what i've learned about mind so far

I wrote most of this recently while spending time in Pharping, Nepal doing a little retreat. I have the time and inspiration to think back on my experience as an amateur meditator for the last eight years. I just finished reading a book called "The Taboo of Subjectivity," which really forced me to deeply examine my own hidden assumptions about mind and matter. I offer in the hopes that it spurs dialogue and that it might benefit some sentient being somewhere.

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From the very beginning, when I read Descartes' famous proposal, “I think, therefore I am,” I was deeply uncomfortable with the hidden assumptions implicit in this statement. It already begins with “I,” the existence of which seems obvious enough, but should also be called into question in such inquiry. Methinks it could be better phrased, “Thought occurs, therefore there is awareness of thought.” That is all we can be truly sure of for the moment.

Mind's location within the physical space of our experience is apparently culturally variable. Due to the prevalence of the (not-yet-proven) equation of mind and physical brain, mind is generally thought and experienced in the scientific West to be “in the head.” Tibetans and other cultures discuss and actually experience thoughts as occuring “in the heart.” I have heard that other cultures hold the mind to be in the throat, or even potentially in other parts of the body. I speculate this has to do with what chakra the culture collectively gravitates towards, and the resulting habituation yielding mind experientially abiding in one bodily location or another. Once I discovered this fact, I began to play around with this in my own experience and have found that despite my extensive habituation to the mind-in-the-head culture, the seeming center or locus of my mind can be shifted to my heart or belly or sacrum. Very quickly though, like a rubber band, my mind will snap back to its comfortable location in the head. I have also found that when residing in any of these locations, mind takes on a different tone. In the head, various conceptual thoughts predominate. In the heart, feelings of love and expansiveness dominate. In the belly or sacrum, feelings of groundedness and settledness predominate. It is all quite interesting. I postulate that there are many implications which come from the culturally-determined location of ming, including what kind of pathologies people develop and where their native intelligence is directed.

The dynamic energy of my mind, which expresses itself in coarse and subtle thought, feelings, emotions, the shifting of attention from one place or object to another, and the nervous regulation and grasping to experience – is relentless and does not tire.

Though I am for sure still a beginner, at this point I have meditated for some hundreds of hours, and my mind is still quite untamed. By untamed, I mean that the turbulent waves of thought come ferociously through my experience. Even when my mind is most calm, there is always movement. My mind is, for the time being, incessantly active.

There are many layers or strata of thought. Sometimes, during meditation practice, at first it seems that there aren't any thoughts arising – that the mind is calm and clear. Not thinking of much at all. Then I notice that there is a secondary layer of thought, which is almost constant, and narrates or directs the present flow of experience. My meditational awareness usually does not even recognize this strata of thought, which is much quieter and subtler than the ordinary thoughts which flood my mind, as thought.

There is a nervous aspect of the mind, which is like an aggressive policeman who feels the need to regulate the behavior of everyone he encounters. Even when it is my intent to simply let thoughts, sensations and perceptions be, this directional attention always jumps up to meet the incoming experience, to hold it or push it away.

When I am experiencing aversion to something, resisting something, while the directional attention is trying to push it out of the field of experience, it also seems to hold on to the object, which is quite a ridiculous endeavor – tightly holding to and pushing away at the time time. Its like muscular resistance training for the mind – and its had a lot of practice.

When examining the mind conceptually, I used to conceive of it as a field, something like empty space which allows for the knowing of the various phenomena of experience – inner thoughts and feelings and outer sense perceptions. In this field, which does not possess definite spatial dimensions, anything can arise – from the most intimate of thoughts to the visual perception of stars many many light-years distant. Naturally, all of this arises from the constant vantage point of here – wherever here happens to be – rooted to the six sense faculties (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile and mental) which are rooted to the present location of the body/mind aggregates. This field of awareness has a few different aspects. First, it acts as a potential for anything and everything to arise and be known. Each of the sense faculties has its own character in the way that it is known by the mind. Visual forms are perceived from the vantage point of the eyes, while arising in the space of the visual consciousness, whereas sounds do not seem to arise from the vantage point of the ears so much as in the space around the body. Thoughts, most notably and subtly, are cognized in what I can only describe in a holographic sense. They are not known from one side, much like a flashlight might illuminate only one side of a cow, but rather seem to be known in a very four-dimensional manner – three spatial dimensions plus time, almost like a flashlight which can illuminate all sides of an object at once. So, this mind is a field of empty space which allows for objects of the six senses to be known in their various ways. They are known however quite clearly and lucidly and directly.

