The mind is outside the brain - the speaker is saying, the scientists are not saying that. The speaker says the brain is one thing, and mind is something entirely different. The brain with all its content, with its struggles, with its pain, anxieties, can never know, understand the beauty of love. Love is limitless. (Bombay Question & Answer Meeting 9th February 1984)
And
the brain is limited although it has got infinite capacity because in the technological world look what they are doing. And psychologically, subjectively, we are very limited. That’s part of the brain. The mind is something entirely different. The mind is outside the brain.… Like love is not within the brain. It is outside…. There is silence only when there is freedom from all the things that man has accumulated. In that silence there is an enormous sense of vastness and immensity, you don’t ask any questions any more.… Then that creation is, if we can use that word, ‘nothing’. Nothing means not a thing. A thing in Latin and so on is thought. When there is no [thought] - when there is absolute silence of thought then there is totally a different dimension. (Brockwood Park 4th Public Talk 2nd September 1984)
And
We are asking each other: is there something which we will call the mind for the moment, we may change the word, is there a mind which is not the brain?… Can the brain ever understand the universe? It can say Venus is so much gas, so much etcetera, etcetera, but the description, the quality, the taste of it is not Venus, the beauty of it, the extraordinary quietness of it. And can our brain, to understand all that immensity be quiet? - not everlastingly chattering, chattering, chattering. Can that brain become extraordinarily simple and therefore extraordinarily subtle? And if that brain is capable of that subtleness, that immense sense of great simplicity… then perhaps that mind which is not the brain can communicate to it. (Brockwood Park 4th Public Talk 1st September 1985)
Would that be similar to the idea of the brain as an ‘instrument’ resonating or vibrating with a ‘finer’ energy say , to the extent of its receptability? And a kind of ‘static-free’ state is necessary for reception?
Two more extracts about the relationship between the universe and the mind specifically:
K: What is the relationship of that mind to the universe?
DB: To the universe of matter?
K: To the whole universe: matter, trees, nature, man, the heavens.
DB: That is an interesting question.
K: The universe is in order; whether it is destructive or constructive, it is still order…. The eruption of a volcano is order.
DB: It is order of the whole universe.
K: Quite. Now, in the universe there is order, and this mind which is still is completely in order.
DB: The deep mind, the absolute.
K: The absolute mind. So is this mind the universe?
DB: In what sense is that the universe? We have to understand what it means to say that, you see.
K: It means is there a division, or a barrier, between this absolute mind and the universe? Or are both the same?
DB: Both are the same.
K: That is what I want to get at…. Now I say, are the universe and the mind that has emptied itself … are they one?
DB: Are they one?
K: They are not separate; they are one… So we have come to a point that there is this universal mind, and the human mind can be of that when there is freedom. (September 1980 - The Ending of Time, The Mind in the Universe)
And
K: What is the mind - may I go into that? - what is the mind and what is the brain? …. the brain has extraordinary capacity, as shown in the technological world. I mean, what they are doing is incredible. And in the other direction, in the psychological realm, it hasn’t moved at all, perhaps a centimetre, less than a centimetre. And because it has not moved, it has not flowered, it is conditioned, it is limited. And the mind is not limited.
PJ: When you talk of mind, you speak of what?
K: This is difficult. I’ll go… The whole… the mind of the universe, the mind of the nature - you follow? - everything that has been created is the movement of the mind.
PJ: Everything that has been created.
K: And is…
PJ: And is in the process of creating.
K: All this. Therefore there is no limit to creation….
PJ: The brain and the mind. That the brain being limited and not having moved can only move within its own circle. The mind being the very source of creation has no limits.
K: Yes, that’s right…. And we are saying that as long as that brain is conditioned it can never understand the immensity of the nature of the mind. If you see, the responsibility then is to uncondition the brain, uncondition the limitation which thought has imposed upon it…. [Therefore] I say the brain which is limited cannot understand what the mind is. It can only apprehend, aware of it when there is no conditioning…. Then I am saying the brain is the mind, when it is totally free. (Rishi Valley, 18th December, 1982)
Right. I didn’t mean his “last words” literally, but perhaps the most important words he spoke before his last talk in India, which I quit watching after he harangued that poor guy sitting close to the dais.
K’s hearing had deteriorated a great deal by that time, and he often misheard what people said, and so responded to what he thought he had heard (sometimes with humorous results). But in this case it didn’t go well for the rather sheepish looking chap near the dais, who seemed quite innocent about what was transpiring!
