to use the projector to project light on itself. Like a torch trying to shine on itself. It requires a lot of circus, to the extent of turning the mind / torch inside out to make this happen. So, many years pass away, trying to hang around to get a hang of how to hang this upside down or inside out or both.

The mind is a ‘looker’. It has to keep looking. Presence, absence, changes, beauty, ugliness etc etc are its contents. The day it stops looking, it is dead. It cannot dye because, it is still looks at death and conveys the emptiness that is sensed as the ‘dead’ or conveying a sense of emptiness all around.. So looking has no limitations of time, precisely because it is ‘time’ that so looking everywhere and featuring contents. So stopping to project, reveals an un-projected perception or the emptiness of the contents featured in sensation.. We cant call it the world anymore, because world is a sensible story. When the projection, as learnt is taken away, what remains is ‘raw’ staring at itself. Its like saying that sound is sound, until you can recognise what the sound is, and when so recognised, its called words or English or French, but no more as sound. Sound is not what English is, even though English is sound. Similarly, world is not what perceiving is, even though, the world is a perception.

So to look within, only means to look without conditioning or interpreting or judging. To look within is to perceive and to look ‘without’ is to conceive. The purpose of mind is twofold. It is sentience or whole mind and is knowing wholeness as featured and then has to convert the knowing into the feel of a knower as one part of such perceiving and ‘known’ as the rest of the perception. The only way it can be memorised is make a story of such subject object world in time-space and interpretation of such inseeing is outseeing.

So looking within, is to ‘just be’ or still the mind or relax to the fullest etc. This opens up the sense of focus until the focus from a point, becomes wholeness itself. It starts with the game of focusing on chest and shoulder etc and slowly trying to go over to focus, what coming up in the mind. Then you start seeing your thoughts more loudly as they come up. The game continues to subtly focus in the field from where these thoughts arise or its source. Now you are inseeing mind itself as a field. The focus will learn how to rest in the field until the focus gets absorbed as that field itself. Its like the focal centre becoming the circle itself. This suddenly becomes the open field of sensations and thoughts. Thoughts don’t come so much now. The external sensations cant be stopped. But all the while, the thoughts were pulling the attention and the outside sensations and inside sensation were kept at bay. Now all sensations starts to dance in the field. Keeping eyes shut can help. But not allowing the ‘focus’ to focus on visuals, but be focused into the mind, is as good. The sensation now that come up are more like ‘sounds’ happening, feeling happening, movements happening etc, as if, whole of perception is just a happening in the mind and such field where it occurs would be the ‘I am’  field that you are. Even the body is a sensation in that field, just like external sensations. So all sensations, external and internal will be named sensations and the focus of attention dissolving into becoming the ‘mind’ or field in which such sensation appear, would be whole mind. The thoughts are now ’not’ interpreting the sensations, and so you are in touch with ‘life’ directly`. Here the you is just a impersonal mind. All sensations in its raw direct feel is 100 times powerful in clarity and is a good feeling. You start loving it and become one with it, as if Love was you, embracing all sensations.

Personally, I realised, while focusing within, that I was hearing sounds like a Tinnitus problem, until the problem was used as a tool to jump into inseeing any time of the day, for every little space of time that I could accumulate for this purpose. It was a 24 x 7 hobby.  So look and look and look, until all is within and there isn’t a in or out, because you as a body boundary is  myth. That is real meditation.

