Whole Mind

Can we present our whole mind to every situation we face? Can we communicate with the entirety of our being involved in the communication? Typically we are not able to. May be once in a while like when we are consoling someone who has lost a near and dear one. But, otherwise, almost never. This is not merely a question of attention / concentration, which is also lacking many times.

In most situations, a huge part of our mind is lost in the sense of "me". Every situation we are in is evaluated based on what is in it for me - sometimes consciously and many times very subtly. Otherwise, neither would we react with lightning speed to a perceived insult nor would we constantly tell stuff about us that would portray us in good light. The sense of "me" in us is like the proverbial dragon that sleeps with one eye open. It is seemingly absent, but scratch the surface a little and you can come face to face with it in all its beastliness. Maintaining this sense of "me" takes up most of our mental resources. Most people cannot involve themselves in a simple debate with purely the perspective of truth. The sense of "me" jumps in and the individual is then all out at defending their position instead of enquiring into the truth. In some people, the sense of "me" gets them to wear different masks at different times and consequently others find it very hard to talk to this person. Children and saints are praised in this regard as they generally dont have this sense of "me" and hence dont have a mask. They are then able to express what they feel at any point without fear or desire. Valluvar expresses this beautifully in the following verse:

உள்ளத்தால் பொய்யாது ஒழுகின் உலகத்தார்

உள்ளத்து ளெல்லாம் உளன்

One who expresses hirself without any falseness from within

always resides in the hearts of people

With a big percentage of our mind devoted to the sense of "me", how can we present the entirety of our being to the situation at hand?

Then, comes the part of us that is constantly looking for past patterns in order to provide quick responses based on memory - a remnant of our evolutionary path. Brains of most species use this capability to quickly sense danger and to a lesser extent to quickly sense an opportunity. The remnant of this is still active in us and plays a big part in our psychological affairs also. We rarely pause to treat the situation afresh each time. This requires tremendous awareness to constantly watch the patterns we fall into and pull us out of such stimulus-response mode. This is not to deny the use of past knowledge but to point out how we become slaves to past knowledge. Observe how we constantly look at others through the images we have of them. If we have a fight with someone today, we do not have the freedom to give them a warm hug tomorrow morning. While there is only the memory of fight the next day, our minds cannot let go of it. While we brand someone whose behavior today is affected by his encounter with a tiger last week as insane, we happily let our day to day interactions be colored by our memory. There really is no difference between fearing the tiger we saw last week and not being warm with someone whom we had a fight sometime in the past. Patanjali expresses this beautifully in this sutra

smṛti-pariśuddhau svarūpa-śūnyevārtha-mātra-nirbhāsā nirvitarkā

When memory is cleansed, objects (living / non-living) cease to be colored by memory and only their essential nature shines forth

Jiddu Krishnamurthi speaks constantly about the primacy of cleaning memory, of dropping the past, of psychologically cleansing oneself of accumulated memory in order to truly taste freedom. This stimulus-response behavior that makes us slaves of memory takes away another huge chunk of our mind.

Finally, comes the inability to pay attention. Attention spans for most people is hopelessly small that within a small time, multiple thought threads are spawned in our head while we are talking. We start thinking about random things instead of paying attention to the job at hand. If the conversation is really stimulating, which does happen rarely, the arbitrary thoughts are postponed for sometime. Even such conversations are colored by the previously mentioned issues. Inability to pay attention and the consequential auto-thinking takes away another chunk from our mind.

These three issues could also be viewed as one single issue but looking at it as three different problems provides a good perspective on the problem of the constantly moving mind. When all such disturbances in the mind are resolved, we are able to present our whole mind to the task at hand. Until then, only a tiny bit of our being is actually involved in the job at hand. Different philosophies point to this in different ways - whole mind says Zen, stilled mind says Yoga. The labels do not matter, but the truth being pointed to by the label matters.