WE, THE CONDITIONED

The Ever-Present Observer

If Mind Is An Illusion And Thoughts Are Transient, What Is Left In Our Experience That’s True And Everlasting?

As wise men of the past had observed, the absence of evidence —

“I have not found any beaming saucers or flattened foliage in my backyard”

can be considered as evidence of absence —

“Therefore, no aliens live in my backyard”

only until the moment a green man slow-walks from behind a shrub —

“Holy crap! There is an alien living in my backyard!”

The absence of evidence will remain as evidence of absence only until a new perspective challenges the existing assumption.

How a Split-Second Silence Turned My Perspective of Reality Upside Down

Until recently, I too was of the assumption that the mind is a subjective phenomenon that reveals itself in human faculties like thinking, remembering, perceiving, reasoning, and understanding.

I thought it was a mental reservoir for our memories and perceptions, the behavioral software to the neural hardware, the seat of our identity and intelligence that serves as the basis for all our human interactions.

Yet when I was, quite suddenly and spontaneously, thrust into a great Silence — the kind that enlightened yogis talk about, the profound state of inner stillness that connects with the essence of existence itself —I “saw” myself briefly exist in a state of “no thoughts”, hence “no mind”.

By all conditioned definitions, “no mind” means I should’ve been unconscious or had fallen into a narcoleptic deep sleep, because if I’m awake and observing, I cannot not be without any thoughts, aka, a mind.

Yet in that extraordinary moment of absolute Silence, “I” existed without a mind.

I was completely present and watching everything 360-degree, top-down, around-and-surround, but all of that without any language, words, or images to narrate what was being observed.

I was simply “Aware”.

We Can Be Without A Mind

In all honesty, I am not enlightened and I haven’t been able to recreate that moment of stillness again. (It’s not something that can be recreated at will either.) But that brief glimpse proved that no mind is a very real state.

It is what the nonduality folks refer to as Awareness /Higher Consciousness /Enlightenment /Nirvana /Self-Realization.

It’s the place where the brain dips in to process the neural firings before revealing its findings to our conscious awareness.

This is the magical wellspring from where inspiration, creativity, and light-bulb moments come forth as if the creative process is a discovery rather than a deliberate pursuit.

“My brain is only a receiver in the universe, there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I haven’t penetrated the secrets of this core, but I know that it exists.”

— Nikola Tesla

What Is This Magical State Called Awareness?

According to the revered Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi, Awareness is the fundamental “I AM” consciousness.

This is the primary sense of existence that underlies all experiences — the silent, unchanging presence that exists beyond the realm of thoughts and emotions.

True Awareness is not a product of the mind; it is the unchanging background against which the mind and its activities unfold.

In simple terms —

When you think, “I was upset yesterday” but “I’m calmer today”, you identify yourself as “upset” and “calm”. Yet those emotions changed while something in you remained constant that was witnessing both these emotions from afar to point them out as “upset” or “calm”. What is That?

How Do We Experience Awareness?

In the window of my experience during which I witnessed the “Awareness”, my mind paused long enough for the Aware state that is ever-present to show itself naturally.

But in normal scenarios, this Awareness is not allowed the chance to show, because the mind keeps itself front and center, continuous and consistent.

Experiencing Awareness doesn’t require any special doing, rather it takes an undoing — a stepping back from the conditionings of the thinking mind and disengaging from the habitual chatter of thoughts.

It takes moving from being absorbed in the content of experience (objects) to recognizing the one who is aware of those experiences (subject).

Not This, Not That

A simple method is the self-inquiry process of Neti-Neti, a Sanskrit expression that means “neither this, nor that”. It involves asking one question — “Who am I?” over and over, not to find an answer but to lead us deeper into the question, away from the object toward the subject.

“Who are you?”

“I am _______.”

“That’s your name. Who are you?”

“I am a female/mother/corporate mule/student/seeker/etc.”

“That’s your job/duties/fancy titles. Who are you?”

“I’m pure consciousness, the divine cosmic soul of the boundless universe, the sacred manifestation of the eternal transcendental Self.”

“That is your conditioned ego masquerading as a humble seeker spewing bloated nonsense. None of this is in your direct experience yet. So, who are you?”

And so we go deeper and deeper into the question, until there is nobody left to ask, no more of the question lingers, but only a profound Silence.

“The silence that arises when the mind is no longer seeking or resisting is pregnant with the potential for deep realization.”

-Adyashanthi

We, the conditioned, is an ongoing exploration of the self from the bedrock up. It involves taking a telescopic view of the world — politics, people, et al., along with a microscopic view of the self — mind, thoughts, and perception. It’s about hacking away the fluff around spirituality, seeing reality for what it really is through the lens of philosophy, and learning what we really are beneath all that we think we are.