Nadesan Satyendra in Reflections on the Gita, 1981 "The mind.. represents a stage and by no means the final stage, in an evolutionary process which has witnessed a continuing change from inanimate to animate, from stone to plant to animal to man, and each stage has brought with it a greater degree of consciousness. It is an evolutionary process which has resulted in the formation of the seemingly intricate fore brain of man today and it is this self conscious mind of man which seeks to know, which seeks to understand. How is this understanding brought about? In what way does an ordinary mind comprehend? One says ordinary mind because one can neither reject nor ignore the experience of those extraordinary beings who have arisen on this earth from time to time and who appear to have comprehended the total reality and who were one with it; enlightened beings to whom time and space dissolved in an eternity which was boundless... The ordinary mind does not however comprehend the whole. It seems to deal effectively only with parts of the total reality. It directs its attention to discrete and separate parts of the whole. In order that it may understand, the mind separates and conceptualises. It separates that which is connected and the very process of separation distorts an understanding of the whole. The mind thinks in sequence in time. The present is a fleeting moment and is then gone forever. Thoughts are so much grist to its mill. Words and concepts are the instruments of its trade. The mind seeks to clarify one concept by having recourse to another. It defines one word with another. There is no end to this process nor is there a starting point. The mind deals in opposites . There is no idealism without materialism; there are no means without ends; there is no detachment without attachment; there is no free will without determinism; there is no good without bad. If everything was good what would it mean? Presumably, we would stop using the word. The mind speaks of theses, antithesis and synthesis and describes this as the dialectical process. And every synthesis is another thesis and gives rise to another antithesis and yet another synthesis - and the process is endless. The mind then speaks of dialectical idealism and dialectical materialism. The need to use opposites is the need of the mind that lives in the duality of I and not I, and the mind extends this duality, extends these seeming opposites, to everything that it deals with. And more often than not, it does not stop to ask: who am 'I'? Are there two 'I's - the one who asks the question and the other, about whom the question is asked? The inquiring and inquisitive mind - the restless mind, the monkey mind of man - allows one thought to play with another and ends up with what it then triumphantly describes as a rationalisation. The mind discovers seemingly broader and broader concepts and seemingly more and more general laws. But what is the result? From the vantage point of each new law, the mind then perceives an increasing area of the unknown and greater and greater areas of the unknown come within the vision of man. The search for fundamental laws, the search for fundamental particles, the search for absolute truths, inside the trap of duality is in the nature of an adventure to possess an ever receding mirage..." more