Today a friend of mine posted an article about how there really is no time. It’s a pretty good article, although the source it comes from is a bit questionable. Other articles they have posted include pieces on some fat flush drink flushes fat away, and the 7 most effective ways to induce an out-of-body experience.
Still, although it contains some cool, thought provoking stuff, it’s one of those articles in which someone not too terribly schooled in current physics tries to tie together things they’ve read in a lot of pop culture magazines and books about current physics. I’m not qualified to judge how close such articles are to understanding real physics.
One problem I have with these kinds of articles is the way their writers always seem to want to jump to the conclusion that something called consciousness underlies everything. The writer of this particular piece strays from the stack of Discover and Scientific American magazines he’s been quoting to throw in his own speculations, which go like this:
“Consciousness is the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence, independent of time, space, or location, of which it is independent yet all inclusive and all present. It encompasses all existence beyond all limitation, dimension, or time, and registers all events, no matter how seemingly miniscule, such as even a fleeting thought. The interrelationship between time and consciousness from the human perspective is limited, when in fact it is unlimited.”
For a long while I thought this was something like the Buddhist view of things. But then Nishijima Roshi blew my mind one day with a simple five word sentence.
“Consciousness is just an illusion,” he said.
He made this statement in reply to someone attending one of his lectures who hijacked the Q&A session to deliver a monologue that made pretty much the same points as the writer of the article my friend posted. I remember the guy literally sputtering in response.
In Buddhist terms, consciousness is just one of the five things that come together to form a human being, or, by extension, to form the universe. These five are 1) form 2) feelings 3) perceptions 4) impulses and 5) consciousness. So consciousness, in Buddhist terms, is not only not the substrate of all existence, it isn’t even the most important of the five elements that constitute existence. Also, when you push a little deeper into Buddhist ideas, all five of these elements are different manifestations of the very same thing. And if you dare to go beyond that, the ultimate answer is, “I don’t know.”
But, to me, an even deeper question is why does this even matter?
I mean, I get why people are interested in it. I certainly am interested in these kinds of trippy ideas. But if they’re just things for bros to trade with each other when they’re stoned, who really cares? Do these questions have meaning in a world where religious maniacs are burning people in cages, where the planet we live on is getting hotter and nobody’s doing anything about it, and where this coming weekend the Grammys are going to tell us that yet another batch of talentless pretty-boys and glamour-girls are the best musicians the world has produced?
Actually, I think maybe it does matter.
It matters because we will only be able to solve our problems when we are willing to look at life realistically, and see it for what it is.
The problem with saying things like “Consciousness is the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence” is that you have reached a conclusion. You have defined life. You have boxed it in. And now that you have your box of life, you can swing it around at other people’s boxes of life and see if your box can break theirs.
What Nishijima said to that guy was a challenge to go beyond the box that he had created. He was asking him to question his own answer.
There is a lot we can learn and discover about the universe we are living in. We can, in fact, even discover the ultimate answer. Yet that ultimate answer does not fit into any box. When you think you’ve found the ultimate box, that’s when trouble starts.
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Every Monday at 8pm I lead zazen at Silverlake Yoga Studio 2 located at 2810 Glendale Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039. All are welcome!
Every Saturday at 9:30 am I lead zazen at the Veteran’s Memorial Complex located at 4117 Overland Blvd., Culver City, CA 90230. All are welcome!
Plenty more info is available on the Dogen Sangha Los Angeles website, dsla.info
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Space and time may not exist, but my rent does. Your kind donations help me keep doing this blog by helping me rent a place to write in. Every little bit helps. Thank you!
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Some guys would give up their robes for a nice tight box.
Only the enlightened ones….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJxU9RRHjrc
Brad, I disagree. As you know, the Lankavatara Sutra was an important part of early Chinese Ch’an. The One Mind doctrine points to how non-abiding awareness is fundamental and universal in the universe, but it cannot be grasped. It is a kind of type-F monism that was integral to Ch’an views. For example, read the 2nd post by Asus here:
http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=9510
Older Japanese Zen also used to be into this. Older Chinese sutras were read and Dogen was not given primacy over such old texts.
