I remember the first time the thought really hit me- “You are not your thoughts.” This was such a profoundly simple yet endlessly complex theory. If I am not my thoughts, then who am I? This question changed the way I think and in turn the way I view the world. I started to watch my thoughts and let them pass me by without judging them, without letting them take over me, and without falling into the illusion that I must respond to my thoughts. I stopped being a reactor to circumstance and started being pure consciousness, because that is who I really am.

Consciousness is not mind and mind is not consciousness. Consciousness is your true nature; your mind is that part of you that has been slowly constructed and conditioned by your education, parents, and society. Your mind is borrowed, your mind changes and your mind is not the real you. Do you ever have moments where you ‘talk’ to yourself? We all do. That is our true nature, our consciousness, talking with our rational, logical mind. Your mind is conditioned, you can have a mind full of Christian or Hindu beliefs, but there is no such thing as having a Hindu or Christian consciousness. Consciousness just is. We know this because our minds change, our beliefs change, and yet our consciousness remains. Your consciousness is always there, but you have to reach a no-mind state to discover the bliss and rawness that comes from accessing your authentic self. The only way to reach a no-mind state is to practice meditation daily.

Meditation is no-state mind; it is a state of no society within you, no conditioning within you. In Zen, they say to find your original face. In Western society, they refer to this theory as the role theory. Role theory implies that we behave according to our socially defined categories; this is what Zen means in that you have many faces and your face is cultivated. Find the original face you were born with and the original face is consciousness. Your roles are socially constructed and you are expected to act according to those constructs and constantly changing. The face of consciousness is eternal; it does not change like your roles do. A man and a child have different minds, but a man and a child have the same conscience.

Take a person with Alzheimer’s as an example. Meeting my grandmother in that state was the biggest eye opener for me. Here is a woman who had all the logic, all the rational mind in the world who reached a state where she could not rationalize, could not think or speak at all. And yet for the first time ever I saw her for the soul and being she was as consciousness. The eyes are the window to the soul and that spark in her eyes was her soul speaking to mine. She was there even if her mind was not and this is love so genuine it defies logic on all levels. This is genuine proof we are a soul stored in a physical body functioning in socialized conditioning but while our bodies and our minds deteriorate, our consciousness is eternal.