WE, THE CONDITIONED

The Pause Where Life Happens

Play back your last eye checkup at the optometrist’s office.

Imagine sitting with your forehead stuck to what looks like a dragonfly’s space visor while the doctor deftly flicked the lens and asked— “Which one is clearer, first or second?”

More than often this would sound like a trick question because the difference between the two is frustratingly subtle, yet this hairbreadth distinction is what determines how clearly we get to see things.

Some metaphysical truths are like that — it only takes a particular turn of phrase in a teaching or a nudge from a teacher to see things differently, yet that slightest shift is all we need to jolt our spiritual acuity from hazy to crystal-clear in a heartbeat.

Brain, Mind, And The Moment Of Understanding

Generally, we think of our mind as an aspect of the brain that holds our thoughts and memories. It’s the location where we process sensory and cognitive inputs like perceiving, sensing, imagining, feeling, thinking, and understanding to make sense of and interact with the world.

Hence our general understanding is that we know this world only through our minds.

But if we peel apart this conditioned perspective and gaze into the inner workings of what we think is the mind, we will notice that there is no such thing as a “mind” in our biological being.

There is no physical location for the mind. There is no superior entity called ‘the mind’ that processes our every experience.

Mind is simply an abstract concept that arises alongside every thought.

If a thought is a language-based narration of whatever the brain has processed at any given moment, then the mind is a pseudo-entity that attaches itself to every thought to claim, “‘I’ thought this thought”.

So,

• if the brain is the physical organ that processes information through the electrochemical interactions between neurons, and
• the mind, is just the reporter of the brain’s neural firings in the form of words and images, then —

where in our being does the actual understanding, the magic of wisdom, intuition, and creative insights happen?

Consider the teachings of Ruper Spira, a nonduality teacher particularly skilled at separating the fabric of our knowing fiber by fiber with his spot-on analogies to unravel this enigma —

“Imagine someone tells us a joke. We hear the punch line, there is a short delay, we get the joke and we laugh. What is actually happening? When do we actually understand the joke? First we hear the joke and think about it; that is a thought in the mind. Then there is the understanding of the joke, and finally laughter.

The understanding of the joke takes place, by definition, after the end of the joke and before the laughter. If we look closely at this moment of understanding, it is a timeless, non-objective moment. The line of thinking about the joke has come to an end and the formulation of the understanding, which is also a line of thinking, has not yet begun. In that timeless, non-objective moment, what we call understanding takes place.

In fact, understanding always takes place outside the mind. A line of questioning or reasoning may precede it and a line of thought may formulate it, but in between, when the mind is not present, understanding takes place.”

And the story is no different when we consider it entirely from a scientific perspective either —

For instance, what happens in the brain from the time we see a red rose to the time we ‘know’ it’s a red rose?

While the exact mechanisms are not fully understood, neuroscientists propose several key concepts to explain how electrical impulses in the brain give rise to mental representations —

• Light from the red rose enters our eyes, and the image of the red rose is projected onto the retina.
• The visual information is then processed by the neural circuits in the retina and transmitted to the brain through the optic nerve, where it identifies the object as a red rose based on its visual characteristics.
• The brain activates conceptual knowledge related to a red rose, including information about its taste, texture, and typical uses.
• The brain then engages in language processing where the neural circuits associated with language production and comprehension become active.
• The conceptual knowledge and the visual representation of the red rose lead to the activation of the word “red rose” in the brain. This involves the retrieval of linguistic information associated with the object.
• The fully processed information, including visual perception, conceptual knowledge, and linguistic association, reaches the level of conscious awareness. We then become consciously aware that the object we’re looking at is called a “red rose.”

Understanding Happens Before Our Conscious Knowing

Understanding cannot happen in the mind, because the mind is not real.

There’s no way to verify if understanding happens in the brain either because we are not privy to the moment it organically happens.

We may presume that we are doing the “thinking” to interact with the world and understand it. But a simple observation of our personal experience proves that our intellectual “knowing” — the thing that our pseudo-mind takes credit for — happens spontaneously beyond our conscious awareness.

In truth, understanding happens in the briefest pause before “I know”.

Every moment, life is taking shape in the pause before “I know”.

I do not presume to know the space where this pause happens, but I know for a fact, that it is most certainly not in ‘the mind’.

“You have never “done” anything. Because the mind has conceived itself to be an individual it conceives itself as the “thinker” and also the “actor” or “doer.” Yet it is not anyone.

The mind is not a thing or an entity but a process, the thinking process. It is simply a process that is happening automatically, in the same way the heart is beating automatically.”

— Galen Sharpe

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.