95. Freedom from desire.

The word ‘desire’ is a tricky word. The sentence –‘to be free from desire’ also is tricky, because the mind makes a target of freedom, believes in the target and works towards the target, as if freedom from desire is taken to be ‘desire to be free’. It may work or not, like all desires that are sought.
Desire is a sense of wanting more or desperately wanting. However it is a functioning aspect of sentience. Its unique for human forms, the desperateness about the wanting more, or the continuous pursuit of wanting, as compared to other forms of sentience. So the basis of human function as an individual or a group is based on this theme. Alternatively, functioning with this theme, is what is making  the feel  of individuality (or separateness) or belonging to group, as if human nature supports this theme to maintain itself as a unique  human race.
Desires are of various kinds. Desire to know, desire to become, desire of acquire, desire to comfort, desire to more security, health, wealth, prosperity, status, power, knowledge etc etc. Its all coming under one method of functioning, which is ‘mind’s exclusivity in its nature of functioning.  Then there is a desire to solve problems, to achieve perfection, so on and so forth. There is nothing right or wrong with this aspect of functioning of mind, as it is its ‘skilled’ nature or expertise. Its evolution aspect to be more skilled, creatively or destructively. Unfortunately,  the mind functions largely in a   desirous way, to maintain a commonality in functioning of the human race. The entire human race, is conditioned to acknowledge, maintain and pass on this basis of mental behaviour for the whole of human race. However the whole of such mental functioning is thought based or thought ‘provoked’ and has little chance of falling out, as long as thinking process is maintained, by sentience.
In a matter of basic survival, this functioning supports the cause. Desire for food, shelter etc, when dealt with and maintained, becomes basic essentially  However desire has an inbuilt aspect to raise the requirement of such basic necessity in order to change for the better. To understand what better is, a sense of judgement has to fall in place and this becomes a mechanism of original perceiving mechanism to make up certain conditions within perception.  So desire, includes use of mind to check out probabilities and deal with them to evolve some result, that is regarded effective. The effectiveness so judged, lies in the condition the result, which must then offer more pleasure and less pain. So, ideas regarding pleasure and pain must take form and be deeply embedded in the psyche, so as to fall back each time onto that, to make the basis of choice and thus make the choice effectively progressive. The choice so made, being personalised will affect the surroundings also,  as all forms are in the end, connected  as one single form, that we call creation or Universe. The choices focused as ones personal target will be automatically bound to have consequences on wholeness, as such choice is a movement of wholeness, even though seemingly personal. Some other ‘parts’ of wholeness will ‘suffer’ consequences of the first part, as it has to be sacrificed to some extent to support such a single ended choice. Impersonal choices are more of a statement and 'impersonality', doesn't need to choose to have a particular end.  
Sentience by itself, being singularity, should find a way to balance its functioning as plurality of individual minds, by finding a method to see success in comparison and not as an absolute, so that the game of mind is kept alive. So success become a progressive game of mind, to that individual and may be at a cost of the rest of the seeming world. Desire then takes on a complex process of dividing all that is, into many brackets of opposites so that there is space for the mind to make progress in terms of achieving more and more pleasure and less and less pain, be it individually or as individual groups.
Desire thus has to be the cause from making of individuals or groups and maintain such separation. In order to achieve the said desire, mind must uses a method of ‘hook or by crook’ to get over with the desires in shorter and shorter span of time. So to desire peace, wars may be raged and to desire wealth, health may be sacrificed and so on and so forth. When these become the primary nature of the conditioned mind, and gets established and settles down, it starts to show that the basic ‘desire’ is getting to be the root cause, having to keep its own game plan active, and that this maintains  separation in the cross section of all creation. This gives hope that there could be a method for such discriminating mind to transcend mind, to overcome ‘desire’ which was by now, seen as the basis of all progress and also regress, to be used for bringing an end to desire, which normally is achieved at a cost of rest of the creation.
Considering that the mind has to function in its own sphere, this problem is now taken head on to have  this ‘new’ desire, which is - to be free of desire. The thinking mind or human mind or split-mind cant work without this principle. Being a desire in itself, its still bound in the original mind game. It is then seen that it becomes difficult to transcend mind, using mind, as keeping the mind active is still its own normal behavior  However, when the mind seeks to use mind to challenge its own functioning abilities, as not to desire, which is not what it is original designed nature, it is possible that the mind may go into a spin and collapse (or not, for that matter, depending on its conditioning ). Such a state where thinking gets out of way, in terms of being fully functional, in its desirous aspect, there is a lot of rest and freedom. Freedom is then seen to be an absence of a desiring mind or thinking mind, in terms of judgement.  However, other than this function, that consumed most of its energy, the mind suddenly gets exposed to a its basic nature of only perceiving, prior of conceiving, for the purpose of maintaining itself expertise in being judgmental  Then it is seen that ‘desiring’ or mind function, comes to ease.
So freedom from desire, must come as a easing of the functioning of the mind, in filling up time, continuously, being judgmental about all perception.  Until then, mind behaves, as the separate individual, desiring or else called suffering a ‘lack’.

