The Truth-bearing Mind

Perhaps Aristotle is right when he says that the truth expressed by poetry is profounder than the truth expressed by history because it is a more general truth and more universally applicable.

When one considers the profound knowledge of human nature which we find for instance in Shakespeare’s plays or Tolstoi’s novels, we can see what it is that Aristotle means. If we had to choose between reading Shakespeare or Freud in order to obtain and understanding of human nature there are few of us who would choose Freud. Systematic philosophy or science is not necessarily a better way of describing ourselves and the world. It depends upon the quality of the vision of the scientist or the poet. If the view is one-sided or distorted, then however it is expressed it will be a limited view.

The mind is our instrument of experience and the quality of our vision depends on the state of our mind. The mind can be full of imagination and fantasy but it can also be truth-bearing and it is about the conditions which make it truth-bearing that we are concerned here.

The mind is sometimes thought of as a glorified computer, comprising an intellectual unit concerned with reasoning and logic, backed, as they say, by a memory-bank containing the records of past experience, and powered by a number of biological drives, such as hunger, the sex-urge, ambition, and the urge to dominate others, and so forth. If this were really an adequate picture of the mind, then the mind would be only programmable and not truth-bearing. The results of thinking would be, and could only be, simply to work out in practice the set of prejudices, beliefs, and expectations which had been programmed into memory by past experience.

To some extent one can say that the learning prescribed by totalitarian regimes is based on a belief in the power of propaganda to obscure and distort the truth, and to make people think exactly as the regime wishes them to think. Some scientists, for example, working in the 1960s, were influenced by certain half-truths derived from the ideas of the great physiologist, Pavlov. They thought of ‘higher nervous activity’, (which is how they regarded thinking) as simply an example of conditioning. But if thinking is only conditioned reflexes, the only kind of learning which would be possible would amount to no more than learning parrot-fashion, by rote with the mind believing what it is told by higher authority, and asking no awkward questions.

In fact, the really important learning in human experience is not this sort of learning at all, but what is called by the psychologists ‘insight learning’, where a new vision of things comes to the mind, through what used to be called intuition. This ‘insight learning’ has claims to be called the only really creative kind of thinking that there is. It produces something completely new in knowledge, which was not present in the elements which led up to it, but is not simply an imaginative creation with no relevance to reality. It is, indeed, a new insight into truth itself. Newton’s insight into the law of gravitation after seeing the apple fall, or Einstein’s theory of relativity, have changed the world for us; they have produced an entirely new view of truth. Of course, they have not really changed the world at all, but they have changed our world, because they have enlarged our understanding of the universe around us.

Countless people had seen apples fall before Newton did, and had learnt that they do so, and had come to expect that they would do so. This is simply a conditioned reflex. One learns to expect that when the apple loses its connection with the branch it falls to the earth underneath, but Newton had insight and realised why this happened.

What are the conditions, then, which make the mind truth-bearing, capable of new insight into reality, and not a mere parrot repeating second-hand information? The answer to this question is hinted at in a story from the Sufi tradition. It concerns a man and a parrot, and a remarkable point about the story is that in it, it is the man who behaves like a parrot, and the parrot who shows real insight.

A certain merchant had a beautiful parrot which he kept in a cage in his shop. One day he decided to visit India, the parrot’s original home, and when he talked to the parrot before going, the parrot said to him: ‘If you see my fellow parrots, greet them for me and tell them that I am thinking about them, and that I wish I were free to be with them.’ The merchant saw no harm in promising to do what he was asked, and he went off on his journey, and when he came to India he found a number of the same parrots living in the wild. So to keep his bargain he said to them: ‘I have a parrot just like you at home, and it asked me to greet you on its behalf, and to say that it wished it was free to be with you.’ And as soon as he had said this, one of the parrots there uttered a little cry, and fell down apparently dead.

