What is the mind? (Mind, yoga, karma and suffering)

If you transcend the mind, you transcend everything in one stroke.
Mind is karma. If you transcend the mind, you transcend the karmic bondage altogether. 

What is the mind? If I don't know what part of me is the "mind" how do I transcend it?
When does one acquire a mind? Is it at birth? Does it come along with the so-called "eternal" soul?
Do we all start with the same mind?

Also what do we mean when we say "experience life"? What is life? Is there a rule to live rightly? What is one's life like? What should it be like?

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The whole process of yoga is to transcend the limitations of the mind. As long as you are in the mind, you are ruled by the past, because mind is just an accumulation of the past. If you are looking at life only through the mind, then you will make your future just like the past, nothing more, nothing less. Isn’t the world enough proof of that? It does not matter what opportunities come our way through science, technology and many other things, aren’t we repeating the same historical scenes again and again?

The past is carried only in your mind. Only because your mind is active, past exists. Suppose all your mind ceases right now, is your past here? There is no past here, only present. The reality is only present, but past exists through our minds. Or in other words, mind is karma. If you transcend the mind, you transcend the karmic bondage altogether. If you want to solve them one by one, it may take a million years. In the process of solving, you are also building new stock of karma.

The whole effort of spiritual sciences has always been how to transcend the mind, how to look at life beyond the limitations of the mind. 

But Patanjali nailed it this way – “To rise above the modifications of your mind, when you cease your mind, when you cease to be a part of your mind, that is yoga.” All the influences of the world are entering you only through the instrument of the mind. If you can rise beyond the influence of your mind in full awareness, then you are naturally one with everything. The separation – you and me, time and space – has come only because of the mind. It is a bondage of the mind. If you drop the mind, you have dropped time and space. There is no such thing as this and that. There is no such thing as here and there. There is no such thing as now and then. Everything is here and now.

If you rise above all the modifications and manifestations of the mind, then you can play with the mind whichever way you want. You can use your mind with devastating impact in your life, but if you are in it, you will never realize the nature of the mind.

The mind is essentially talking about a certain bank of memory. It is this complex web of memory which gives you a certain character. This memory is being gathered every moment of your life, in wakefulness and sleep. You are unconscious of most of the memory that you gather because it is being gathered in such heavy quantities. So many things that you do so easily, something as simple as walking on two legs for example, is possible not just because of your bone and muscle, but because of the memory that you carry. The body remembers how to walk. If you forget, you cannot walk.

Karmic Impressions

When we say memory, people tend to think of the mind, but the body has much, much more memory than the mind. Your great, great, great-grandfather’s nose is sitting on your face because something inside your body remembers. Your body still remembers how someone was a million years ago and it is still acting that out. So the memory of the body is way bigger than the memory of the mind. This memory is what we refer to as karmic impressions. There was a time when in India, society was trying to manage your karmic impressions. It is for this purpose that jatis, gotras and other things were started. But that has all gone now. So you have to manage it within yourself.
What kind of thoughts you have, on the conscious level, is just the memory that you have gathered on the conscious level in this piece of life, from your birth to now. This conscious memory is called prarabdha. But what kind of emotions these thoughts generate within you is coming largely from an unconscious process of memory. That memory is way bigger than the conscious memory and is called sanchita. Sanchita means the unconscious accumulation of karmic mass, which keeps on acting in its own way. It is not active in terms of manifesting itself but it is active in terms of influencing you in a million different ways. Does that mean you are all fixed and there is nothing you can change? No. It is only because of this basis that you exist. What you want to make out of yourself is still you. Destiny is not a done thing. Destiny is like the skeletal system of your body. It decides your stature but it doesn’t decide everything. How much you put onto this skeletal system is upto you.

A Question of Perspective

Instead of looking at what kind of thoughts or emotions you are getting, just see that in the larger perspective of life you are a tiny speck of dust. In this cosmos, our galaxy is a small happening. In the Milky Way, this Solar System is a speck. In that tiny speck, planet Earth is a super-tiny speck. In that, your city is a micro-tiny speck. In that speck, you are a big man! People have lost perspective of who and what they are. A spiritual process means, even if you cannot experientially see, at least to intellectually understand your place in this existence. This is the simplest thing to get. If you get this much, a new possibility is open – you will walk differently, sit differently, breathe differently and experience life differently.

What this tiny speck thinks and feels is not important. But for most people, what they think and feel is more important than the fabulous cosmic dance that is happening. The whole cosmos is going on phenomenally well today, but just one thought can bother you and put you in the dumps. If you just see “What I think and feel is not so important,” if you bring this distance between you and your thought and emotion, they will become a conscious process. Once your thought and emotion become a conscious process, you are free from the karmic process in many ways. Right now, both your thought and your emotion are a compulsive process. Once it is a conscious process, suddenly you are empowered in such a way that people think you are super human. This is not superhuman, it is just being human.

Suffering is happening essentially because most human beings have lost perspective as to what this life is about. Their psychological process has become far larger than the existential process, or to put it bluntly, you’ve made your petty creation far more important than the Creator’s creation. That is the fundamental source of all suffering. We have missed the complete sense of what it means to be alive here. A thought in your head or an emotion within you determines the nature of your experience right now. The whole creation is happening wonderfully well but just one thought or emotion can destroy everything. And your thought and emotion may have nothing to do even with the limited reality of your life.

What you call as “my mind” is not yours actually. You don’t have a mind of your own. Please look at it carefully. What you call as “my mind” is just society’s garbage bin. Anyone and everyone who passes by you stuffs something into your head. You really have no choice about whom to receive from and whom not to receive from. If you say, “I don’t like this person,” you will receive a lot more from that person than anyone else. You really don’t have a choice. If you know how to process and use it, this garbage is useful. This accumulation of impressions and information that you have gathered is only useful for survival in the world. It has got nothing to do with who you are.


When we talk about a spiritual process, we are talking about shifting from psychological to existential. Life is about the creation that is here, knowing it absolutely and experiencing it the way it is; not distorting it the way you want. If you want to move into existential reality, to put it very simply, you just have to see that what you think is not important, what you feel is not important. What you think has nothing to do with reality. It has no great relevance to life. It is just chattering away with nonsense that you have gathered from somewhere else. If you think it is important, you will never look beyond that. Your attention naturally flows in the direction of whatever you hold as important. If your thought and your emotion is important, naturally your whole attention will be right there. But that is a psychological reality. That has nothing to do with the existential.
Suffering is not showered upon us, it is manufactured. And the manufacturing unit is in your mind. It is time to shut down the manufacturing unit.