September 22, 2023
When the mind considers something as pleasure, that assessment itself creates the climate for the impression, the samskara. Is it possible to go through life without the mind regarding experiences as pleasant and unpleasant? Life has its own procession of experiences, and the senses act and react on those objects and experiences in a natural way.
There is a piece of chocolate on your tongue; naturally there is salivation, the chocolate is dissolved and it goes in. If you put a small piece of very hot curry or potato on the tongue, it quickly comes out. In these two experiences there is no judgement, no assessment; the mind, or thought, comes in later. Very often this 'later' is not half an hour later, but one five hundredth of a second later, and therefore we think that the thought arises immediately.
If you observe something very keenly, you'll see that between the experience and the recognition of this experience there is a period, one brief moment, of darkness, of ignorance, of unawareness. Out of that unawareness arises 'This is pleasant', or 'This is not pleasant, I hate it.' If that period of ignorance or unawareness was not there, there would not be the consequence of the recognition of pleasure and pain. Therefore, only when this insight is constantly alive and awake is discipline possible. Then life becomes natural 'as God willed it'.
You and I live exactly as God wills we should live, which means that the ego or mind does not decide what I should do or I should not do.The mind is nothing else than all these samskaras. When all these 'scars' which have been imposed upon the intelligence are removed, what is, is the original stuff - intelligence, God. When on that intelligence, as it were, these samskaras get formed, then what you call mind arises. The mind is really not completely and totally different from this intelligence or insight; this inner intelligence and the samskaras which form the mind, are all one substance.When the content of the craving is inquired into, it is seen that it is non-different from the mind, the intelligence. This craving for experience, the recognition of an experience as pleasure, arises as a result of ignorance. If that ignorance is avoided in the first place and one is awake inwardly, neither the recognition of something as pleasure, nor its subsequent samskara and the craving would arise.