“I am struck by the observation that I have different minds, or rather, different minds and I participate in emergence into thought together. Consider the example where I am searching ‘my vocabulary’ for a word that I ‘know I know’. What is the mind that is searching? And what exactly is it searching? Does it actually know that which it does not possess in the moment of searching? It does not. So there is ‘another mind’, voiceless, perhaps eternal, whose scope is not determinable. What is actually happening is something like an attempt at ‘handshaking” [ connection.recognition.derivation ] between the mind that speaks and thinks… and the mind “where knowing is alive”.

Though both more and less are true, I imagine that the mind that speaks knows nearly nothing, and depends upon the relatively silent mind that dreams for all its inventions and declarations. For without this ‘other mind’ there is no dreaming, and without dreaming no meaning… and without that?

No differentiation at all.

It is the silent facets of mind who are relationally intimate with all moments, all things and beings, relationships and possibilities. (s)He does not ‘possess’ knowledge at all, though he may preserve something analogous to records; unlike a book or library (and unlike a computer entirely) he sustains blurry figures whose capacity to leap into more concise expression depends upon a fusion between the mind that speaks and the mind that dreams. The one who makes structures and the one who participates in transformations.

And these are not the only facets of mentality which I discover in myself once I am free of the idea that ‘I have a mind’; singular, possession-like, complete and at hand. The idea that we possess a mind reminds me of the idea that my hand’s actions invented my existence. The mind that thinks ‘it knows things’ is a tool-like subdivision of awareness, a leaf upon a single tree in a universe of faculties and forms of attention.

I no longer think that I am of one or even two minds, or that I possess them, even though, like most of us, this idea is still compelling. No, I suspect something vastly more strange, mysterious, and exquisite is at play. Something not bound to my body, something like many flocks of birds, or the ocean. Something like the sky, and the before of its formation… or, perhaps, not like anything at all… yet whose gestures conceive relations… from which all forms and understandings are derived.”

— an anonymous informant