Yesterday I read a article of Śri David Godman about the dead mind. For more clarity I will post it here.
Question: You have mentioned that final Self-realisation is when the mind actually 'dies' irreversibly in the Self. You have also mentioned how Papaji used to sometimes give an account of his life based on memory of his earlier narration. The idea of memories and a dead mind seem contradictory. Could you please clarify this?
David: Many people are puzzled by this apparent conundrum. A dead mind is one in which there is no thinker of thoughts, no perceiver of perceptions, no rememberer of memories. The thoughts, the perceptions and the memories can still be there, but there is no one who believes, 'I am remembering this incident,' and so on. These thoughts and memories can exist quite happily in the Self, but what is completely absent is the idea that there is a person who experiences or owns them. Papaji once gave a nice analogy: 'You are sitting by the side of the road and cars are speeding past you in both directions. These are like the thoughts, memories and desires in your head. They are nothing to do with you, but you insist on attaching yourself to them. You grab the bumper of a passing car and get dragged along by it until you are forced to let go. This in itself is a stupid thing to do, but you don’t even learn from your mistake. You then proceed to grab hold of the bumper of the next car that comes your way. This is how you all live your lives: attaching yourself to things that are none of your business and suffering unnecessarily as a result. Don’t attach yourself to a single thought, perception or idea and you will be happy.' In a dead mind the 'traffic' of mental activity may still be there, usually at a more subdued level, but there is no one who can grab hold of the bumper of an idea or a perception. This is the difference between a quiet mind and no mind at all. When the mind is still and quiet, the person who might attach himself or herself to the bumper of a new idea is still there, but when there is no mind at all, when the mind is dead, the idea that there is a person who might identify with an object of thought has been permanently eradicated. That is why it is called 'dead mind' or 'destroyed mind' in the Ramana literature. It is a state in which the possibility of identification with thoughts or ideas has definitively ended.
So after realization do the mind and thoughts still there or not? I cannot understand. Even Bhagavan's explanation of what happens to the mind after Self-realization are not very clear to me. Or may be I haven't read everything about it. I don't know. Please, explain. This is the toughest topic for me because every Sage, even the students of Bhagavan give different explanation, very far from one another.