94. Time and Me.

What is time?  This is a difficult question, which assumes that there is an answer.  It’s the assumption of a positive answer that 'objectivises' time. This assumption is also is what, is enabling ‘time’ to exist as, an independent thing. Time is thus a concept or agreed upon term, used in communicating one’s idea with another; as if such a ‘thing’ called objective time exists. If you ask someone to define time, he could not make it tangible.
Time is an idea to 'grasp' change or movement. So you choose a frame of a second or hour or a day, mentally. This frame can take a story of an event to fill that frame. The frame of time is purely mind made or imagined, as physically other than now, nothing is 'sensable' directly. Its the sense of duration that makes a feel of time through knowledge, that 'change is with respect to time'. So change gives rise to time rather than time gives rise to change. A sense of space make three dimensional objects ‘seem’ to exist and a sense of time seems to make 'change or movement or event' as a 'story' of change to exist. 
Duration is memory dependent and arises with a ‘sense of perception’ wherein, what is already perceived seems to overlap with what is now being perceived as if, the previous existence continues into the present.  So we have persistence of vision, sound, smell, feel, etc, from the previous moments into the present moment. This drag smoothens each frame that is perceived, to make continuity to what is perceived  seemingly increasing the present frame of time from past to future. The perceiver ( sense instrument or body) within the frame of time is also appearing to change, even though the fact is that its the unchanging element that can perceive change.
If you take a movie film, and run it at slow speed, it is all frames. At a certain speed, it feels like a movie and at full speed it may just be white light. So the existence of a movie to the film is a matter of resonance between the perceiver’s persistence of vision and the speed of at which perception is displayed. So the experience of movement or duration in the movie is purely a type of synchronicity of perception and display. In case something happens, to change your sense of perception, the whole world may crumble on itself! So the existence of the world is magically maintained through a sense of ‘duration’ to what is perceived using a magical memory, that is somehow maintaining the ‘reality’ of ‘things’.
It doesn’t take much to see through this ‘fact’ that all there is -is -a magical operation happening, what we call life, wherein a world is maintained on a mental screen, magically through the use of direct perceiving, memory and a time lag of the perceived sensations, that gives continuity to the world having ourselves also as perceived.
What is eternal is not recognised as such, because the process of recognition, being the intelligence of what eternal is,  is purposely designed to make feel one content of cognition as a cogniser of the rest to create reality of an illusory separation in the content of display. The concept of time, being real or feeling real, ignores the possibility of timelessness or that there can be something as absence of time or something beyond the concept of time as intemporal or eternal. When the basis of existence is accepted vide a time concept being real, the unreality of time is sacrificed for good. Thus the ignorance of the eternal sets in due to the strong belief in the concept of time, or a bondage to concept of time.
Such an ignorance that time could simply be a concept with no independent reality, is the obstruction in seeing the factual reality of existence ( of objects or world).  This ignorance is identical with the ‘me’ thought. Seeking the source of such ignorance will automatically result in the vanishing of time and ‘me’ concept, as both are realised as illusory concepts that make up the illusory reality.
The absolute cogniser or the ‘I” concept is purely and entirely a ‘temporal product’. The ‘sense’ of continuity of the ‘me-sense’ is subject to the feel of temporal extension of perception. If you apperceive what ‘time’ is, it must simultaneously dis-appear as an object in the mind.  It is then revealed that the essential element that constitutes a me-concept and objectifies it, also dis-appears, for the simple reason that neither ‘time’ nor the ‘me’-concept can have any objective quality to sustain. They only have a mental strength that holds their reality.
The ‘me’ concept and ‘time-concept’ are inseparable from the intelligence that creates it, like light creates brightness. The intelligence or the Absolute or 'I' principle plays out the mind to create both me and time. However 'me' and 'time' which are expressional aspects of the absolute create a feeling of reality to me and time and thus all objective seeing sets into the subjective creation. Magically me and time are believed to have independent objective existence, even though there is nothing objective about them.  The concept of ‘sequential happening’ in time believed to be sensible or logical or real, mentally, is the foundation of the ‘notion’ of bondage. As long as the concept of ‘time’ is left untouched, with objective existence, its subject, as the perceiver, is precisely the ‘me’ concept that remains unquestioned. That is why the nature of time must be investigated into.
Trying to remove the me-concept, and retaining the time concept implies that the mechanism of functioning of perception is not recognised. On the other hand, if duration is ‘seen’ or felt as invalid, as an objective existence to which we seem to be bound, but as an essential part of appearance, then removal of duration would necessarily remove all that seems to be ‘existing’ in time. Then the supposed objectification of time and me ceases, leaving ‘us’ as what ‘in- temporally’ we are. As long as we regard space-time to be objectively factual, we are bound and tethered.
The term ‘absolute’ is just a symbol for the functioning of mind as a ‘split’ into relative duality, consisting of conceiving ‘other than self’ as a space- time entity or the world and its interdependent counterpart ‘self’ also as another space-time entity. This dual or divided functioning of mind , referred as merely ‘mind’ by Maharshi, appears as the conceiver or the functioning ‘I’, temporally extended in duration. So ‘I’ thought is really the Mind.
The only way to subjugate the concept of time as an objective reality, external to ourselves, is by identifying ourselves with it, which is apperceiving that, it is what we are., not objectively but subjectively. When we recognise ourselves as temporality, we have only to apperceive that temporality and in-temporality and inseparable, each being aspect of the other, one appearing in movement and the other static. They are twin modes of cognition, temporality accompanying and making all phenomenal existence possible and intemporality remaining noumenally ‘eternal’.
As ‘time,’ we are Intemporal and as ‘intemporality’, we are time. So we all can say, Intemporal, I am Time;  temporal, I am eternal.