The Mind...

Think and meditate about the mind, and how it involves you in all kinds of
schemes and desires. Try to watch how the mind works, and how thoughts arise.
For a while become an observer of your mind and its thoughts. Follow the way
they arise, move and make way to other thoughts. Pay attention how they entice
you to think them.

Now you have done something you may have never done before. You have thought
about your thoughts, you have viewed the mind from the outside, as if you were
watching someone else's mind. Without realizing it, you have watched the mind as
if you were separate from it. Wow! Think about it!

Now I ask you, who are you, the mind and its thoughts, or the one watching the
mind? If you have followed the above advice, then you have made a great
discovery: You are not the mind. You are the one who is watching it.

It is possible to develop the habit of looking at the mind as if from the
outside, as if it is not yours. Try not to be involved in the thoughts and
desires that arise, and at least in theory, separate yourself from the mind.
Just convince yourself that it is not you. Do it often, until you really start
to see that you are separate from the mind, which is some kind of a power you
can use.

Each day devote some time watching how thoughts enter your mind. Don't try to
think, just follow their movement dispassionately. Watch how they come, try to
claim your attention, grow, then wither, and new thoughts arise.

By experience you will come to appreciate how great and useful is this way of
treating the mind. If your concentration ability is strong enough, it will be
easier and faster to reach the conclusion that you are not the mind.

If you treat your thoughts with indifference, you will experience inner silence.
In this silence there is happiness, power, content and the certainty that
nothing can harm or disturb you anymore. By "you", I do not mean your body, I
mean you, your consciousness that at this moment of inner silence you consider
as yourself. You now know without the slightest doubt that you are not your
thoughts or mind, but something bigger and vaster.

A different kind of Consciousness......
When there are no thoughts, there is no vacuum. There is a feeling of
beginning-less and endless consciousness and awareness. Not awareness of
something, but just awareness. You can get some idea of what I mean, if you
remember how you felt in a completely dark and quiet room. You could see and
hear nothing, yet you were conscious. It was some sort of lack of sensory
perception, yet you had full consciousness. Not consciousness of something, but
just awareness of yourself. It is the same here, but vaster.

It is not the body that enters a peculiar and different state. It is neither the
mind, because it is silent. At this moment there are no concepts or thoughts in
the mind. As there are no thoughts, this consciousness cannot be an illusion, as
it is the mind that creates illusion, and it is not present now.

This consciousness is not something new. It is not something strange, peculiar,
unnatural or supernatural. It the substratum of our life, but we never pay it
attention. We let the mind rule and create our life. You may not accept it, but
what we call life, is actually a dream, a sort of a movie weaved by the mind. We
never stop to think and examine the mind and its thoughts. We have got
accustomed to live in the mind, rely on it, and accept whatever it presents us.

This Consciousness you are reading about is real, eternal, one and indivisible.
Due to ignorance and the way the mind works, we consider ourselves as a separate
organism with body and thoughts.

From the standpoint of the Indian philosophy Advaita-Vedanta all is
illusion-Maya. It is only the One great Universal Consciousness that exists.
While sleeping and dreaming, we see a world. This life we call awakening is also
a dream, but a longer one. When we stop our thoughts and quieten the mind, we
find out who we are and always were. When the coverings and sheets of the mind
are removed, we see reality as it really is..........Remez Sasson