The Mind is Not Real

Last week, I posted a teaching from Indian guru Ramana Maharshi, who said, “You are perfect, so abandon the idea of imperfection. There is nothing to be destroyed. The ego is not a real thing. It is the mind which makes the effort, and the mind is not real. Just as it is not necessary to kill the rope, which one imagines to be a snake, so also there is no need to destroy the mind. Knowing the form of the mind makes the mind disappear.”

A Muslim friend responded, “So then, should the mind be ignored from the beginning? If we don’t actually need schools and education, what should be in its place? Spiritual sittings? Isn’t that another effort? We want solutions unless there’s nothing to be solved, so then we’ll just walk the earth like pure instinctual beasts (and not even try not to destroy it).”

This is a very interesting response. First, there is a semantics issue. To say that the mind is not real is not the same as saying that it is not important to cultivate the mind or educate the young. In the past, I had the impression that Buddhism and many branches of Indian philosophy were anti-intellectual. I just finished writing a chapter in my book about Nirvana and the Third Noble Truth. I spent three weeks on this endeavor and wrote thirty pages. But it was a worthy exercise. I have come to a much deeper understanding of why Ultimate Reality cannot be talked about.