Now the merchant was a kindly man, and he was sorry that he had said something in complete innocence that had caused such a tragedy. But the incident made an impression on him, and he remembered it. And when in due course he got back to his shop, he told his own parrot about it: ‘I gave your message to those parrots,’ he said, ‘that I saw in India, and to my dismay, one of them uttered a little cry, and fell down dead.’ As soon as he finished speaking, to his horror, his own parrot too gave a little cry, and fell down motionless on the bottom of its cage. He was terribly distressed, and started reproaching himself for being such a fool as to go on transmitting these apparently devastating messages, which seemed so innocent and harmless. And as he opened the cage-door to lift the body of the parrot out, it slipped from his hand and flew away into the trees.

The surprising thing is the intelligence shown by the parrot, and the stupidity shown by the man. For the parrot in India had clearly been indicating to the parrot in the cage how it might escape. But the man had no insight into what was happening. He could only repeat his message and the account of what happened, parrot-fashion. The caged bird had immediate insight into what the other parrot was doing, and the truth he had realised was, that by apparently dying, he could gain his own freedom.

This legend provides a perfect illustration of the difference between insight learning and learning without insight. But there is more to it than that, for it also illustrates the conditions under which the mind becomes truth-bearing. It is precisely when the mind loses itself in concentration on a topic to such an extent that the ego-consciousness in it is temporarily lost, that it becomes truth-bearing and gains the freedom of real insight.

The ego in the mind is the self-assertive parrot, demanding its rights, and making its voice heard, unasked, the whole time. It becomes a disturbance to all those around it, and is never quiet. We may be amused and delighted by its antics at first, but if we have to live with it, it becomes a great bore and a curse. Like a parrot it has a few stock phrases, which it repeats endlessly: ‘I want it.’ ‘I did it.’ ‘Look at me, aren’t I wonderful!’ And everybody else in time gets sick and tired of these phrases. We even get sick and tired of them ourselves. Unless this ego can be persuaded to abrogate its perch, and, so to speak, to die: that is to say, unless the voice of the ego can be silenced, and the assertion of narrow individualism can be given up, so that the ego consciousness is lost, then that state of mind called ‘ritambhara’, truth-bearing, cannot be achieved. This is one of the main objects for which the Yoga of Self-Knowledge is practised.

The mind is like an organ, on which we can play. It is ordinarily being played on by the spoilt child of the ego, but if the ego once abdicates, even for a short time, then that master-musician whom the sages call the real Self, Atman, who stands behind the mind waiting to produce the music of inspiration on it, will start to play. That transcendental element, the infinite and immortal essence in us all, uses this same instrument to produce inspired works, or the visions of truth of the philosophers and the mystics.

We have to find the method of allowing the mind to become the instrument of inspiration from the universal Self. This is not something which is going to happen by chance: we have to make conscious efforts to achieve this state, just as the parrot had to make conscious efforts to find out how to free itself.

It is a modern heresy that the individual should be subject to no coercion of any kind. There is a misunderstanding, based on Freudian psychology, which maintains that any so-called repression of the mental urges is bad, and that no force of any kind is ever justified. This is a deluded view of freedom. By all means let us avoid using force on others, and violence is always to be avoided, but we have to use some force on ourselves. We need to make efforts if we are to achieve anything; and we need the voluntary application of the force of will to the mind, if anything is to be made of it. If you tell an experienced gardener that he should just leave everything to nature, and that he shouldn’t coerce the plants by preventing them from growing where they want to, and forcing them to grow where he wants, just see what his response will be! The mind and personality need at least as much cultivation as a garden, if they are not to become a wild jungle of weeds and brambles. Therefore we cannot afford to adopt the policy of laisser faire with the mind.

If we are really looking for that which restricts our freedom, it is the state of our own personality which we have to examine, and the best object of protest for us, is the behaviour of our own recalcitrant lower mind. Then our protest will be effective, and really fruitful.

Good and evil are like living organisms dwelling in the field of our mind, and we nourish or starve them according to the value of our thoughts, words and deeds.

There are three things which we need if we are to transform the mind and render it in a fit state to become truth-bearing. These are: faith, endeavour and consciousness of the goal. It is by these three means that the ego-consciousness is silenced, and the mind becomes enlightened.

