You believe this mind so completely that you invest all your energy in it until after awhile it appears to be solid and real. We believe the content of our minds to be reality. We completely believe our thoughts, our ideas, our beliefs, and our dreams, and we make them solid by continuing to see them and believing them to be reality. If you consider the world you live in, the kind of things you pursue, the kinds of things you like, the kinds of things you want, they are nothing but repetitions of the past. There is nothing new in them. Even what you think is new is a combination of things from the past, and since it is a repetition of the past, it is not real, it is not alive, it is not what is there. It is a content of your mind. That content of mind is a prison. But the person in that prison is so mesmerized, the bars appear so powerful and strong, that you take the bars of the prison to be what you want, what you seek, and what you want to strengthen. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 8
To throw away your mind means to throw away what you think you are, what you think the world is, what you think is there, what is not there, what is good, what is not good—to throw it away, all of it. Otherwise, what you will perceive, what you will be experiencing, is nothing but parts of your mind, a continuation of the past coming from your own memory. When I say the world is old, or that what we see is old, I do not mean old in the sense that it has grown in time. I mean old in the sense that it has stopped growing. It is dead in its old form, the way you constructed it years and years ago. The mind perpetuates ghosts, dead things; there is no life in them. They’re not light—they’re heavy, dark, dank, old, and musty. They are stale. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch. 8
The mind is very tricky, very subtle, very powerful. And to see the truth means to know the mind, to know it to the extent of being able to see beyond it, and of being able to use it instead of it using you. In some sense the mind is the most powerful thing there is, because it creates our world. What do I mean by that? Just look at the world you live in, the drab, ordinary world that you believe is not spiritual, the world you go around in from here to there, driving your car, meeting your friends, doing your job, and once in a while having a spiritual experience. You live in a world that you look at as made of physical things, moving around. You look at your car, for instance. What is your car? A Honda. Very good, now you know what you have—a Honda. Say you have a Honda, a Japanese car, and it is red. 1986. Automatic, with this and that extra equipment. You believe you know a lot about your car. Yes, you know a lot about your car, but you do not actually know the car directly. What do you know about your car? You say, “My car is Japanese.” What do you know? You say your car is a Honda. What does that mean? What do you know? It is a name you have learned to call it. Someone else could call it something else. What does it say about the car? The name might help you distinguish it from a Chevrolet. But with all these labels, you still do not know anything intrinsic about the car yet. You could get more sophisticated—”I know what a car is, it is a vehicle made out of metal and rubber and things like that.” You have become more sophisticated, but what do you know? What is metal for you? What is rubber for you? Is metal or rubber something you know? Or words you have learned? Do you perceive rubber or metal actually? – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch.13
But in this process you have to go all the way with the word, all the way, exhaust your words, your mind. You do not stop and say, “I read in one of those Zen books that you cannot know reality. Reality is beyond words . . . okay, that’s it.” Bullshit! That does not work because what you are doing there is using your mind and believing your mind, and maybe believing that you are going beyond the mind. You are not seeing the truth, the mystery. The mystery appears when you use the words all the way, looking honestly, genuinely, truthfully at your own experience, and realize that what you are seeing is your mind and nothing else. You cannot see this by using some belief, or remembering a story you heard from someone. You actually perceive, “This table is my mind. It does not matter that I feel that I am touching it.” It is like in your dreams—you could touch a table in your dream. Isn’t it your mind you are touching? You do not believe that you are really touching a table in your dream. Why do you think you are touching a table now? It is the same thing. It is your mind, and you can actually perceive it is your mind if you can just stop for a minute believing that you know. If, for a second, you stop believing that you know what reality is, if you stop being arrogant for one second, then you might see that it is your mind and all its concepts that you are seeing when you believe you see the world. – Diamond Heart Book Four: Indestructible Innocence, ch.13