The point is, the mind is not cut off from the world. Mind is also irreducible to brain activity and not emergent from brain activity, even though it goes through higher levels of complexity with more information integration.
Consciousness is not the same as awareness because consciousness is always OF something whereas awareness is “not-of”. This is why Shikantaza involves a moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness that does not suppress or block out thoughts, sensations, or feelings, to the point of no-thought. However, by saying the universe “IS” awareness, I have reified it and cannot awaken to its all-pervasive nature, for it is fundamentally formless and without intrinsic nature. The absence of its intrinsic nature, however, is what leads to fundamental and universal characteristic. It is what gives Buddha nature to every living being. From this view, chemical reactions where some of the molecules involved end up producing more copies of themselves and creating cycles with external energy sources have an elementary level of awareness that evolves into more complex forms of experience. This is what is meant by Form is emptiness (non-abiding awareness), emptiness is form.
I believe the Kyoto school and contemporary Zen went more for a Prasangika Madhyamaka view of emptiness which does not give primacy to either matter or mind. This was due to Heidegger’s influence on figures like Shizuteru Ueda, and they left behind the Yogacaran aspects that were fundamental to both the practice and expedient, provisional beliefs of Ch’an Buddhists. Earlier Ch’an/Zen undoubtedly gave primacy to the elementary level of mind, non-abiding awareness.
The “extraordinary viewing without a viewer” points to the reality of a non-local non-abiding awareness that is timeless and aspatial.
Saying my experiential felt qualities of pain, redness, and etc. are reducible to brain activity is fallacious. They are correlated by irreducible considering the machinery of the brain does not contain the actual phenomenological experience of red. Furthermore, full knowledge of the brain does not tell us anything about the actual subjective experience. The answer to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” is in Christof Koch’s (a close friend of Francis Crick) new theory he explicated in confessions of a Romantic Reductionist: “that all matter is sentient to some degree is terribly appealing for its elegance, simplicity, and logical coherence. Once you assume that non-abiding awareness is real and ontologically distinct from its physical substrate, then it is a simple step to conclude that the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience. We are surrounded and immersed in consciousness; it is in the air we breathe, the soil we tread on, the bacteria that colonize our intestines, and the brain that enables us to think.”
Schopenhauer also gives convincing arguments for the primacy of the Will which I view to have a non-conscious, non-graspable awareness. I can give a short summary of his views in relation to modern physics concepts.
Henri Bergson technically says the same things as Dogen btw.
Here are some quotes from Stephen E. Robbin’s Memory and Time on Bergsom:
==========
“The theory of time is precisely the ground where psychology, the theory of consciousness and physics meet. In truth, with Bergson’s vision – with its non-differentiable flow, with its irreversibility derived from the fact that each ‘instant’ reflects the entire preceding series, with its primary memory or true continuity wherein there are no mutually external ‘instants,’ where the motions of ‘objects’ are transferences of states within a global time-evolution of the material field implying therefore an inherent non-locality – one sees that Einstein’s two times “a psychological time different from that of the physicist,” are in reality one.”
—
“I have argued that the universe clearly has an elementary awareness at the null scale of time. The properties of its indivisble, non-differentiable motion reside beneath our memory and our will. But what is the time scale of this universe? Our brain controls our scale of time; it gives us ‘buzzing’ flies as opposed to ‘heron-like’ flies. But the matter-field is an infinity of scales and retains the entirety of its past – trillions of lifetimes of beings. What do we really know of such a universe or ourselves as integral parts thereof?”
—
“Our brain controls our scale of time; it gives us ‘buzzing’ flies as opposed to ‘heron-like’ flies. But the matter-field is an infinity of scales and retains the entirety of its past – trillions of lifetimes of beings. What do we really know of such a universe or ourselves as integral parts thereof?””
