Recognition

Dhāraṇā 69 · No mind within

Contemplate: 'within me there is no mind, no inner instrument at all' — and in the absence of the thought-maker, thoughts have nowhere to stand.

Every struggle with thinking assumes there is a thinker to discipline — a mind inside that must be stilled, purified, brought to heel. This dhāraṇā dissolves the struggle by contesting the assumption: contemplate that the inner apparatus is simply not there.

The method

The contemplation is given as a sentence to be held: cittādy-antaḥkṛtir nāsti mama antar — 'within me there is no citta, no inner instrument at all.' The ādi sweeps in the whole traditional apparatus: mind, intellect, the sense of I-making — the entire inner machinery that is supposed to sit between awareness and the world, manufacturing thoughts. The practice is to entertain, seriously and repeatedly, the possibility that this machinery is a rumour. Look inward for the mind — not for thoughts, which certainly occur, but for the organ that supposedly produces and owns them. What is actually found is only awareness, and appearances arising in it.

The verse then states the mechanism with almost logical dryness: vikalpānām abhāvena — by the absence of thought-constructs — vikalpair ujjhito bhavet, one is abandoned by thought-constructs. Not: one abandons them, after long battle. They leave, the way courtiers leave when it is discovered there is no throne.

How denial can be true

Is the contemplation a useful fiction? The tradition's answer is subtler: the mind is real as an activity but fictional as a thing. There are thinkings; there is no thinker-organ standing behind them — what stands behind them is consciousness itself, free and unconfined. The vikalpa that binds most deeply is the vikalpa of the vikalpa-maker: believing in an inner mind, one owns every thought it 'produces' and must wrestle each one. Deny the factory, and the products revert to what they always were — spontaneous shimmerings in open awareness, arising and dissolving with no one to detain them.