Beyond The Mind

This is a book review of Beyond The Mind by Dada Gavand.
This book is a very interesting conversation with eight successful people in the US.In a very direct and warm dialogues with a seeker, a family man, a woman, a wealthy person, a researcher,an artist. a psychotherapist and a meditator the marvels of life are revealed.
What is meditation? How does one deal with emotional problems, are woman less suitable towards spirituality due to their emotions? How does a professional conduct himself, awaken his spirituality,live in this world and yet remain out of mind-thought activity?He puts it beautifully in his poem:

Freedom From Time:
Life has gathered Dust on the Way
During Her Centuries of Travelling Time.
Particles of the Dust
Have Developed into a Mountain
Which calls itself ‘I’~ The Mind.

This Dusty mold
Of millions of yesterdays Past
Is an Imposition and
Burden upon Life Energy.
Freedom from this
Dusty mountain of Past
Is the Purification and
Liberation of Life.

Life Fulfills itself
Through its own
Liberation.

Key takeaway:

Disquietude is nothing but ceaseless thought activity. We try to quieten one thought with another idea, which then becomes a fight between two opposing thoughts. This way we remain in the same field of mind. This creates seeking, which is nothing but a struggle and conflict. We may hang on to some words, pictures, mantras, but again it is an idea, a seeking of the mind. The mind will never lead us to quietude. We start chanting mechanically, and again it becomes a habit of the mind. So we are never free from thought. The spirit is a quality of a new dimension, and thought has to resign for the spirit to come in.In other words When there is quietitude,when there is no seeker there is unleashng of whole energy which is life.

His Message:

One needs to look at everything that moves within the field of mind. This must not be a superficial inquiry but one carried out with one’s entire being. One has to be watchful to catch every thought as it arises – follow its trajectory – how it comes up, moves and ends. Then one will begin to realize that the entire movement of thought is habitual and mechanical.Only through attentive watchfulness will this mechanical and compulsive movement of thought, lose its momentum and finally come to an end. In such ending one will discover a mysterious momentum of quietude.If one wants peace, creativity and love, one has to undertake this inward journey. One may be clever, but mere cleverness will not lead to that state of peace and ecstasy which is the very basis of life.

At present, the mind has become a storehouse of the past – of information and knowledge gathered from books, classrooms etc and used cleverly again and again. All our thoughts and ideas come from stored information which is always of the past. So the mind is an expression of the old, the past, though it works so cleverly and so fast that it appears to be just in the present.
Life, the living quality, functions in the present, in the twinkling momentum of the ‘now’. Thought cannot touch this dynamic momentum which is very spontaneous and intuitive. The past cannot touch the present. One needs a fresh, intuitive consciousness to meet Life – not second- hand ideas based on memory, on the past.One has to wait within in silence, in the state of innocence and anonymity. The mind activity has to remain absolutely quiet without the interference of thought. Such a silent state of thought-less-ness and not-knowing alone invites something of a higher dimension to give the experience of that which is Timeless.

In a way Dada talks more directly and serves in a ready to eat package what J.Krishnamurti has tried to teach through his talks.Basically he talks about freedom from the known and ending of time and I as a past memory and watchful attentiveness.It is good in the sense it is clear and direct.There is no going around it in a conundrum.The flip side is that it may fail to provoke enough and drive the urgency to be light unto oneself.Once the intellectual curiousity is fulfilled mind may get back to its old game.Whilst J.Krishnamurto would tear one apart into the conundrum step by step without ready answers.Dada gives the answers wheras J.K enables the reader to derive answers.


Dattaram Gavand, a mystic, traveller and photographer, was born in Mumbai in 1917. The eldest child of his parents, he came to be called Dada or elder brother.