Have you come yet to the end of your mind?
“Sixty minutes of thinking of any kind is bound to lead to confusion and unhappiness.”
It is dusk in the information age. The sun has already set. Its time has passed. With the amount of information generated increasing to an unprecedented degree, it is not the end of information, but the flooding of its darkness. It’s become increasingly clearer and clearer that the answers to our problems do not come simply with more information. And yet we keep going, passing far beyond the point of information “overload” and into a reality of information enslavement.
Information is frequently referred to as the food of the brain. We believe that we need a continual influx of stimulation, often in the form of new facts and findings, ways to perform better or know more, as if these new learnings will give us the edge we need to succeed, or the sense we crave to make meaning of our lives, or simply to feel like a more productive or better person. We buy another book, listen to another podcast, read yet another article, excited about the prospect of learning something we didn’t know before.
Or in the current situation, do you find yourself constantly looking for updates, news, developments? While there is certainly plenty of value in having the correct information, you may also notice that this becomes a compulsive cycle as the mind grasps for control, understanding, a way to make sense of everything. It—we cannot “know enough” or adequately sort what is essential for us and what is not. “Need to know basis” is not an internal reality for most of us.
The trouble is, the more we learn, the more we realize how much more we don’t know. And on further down the rabbit hole we go. Is it possible we are feeding the monster who holds us captive? The mind that always seeks to acquire more and more? Have we become addicted to the stimulation, without asking where it’s taking us?
Have you ever felt like you’ve come to the end of your mind?
To come to the end of your mind does not mean that you are done with it, as if that could ever be. It means that you have come to the point of realizing its limitations, of seeing that all the learning, strategizing, and thinking processes can only take you so far. You can certainly keep going. And for a while, you do, out of habit. But now you have begun to sense something more.
I think many of us have experienced this mind-fatigue, the sensation of feeling exhausted with your own thoughts. A most common response today is to “zone-out” or occupy our minds in passive consumption of entertainment. Humans spend billions of dollars and unconscionable amounts of time for such relief and stimulation. I do too. A somewhat more conscious response is mindfulness or meditative practice aimed at stilling the monkey mind. After much practice and training, we may find a few moments of stillness—but we always come back to ourselves, back to our heads.
We are so mind-centered that we often mistakenly think that we are tired of our very selves. But in truth, we are just tired of the loops of our own mind. If we’ve run the track enough, we begin to recognize a discouraging familiarity. I’ve been here before. The first step of finding your way is often to recognize that you’re lost. Lost in the maze of the mind.
I wonder if very many people don’t really even allow themselves to reach this point, turning away from the recognition because, well, where else would they go? What else do we have but to circle through the labyrinth of the mind with a few precious moments at the center?
What did Jesus have to say about this? His very first call in his ministry spoke precisely to this, though it might not seem so at first glance.
Updating the Call of Jesus
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
-Matthew 4:17
The invitation of Jesus to “repent” is a traditional translation of the Greek word μετανοεῖτε from metanoia. While this word is often rendered as to “change your mind,” a more literal translation of the prefix “meta” would encourage us to move above, to rise to a higher, more expansive beyond thought. Or, beyond the mind. That right there is probably enough to radically transform our understanding of this call, but let’s keep going.
The phrase “at hand” does not mean that it is coming soon. It means not only that it is now, but that it is here, immanent. Right in front of you, even within you, as Jesus says in another gospel. All one has to do is decide to take hold of it.
“Kingdom” and “heaven” are both words that have a lot of traditional-level baggage. We can also render “kingdom” as “realm,” which frees us from the abusive hierarchical power dynamic. And the word “heaven” is the plural “heavens,” connoting both the visible cosmos and the spiritual heavens.
Now those are all the Greek words. They are what we have to go on, even though we know Jesus spoke Aramaic. While scholarship around the Aramaic of Jesus is still unfolding, from what we do know, for this verse we can also gather connotations of ebbing or flowing back, returning home within, and seizing the moment. We also learn that there are meanings of both within and among—literally “in the belly” and also within the collective.
So we might read it a little something like this:
“Flow back home beyond your mind, for right now within all of you is the divine cosmic realm.”
Beyond Your Mind — Within & Among
This is not simply metacognition (another “meta” misnomer) or becoming aware of your thoughts, nor is it becoming aware of being aware. Those can all be helpful steps in the contemplative journey, moving further into a witness state of seeing. Though for many, that space alone fails to move the seat of awareness beyond the mind. Perhaps more importantly, it also neglects incorporating the embodied realm that is quite literally “at hand.”
Elsewhere, Jesus says “The divine realm is within/among you” (Luke 17:21). The Greek ἐντός can mean both within and among. So while we often think of “going beyond” as a movement of transcendence outside of ourselves, what Jesus is inviting us to here is primarily a movement of going within and among. These are the spaces where we can move beyond simply being trapped inside our heads. To the immanent immediacy of incarnated being.
Flowing back home within is movement into our body. Our body is our home, our whole self. We have more neurons in our gut than our head. Our heart’s electromagnetic field is much larger than that of our head. The energy of spirit is in contact with matter, not removed from it. We live in this embodied reality in connection with God-being-us infused within the very fibers of our cells. When we think that the center of ourselves is in our head, we are disembodying ourselves from the realities of our incarnated humanity.
Flowing back home among is the movement beyond our minds and our bodies into the reality of our interconnectedness. Remember, this cosmic realm among us is right here right now. It is not out in the vast distances of space. It is not removed from our present reality here now. It is in the space between us. We can go beyond our own minds and experience this shared, collective space. It is Jesus inviting us beyond our individuality and seeming separation.
We are not separate from one other, so we need to stop thinking of ourselves as separate seats of consciousness inside our own little individual heads. That’s quite a leap, I know. And we aren’t going to figure that one out in our mind. It will most likely take the experience of moving into an intersubjective space in one form or another, such as in our WeSpace groups.
So this movement within and among is transcendence into immanence. Going beyond the confining limitations of the mind into the presence of being fully here, now, in this moment. In the very physical being of our life. Not alone. Together. All of us. Incarnated into this very age and place, for such a time as this.
Whole Being and Interbeing
It’s important to note that when we “go beyond” something, we do not necessarily leave it behind. We can include the best of what it has given us and what it will continue to give. But we are no longer confined to its limitations. We transcend and include. A whole-body presence is one that includes the mind. We do not reject it, but rather allow it to fall into a healthy place within alongside the other forms of knowing and living in our incarnated divine being, individually and collectively.
You can practice this transcendence into immanence with our Whole-Body Mystical Awakening meditation and prayer, moving more deeply into the spaces beyond the end of your mind, both within yourself and among us all.
As this is often something unfamiliar to us, it will take practice. But once we’ve experienced it, very often we realize that it is much more natural for us. It is the deeper truth that we are not confined to our minds. That we are so much more. We are released into fuller being and liberated into expansive interbeing, following the ebb and flow of the tide within and among, beyond the mind and into wholeness.
When we move beyond our minds, we can experience this flow within and among us as the spiritual energy of Christ. We’ll explore that next week. You can sign up to our mailing list to receive it by email!