I was shocked in the mid-seventies, to realise that I had grown up regularly using the word ‘mind,’ without any grounded experience of my mind. I was, I found, in need of a skillful means by which to make practical sense of the word. My mental health depended on it.
I’d suffered twenty years of formal education, and during my schooling no-one had suggested how I could investigate the experience toward which the word ‘mind’ pointed.
This realisation came at a time of crisis. Twenty-five years old, and I can’t find the mind. It seemed the most fundamental quest that could be; and yet, I was told by many people to just forget it, and get on with my life. Don’t ask impossible questions. Some people said there was no mind; that the word was just a convention. But, it was too late, for I couldn’t just stuff the issue down.
No-one in my culture had ever modelled the possibility of grounding words in experience. Even today, people are puzzled when I suggest that words are primarily for pointing back to experience; not for saying what ultimately ‘is’ or ‘is not.’
Indeed, the unquestioned widespread supposition still is that if words point, they point to ‘things’ things that somehow are there, in the way we perceive them. It is unusual to think that words are for pointing to experiences.
So, I’d use the word ‘mind,’ like anyone else, as though there was a something somewhere inside me. And, except for the vaguely unconscious convention that ‘mind’ is thoughts, there was otherwise no tutoring in exactly what kind of experience ‘mind’ might be.
Is it any wonder that I was depressed and suicidal by the time I left school. Our living awareness is the source of happiness, and I was as estranged as any Western teen from this source – if not more estranged than most.
So, how does one ground oneself, if one wants to know how the word ‘mind’ is being used? This matter of how we ground our knowing is very important if we are contemplatives; by which I mean people looking deeply into human life, to realise its potentials.
Once I discovered mindfulness and meditation, though, I had a way forward. Mindfulness of the body was my first way of grounding the search for knowledge and goodness in my own experience.
What emerges with this work is a growing capacity to become intimate with living process, as it actually occurs. We are able to access a fresh intelligence to ground this dialogue.
Dialogue? Maybe it will be useful to say that our intellects are dialoguing with reality, seeking to settle the matters of separation and division; and hence, to know completeness.