What is mind?

Short answer: mind is just another four-letter word.

Long answer: mind is a body that thinks it is not a body but something separate from it.  Thus, a mind is a deluded body.  Once again: here you are, a “mind,” thinking that you are “in” a “body,” but you aren’t “in” a body.  You are a body, a body thinking that you are a mind, i.e. a body that does not know oneself, a body that thinks it isn’t what it is but something else.  But you aren’t anything else.  You are this body.  That’s all.  I hope it’s enough since there isn’t anything else.

Sure, you can call this “mind” a subtle body, or a body-within-a-body, or an inner body, but a body is still a body even if it’s in the form of a nesting doll set.  You are one, not two, even if you use two words (body and mind) to describe this two-dimensional oneness of yours.

I know, I know there is nothing subtle about this.  Western mind recoils from this kind of Eastern reductionism.  Yet there is some existentially sobering clarity to this.

Here’s more on the topic: Mind is a Myth by U.G. Krishnamurti, perhaps, one of the most confusing and most dangerous (meaning “mind-opening,” “paradigm-shifting”) books that I’ve come across.  Keep in “mind,” this is a different Krishnamurti, this is U.G., not Jiddu.

Woman thinking photo available from Shutterstock.

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    Last reviewed: 11 Apr 2012