But one oughtn’t judge too harshly. K was already succumbing to the pancreatic cancer that would cause his death only a couple of months later, and he was quite weak and haggard in that last talk (which partially mitigates his hectoring tone).
The other reason I think explains his attitude (although this is my own speculation) was his particular relationship to the Indian audience. K’s talks in India always feel a bit more personal to me, and he tended to berate the Indians in particular, in the manner of an anxious father or mother who sees his/her children making all the wrong decisions. As this was his last talk, he seems to have been especially anxious to make his teaching clear and emphatic to all his Indian friends and the public who were in attendance. This doesn’t excuse his momentary outburst, but it helps to put it in context (for me at least).
There are two things I remember from that talk:
When the computer and genetic engineering meet - which they are inevitably going to do - where are you? What is the human mind then?
His last words were about creation:
What is creation? It has nothing to do with invention. So what is creation, the origin, the beginning? What is life? Tell me what you think of it. What is life? Not going to the office and all the rest of it, sex and children, or no children but sex and so on and so on and so on. What is life? What gives life to that blade of grass in the cement? What is life in us? … I can kill that bird; there is another bird. I can’t kill all birds; there are too many of them in the world. So, we are enquiring into what makes a bird. What is creation behind all this? … No description can ever describe the origin. The origin is nameless; the origin is absolutely quiet, it’s not whirring about making noise. Creation is something that is most holy, that’s the most sacred thing in life, and if you have made a mess of your life, change it. Change it today, not tomorrow. If you are uncertain, find out why and be certain. If your thinking is not straight, think straight, logically. Unless all that is prepared, all that is settled, you can’t enter into this world, into the world of creation.
In his discussions with Bohm K went back and forth about whether to use the term “universal mind”. Sometimes he used it, but other times he felt that this phrase had been used by other people with whom he disagreed. In the latter case K stuck to the rather inelegant expression “the mind that is not made by man” (to distinguish it from the man-made mind, or brain).
What I am really pointing at is the ideas we have when we use words like “mind” (especially in the concept of “universal mind”) and even with words like “finer” (when used with energy) - we are building up an image as usual - and are always in serious, practically obligatory danger of mistaking our images for actual truth - which is our habitual psychological problem.
So I am proposing what seems to be a less misleading image of : the whole universe manifesting mind more efficiently through the non-deluded brain (thus fulfilling our potential)
Unless I’ve misunderstood, there seems to be a general acceptance of the existence of the ‘universal mind’ here. I’m still grappling with whether it’s real or a spiritual fairy tale. And I don’t know if it’s possible to know for sure. It might be a question of intuition or even belief.
Yes - but I think my reformulation is more accurate
If you throw out everything idiosyncratic about the various religions, and keep only what is common to them all (or at least their mystical and contemplative expressions), a quiet brain seems to be the most widely agreed upon element.
One finds this in Taoism, in Buddhism, in Greek Orphism, in Christian mysticism, in Sufism, in the Upanishads. It’s a pretty universal data point.
This may be true for some of us, but I don’t think macdougdoug has said he is on board with it. He says (as far as I understand what he has written) that he is more comfortable with talking about the universe manifesting more clearly, more “efficiently”, through a quiet brain.
There is no belief involved in that, as far as I can see.
Yes ~ and I’d go as far as to say that my idea (and most anyone else’s) of what we are pointing at when we say “universal mind” is a fairy tale ~ so I wonder if it is in any way true or helpful to believe in its existence
Having a mind that can look deeply and unflinchingly at what-is seems like a must for having a mystical experience. Would this mind have to be quiet? Maybe. But maybe there are extraverted and introverted mystical experiences, and maybe the extraverted kind would benefit from a mind teeming with energy and movement?
You ‘believe’ in your existence, K says you don’t exist. If it’s so that ‘you’ don’t exist then that belief is a “fairy tale”. So forget about a ‘universal mind’, what we are about here is to see , for humanity’s sake if a radical transformation in our self is possible. That means to follow each thought as it arises trying not to miss a one. And if you do miss a one, not to fret but to simply pick it up again.
Because that’s what I thought we both meant by ‘quiet mind.’ Still, unmoving. Low kinetic energy, the energy of movement. Is that not what we (you) mean by quiet mind?
- yes, I remember that incident. Poor chap.