Mind and Brain

[Allan Curry]

Namaste

Ramakrishnan writes:

>Another question was: Can the experience of non-duality be an alternate state
>of the brain?
>
>"Experience" is a only a loose way of describing non-duality. This point is
>brought out well in the mAnasollAsa. The only thing which can be said is
>manonAsha (extinction of the mind) should be brought about to get rid of the
>ego. After that what exists can obviously not be any modification of the mind.
>So the question of the "non-dual experience" being a state of the mind does not
>arise.
>

Extinction of the mind may not be the same thing as extinction of the
brain. If I may make a crude comparison to the computer: we may close an
application running on an operating system but neither the operating system
nor the extinguished application are the hardware that is their true
substratum. In our example, my question is how do we know that non-duality
is not just some kind of a psychological "base state" (ie. like the
operating system) running on top of the underlying wetware (ie. the brain) ?

The question may not arise during that base state (non-duality) in exactly
the same way and for the same reason that the world does not appear when we
shut our eyelids. Not asking a question is not really an answer, but it may
be the best we can do...

P.S.