Falling Freely

 Mana eva manusyanam karanam bandha moksayoh

As the mind, so the person; bondage or liberation are in your own mind.

Sanskrit saying found in Satchinanda's translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, page 5.

Or as Michael Singer would say:

If you stare at your mind, your mind becomes a prison.

Michael Singer

Most of us are staring at our minds. We are so focused on the noisy mind as it reacts to everything that unfolds in front of us, clinging and struggling, that it imprisons us.  It imprisons the consciousness that we are by pulling us into its never ending dramas, its preferences, its dislikes. When all of our attention goes there it limits  what we observe and expereince. It traps us.

Alan Watts once gave  the analogy of our journey through life as being like this:  When we are born we are pushed off a precipice and we fall to our deaths.  At the same time a large boulder is also pushed off. We spend our life falling as the  boulder falls with us. Instead of enjoying this amazing ride we spend our time terrified and worried. We cling to the boulder with all our might which increases tension and struggle...yet we are so afraid to let go.  We don't realize that letting go will make the inevitable  journey downward pleasant and relaxed, peaceful, and fun. Our struggle is not in the falling but in the clinging to this boulder. The boulder could be the mind or the mental modifications as Patanjali referred to them.

The thing is...with this clinging and preferring, stuffing and storing we tend to do...we create samskaras that lead to a further need to cling and prefer, to stuff and to store. This becomes so distracting and our consciousness gets pulled in to this drama and eventually trapped by it. Each samskara, Singer says, is like a bar in our prison cell.

The thing is it doesn't have to be that way.  We cannot change the fact that we are all falling to our physical deaths in this very temporal world. We cannot change the reality of the things that happened. The world will, afterall, unfold the way it unfolds. This is Life's reality, and has little to do with what this falling little me wants. The mind we cling to with its likes and dislikes, its fears and expectations becomes a prison when we focus like this. If we were, however, to use the mind to contemplate something bigger than us and our puny little fall...than it can actually liberate us. If we use the mind to focus on and explore consciousness rather than the boulder, we can be free.

Spending our time falling emptying and purifying the mind and then using it for higher purposes us can certainly set us free. 

The purified mind is no different than the Self.

RamaKrishna

All is well.

Allan Watts: not sure where or when I heard this

Michael A. Singer/ Sounds True/ Temple of the Universe (October, 2024) The Mind: Prison or Liberator. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpU1N80-35w&list=PLyOuAoSmZkKoESr2acNWwhznusbBkKXsT&index=3

Swami Satchidananda (2012) The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Integral Yoga Publications.