The Myth of the Balanced Mind and the Simplicity of What Is

We often talk about seeking a balanced mind as if it were a trophy to be placed on a shelf or a destination at the end of a long, arduous trek. But who is it that is seeking this balance? When we look closely, we find that the mind itself is not a solid thing. It doesn't have an independent existence. What we call "mind" is simply a name we give to the totality of thoughts that appear and disappear in a constant flow. Within this stream, there is a recurring thought that says, "I am doing this," or "I am deciding that." These are just more thoughts, flickering for a moment and then vanishing into the same void from which they emerged. The separate self tries to create a sense of continuity, weaving these fleeting thoughts into a story that guarantees a future. It imagines a journey where it can eventually achieve a balanced mind, but this is just the protagonist of a film trying to ensure the movie never ends. The mind is terrified of stopping because it senses that if the story ceases, it won't just be left with a "void"—the mind itself will vanish. It is the character, the stage, and the play all at once, with no separate director behind the scenes. When we see this, the whole game becomes wonderfully impersonal and free. There is a profound simplicity in what we already are that the mind cannot grasp. The mind is a tool, much like a measuring instrument in quantum physics. In the quantum world, the act of observing a system changes it; you can know the position of a particle or its velocity, but never both, because the very tool you use to look modifies the reality. Similarly, the mind is too complex an instrument to touch the raw simplicity of existence. It requires a certain level of complication to function. When we say things are exactly as they are, right here and now, the mind finds itself unemployed. It screams that it cannot be this simple, because if it were, the mind’s great search—the climb up the spiritual mountain—would be revealed as an illusion. We have developed a habit of keeping this mental machine running even when it serves no purpose. It is like an appliance we forget to turn off. In our civilization, we are addicted to the constant input of abstraction. We are like the man on the train who cries out incessantly about how thirsty he is, and then, after finally drinking a bottle of water, spends the rest of the journey crying out about how thirsty he was. The thought never stops; it just shifts its focus. Yet, in those moments when we are walking through a park, feeling the air, or watching the clouds, the mind isn't needed. There is no requirement for a balanced mind in the vividness of a sunset; there is only the vividness itself. Even the most intense emotions are not obstacles to what we are. We are taught to manage them, to suppress them, or to vent them, but these are all just ways of keeping the attention on the "object" of the emotion—the person who made us angry or the thing we desire.