Lately though, the sense of there being a field in which objects are known has dropped away under analysis, and there only seems to be knowing, which is fresh each moment and can and does know everything that it does. Its hard to talk about for sure, but I encourage you to examine your own experience.

Mind does not respect any convenient designations of outer and inner. In Buddhist epistemology or pramana, there exists the idea that there are two primary mental objects: specifically characterized objects and generally characterized objects. Specifically characterized objects are those that appear directly to the five sense consciousnesses (visual forms and so on) and (there is some debate on this) thoughts that appear freshly and directly to the mental consciousness. Generally characterized objects are those that appear to the mind (they are strictly conceptual), and do not refer to specific objects which “exist” in space and time (like the words you are reading on this screen right now, or the computer screen on which the words appear). They are thoughts about thoughts, and thoughts about objects. This is all well and good, except that the mind is often unclear about which are which. It readily confuses generally characterized objects for specifically characterized objects. This can be very tricky, and its consequence are quite profound and far reaching.

My best example of this phenomena occurred when I worked at Oregon Wild in Eugene, Oregon. Our office was in the Grower's Market building, a long running and venerable establishment housing many non-profit organizations. I worked in this office twice a week, every week for about 16 months. During this time, I ate a diet composed mostly of fruit, and thus had to pee far more often than the typical cooked food person. So, during the course of my workday, I would walk to the bathroom a few times. If I went to the bathroom thee times a day, twice a week, four weeks a month, for sixteen months, then I walked past the Douglas Supporting Teens office approximately three hundred eighty four times. Outside this office, there are many signs with the logo and words Douglas Supporting Teens. My eyes would glance at them often, and I read Douglas many many many times. I referred to the office by this name when talking about it with other people. Very close to the end of my tenure with Oregon Wild, sometime caught my eye as I walked past their office on the way to the bathroom. The signs all read, Doulas Supporting Teens, NOT Douglas Supporting Teens. Every single one. My mind cracked open as I realized that I had mentally imputed a “g” onto those signs for well over a year. I had mistaken the mental image of “Douglas Supporting Teens” and actually mentally pasted it over the direct sensory experience of the signs outside the office of Doulas Supporing Teens. Doulas, incidentally are a sort of midwife, I am told.

The implication of this is that, on coarse levels (like this one here) and subtle levels, we are constantly experiencing a mixture of our fresh sensory perceptions and a conceptual overlay that we do not know as such. The world we experience is actually created by the mind. This is obvious if we just check in with our experience. Have you ever experienced something outside of your mind? To do so is, naturally, impossible.

What becomes possible when we fail to recognize our projections for the truth of our experience? Keeping this discussion within the realm of the mind, in the west, a major implication of this is the way that we think about the mind and its relationship to the brain. In the media (the New York Times is serially guilty of this) and in common parlance, we have created the idea that the brain is the mind. The brain, being material is primary to any thing which may or may not exist and is called “mind.” Most people simply assume that the brain is the mind and do not think much more about it. Despite there being no scientific or experiential evidence for this theory, it is the assumed dogma even of many neuroscientists and most modern western people. A consequence, if the mind is naught but the brain, is that if you have a mental or emotional problem, then it must have a material solution, because the brain is a material objects, hence the range of intense psychopharmacological chemicals legally and illegally available to regulate your mental experience. Because the mind is the brain, the question is not asked whether one can directly train or work with one's mental experience to gain freedom from said problem. There are many other examples of how our mental imputations actually create the world we live in, socially and experientially, this is only one.