“It is too difficult to be just what we are.
The thinking mind cannot remain still when holding an image, imagination or picture.
Our body and mind are constantly changing with different images”
excerpt from Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati’s Essay ‘World of Images’ dated 1/31/1986
Early on a Sunday morning in July, sitting on the front porch of our house in the Catskill Mountains of New York, an array of sounds from the forest flood my attention. The cells in my body receive this mix of nature’s spontaneous expressions, while intermittently my mind interrupts the flow of this receptivity with its need to pin an image to the source of each sound – an owl, a hummingbird, a cricket, a chipmunk, a cicada, nightingale, and some sounds to which the mind is unable to assign a source or image.
Knowledge and direct experience compete with each other, while I gently keep nudging myself back to the immediacy of the orchestra and the evolving symphony. The compulsion to know something through the framing of the mind rather than meeting it directly is a hard habit to set aside.
Every thought has an image associated with it. Every image is accompanied not only by a thought, but a physical and chemical reaction within our bodies. Hence the seduction of the world of images right at our very fingertips, that we feed into and that feeds us with ever increasing speed and frequency – images of exotic destinations, images of war, images of peace, images of luxury, images of simplicity, and so on.
Even our collective exploration of the truth of who we are is guided by a subtle image of ourselves as truth seekers, image of meditation, image of the meditator, image of meditator doing a meditation, each one reinforcing the subject/object dynamic of every experience.
A mental image of the subway grid in New York City helps me navigate from uptown to downtown to Brooklyn. An image of how the sun imparts its light at different hours of the day along different sides of our house helps me plan what to plant where in my garden. Images can provide useful blueprints. But if we are unable to set aside images when they are not needed, they continue to work in our mind 24 hours a day like ghosts and “our whole life becomes imaginary”. Sleep with a mind swarming with images is called dream sleep. A restful sleep, deep sleep is free of images and imaginings. So it is true of our waking state. When we consciously set aside images that are not relevant to the moment at hand, we give our minds the opportunity for rest or reprieve. We are then available for the spaciousness and clarity that rest allows.
Every seven years the cells of the physical body undergo a significant shift. As I approach 50, the image of me when I was 43 no longer corresponds with how I appear now. Images are bound in time and space and thus hold us and our attention within the capsule of time and space. Could our receptivity to the changes we observe in ourselves over time broaden, if the mind loosened its grip on the image we hold of ourselves from 20 years ago or more.
In his essay “World of Images”, Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati reminds us that “The ‘I-Am’ principle [that which we are at our essence], has no form, no design, no picture, no image, no male or female gender, no white, brown, or black color, no youth, no old age.” So long as our consciousness is entrenched in the psychosomatic machine of images, we delay awakening to the experience of ourselves beyond the body & mind, beyond time & space, beyond language, beyond images, beyond name & form.
