Darkness At Noon-Part XII

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Ceaseless enquiry

The new has its own challenge. Ramana counsels that one should ceaselessly, without tiring, investigate, enquire into and find out what is this thing called the 'mind"? On such enquiry, it will be obvious when there are no thoughts, there is no mind. Do you not go to sleep soundly, each day? What happens then to the mind? Does it keep ticking away in its pestering course? No. It is totally free from thoughts. Where has the mind disappeared? When the mind is free from thoughts, is it not silent? Can we not infer and rightly at that, mind is only thoughts? When there are no thoughts, one"s mind as we regard it at present, is not existent.

The birth of thoughts and birth of the mind

It must take sometime to digest these words, which are totally unknown phrases in our vocabulary.
deeply, one would discover that rising and subsidence of thought is a daily occurrence, though it has gone wholly unnoticed by the individual for whom it relates. To prevent any conceptualisation, Ramana himself gives the required insight about the nature of the mind, by defining the mind for us. What is it? It has a center and periphery. The centre of the world of thoughts is the first person thrown on 'I". Ramana points out that even if the nominative case is not used, no sentence can be formed without it. Without the 'I", there is no 'You" or 'They".

The power of the mind is called attention, which irrigates the whole thought world. Among the hordes of embedded thoughts in the mind, only such thoughts to which attention of the thinker is bestored can arise. So, Ramana defines the mind as the 'I" for any thought can be existed only till, and to the extent to which this attention falls on it. In short, the thinker 'I" alone is the mind. The further understanding of the source of the mind itself is the next logical question, which remains for an in-depth study.

To be continued