Faith is necessary because one must believe in the possibility of inspiration. No one who has read the accounts given by the scientists and the creative artists, can really have any doubt about the reality of inspiration as a phenomenon. In one of his writings the poet Shelley says: ‘The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within… Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results.’ And the composer Tchaikovsky, in the letters he wrote to his friend and patron, Frau von Meek, says: ‘Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly… If the soil is ready, that is to say, if the disposition for work is there, it takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches, leaves, and finally blossoms.’

One of the characteristics of inspiration is the sense of being possessed by something outside one’s own individuality, and used, so to speak, as a channel. The writer George Eliot said that in all she considered her best writing, there was a ‘not herself’ which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting.

Many other examples of the same feeling could be quoted. There is a feeling at the time of artistic inspiration, that something greater takes charge of the mind, and that the ego-consciousness is in abeyance. This is a fractional form of the inspiration, or enlightenment, which the spiritual paths lead to. In fact, what the artists, poets and musicians have experienced only at times of creative inspiration is the continuous experience of the illumined sages.

The way to realization, to insight, at whatever level, is getting to that state where the consciousness of the little personality is altogether lost. The very moment inspiration is there, the idea of ‘I know’ and ‘I do’ is absent. Nobody can be inspired and be conscious of the fact that he is inspired. When one becomes that consciousness itself, then is the point of inspiration reached. It has been said: ‘You cannot be inspired, and at the same time enjoy (as an actor or spectator). If you try to enjoy a thing, you are no longer inspired. Others will enjoy you, the world will enjoy you, when you are inspired, but you yourself will not be an enjoyer and one who is inspired at the same time. You will be no enjoyer—you will be better still—you will be joy Itself’.

Complete absorption is required for that insight which is conferred by inspiration, and this is the result only of prolonged meditation on subtle things. Even in the inspiration enjoyed by creative artists, long-continued concentration of the mind always precedes the inspiration. The artist or thinker must have learnt to still and focus the mind on the object of his quest, whatever it may be, over a long period. Then like the sky before rain the mind becomes saturated with this focused inquiry through that which the yogis call shravana, manana, and nididhyasana.

It is through hearing (shravana), through cogitation (manana), and then through one-pointed meditation (nididhyasana), that all other elements are eliminated from the mind, and then comes inspiration and enlightenment. Before the enlightenment of the World-Honoured Buddha, or when Jesus was taken into the wilderness in the account in the New Testament, their minds were presented with many temptations, temptations of power, of sovereignty, of promised adoration, and so forth. And they were all attempts by the forces of the lower mind, to re-establish the empirical ego-consciousness, to re-establish the parrot whose cries of: ‘I want it’, ‘I am doing it’, ‘How wonderful I am’, disturb the inner peace and prevent inspiration. Only if the one- pointedness of the mind is sufficient to overcome these distractions, can it avoid being dragged again into the realm of the individualistic efforts of the empirical personality. And only if it can do that will inspiration result. For as soon as this happens, as soon as it gets dragged down, then our higher Self is replaced with the ego.

The mind that we are concerned with, is not a special mind: it is the same mind which we all possess; the same mind which has been used by the artists, writers, and thinkers of all ages. This feeling of the mind being taken over by a higher power, together with the feeling of joy, is common to all true inspiration, although it is only a fractional form of it in the artistic experience—a glimpse, so to say, of the realm of true insight—‘to see in’—the vision of reality which pierces behind appearances to the truth which they hide. Practice of the non-dual teachings is a preparation for insight into the highest Truth which is called ‘jnana’, or enlightenment. Yoga is defined by Patanjali as the restraint, or inhibition, of the functions of the mind, through practice and non-attachment, with a view to know truth. Why restraint? Why inhibition? Because it is only when the parrot of the empirical ego has been silenced, and dislodged from its perch, that the mind becomes ritambhara—truth-bearing.

A.M.H.