—
“Though we are free to attribute rest or motion to any material point taken by itself, it is nonetheless true that the aspect of the material universe chnges, that the internal configuration of every real system varies, and that here we have no longer the choice between mobility and rest. Movement, whatever its inner nature, becomes an indisputable reality. We may not be able to say what parts of the whole are in motion, motion there is in the whole nonetheless.” – Bergson
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“Bergson, we saw, would come to view the “motions” of “objects” within a global motion of this field or whole as ‘changes or transferences of state’. This motion is better treated in terms of a melody, the ‘notes’ of which permeate and interpenetrate each other, the current ‘note’ being a reflection of previous notes of the series, all forming an organic continuity, a ‘succession without distinction, a motion which is indivisible. In such a global motion, there is clearly simultaneity.”
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Overall, perception is the result of concrete biochemical dynamics and fields, not symbol manipulation and abstraction computation. By ceasing to project the illusion of intrinsic existences with the mind, the simultaneity of all events can be experienced. The blurring of unreal and real, senseless and sense, and other dichotomies in the eternal now of non-abiding awareness.
So it’s more of a matter of our brain attuning to various “frequencies” of the universal field.
There is simultaneity in relation to past events and the present… right now when we simply quiescent the mind, no longer controlling the scale of time or projecting the illusion of fixed self-natures.
JUST Sit and let the background of stillness harmonize. Non-abiding awareness is inherently non-differentiable and in the eternal now. The answer to the Hard Problem of Consciousness is in Dogen, older Ch’an sutras, Schopenhaer, and Henri Bergson.
SH:
Have you read “Irreducible Mind” by husband-and-wife psychologists Edward and Emily Kelly?
They’re making a serious attempt at dragging western psychology into nondual realms by trying to re-promote the theories of FWH Myers, who was quite popular at the end of the 19th century and then disappeared almost entirely when Freud became all the rage.
Consciousness = Maya Nishijima was correct.
http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html
Check out my quotes of Henri Bergson.
When we sit still, beginning and end unify.
“The problem with saying things like “Consciousness is the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence” is…”
… That it is a Woo Word Salad.
It’s a sentence, saying words with definitions, yet manages to say nothing at all.
Check out my quotes of Henri Bergson.
Unconsciousness is the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence
Still a woo salad. 😉
Yes, it’s all woo woo.
No… No it’s not
nonconsciousness is the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence
woo salad is the formless, invisible field of energy of infinite dimension and potentiality, the substrate of all existence
Yeesh.
I think you bunch just love to hear yourself talk… :/
“Time is a mood” – I found that quote inside a fortune cookie once. Time is a cultural construct that we are all forced to accept in order to have a calendar, in order to have history books and in order to wake up and get to work.
It would be more accurate to “time doesn’t exist as a fundamental reality”, but the cultural reality is inescapable. Although there was a scientific experiment done once where they had people living in caves for extended periods and those subjects started living on a 26- or 28-hour daily cycle naturally after a while. If you’re living in a place with no clocks, calendars or watches and especially no natural light to offer clues for “time measurement”, then the cultural convention of time breaks down.
I suppose you could consider the human heartbeat as a “measurement of time”. No exit.
Like a 3 year retreat at Diamond Mountain stripping the brain of its cultural constructs.
Yes. And they were living outdoors while their brains were stripped. And then there’s waterboarding. So many ways to confound conventional society…
And spending 3 years in a yurt with a woman who’s never more than 10 feet away, telling her that she’s a goddess and you’re the messiah, and that penetration isn’t penetration, it’s a spiritual ritual.
PEDANTRY WARNING: reader discretion advised.
Brad says that consciousness isn’t close to fundamental in Buddhism, or something.
But we should note that what Buddhism calls ‘consciousness’ (vijnana skandha) is not the same thing that western psychology calls ‘consciousness’, and philosophers have another definition, and anaesthetists have one more, and new agey bullcrap merchants have various others.
Before y’all rush off and call each other names over this, you’d better agree what you’re arguing about.
Bravo!
I’m about ready to turn in for the night – does anyone want to list the terms Buddhism uses that can be translated as “mind,” “consciousness,” “awareness,” etc.?
Yes, here are some various sutra quotes regarding differing contexts describing consciousness:
“Were someone to say, ‘I will describe a coming, a going, a passing away, an arising, a growth, an increase, or a proliferation of consciousness apart from form, from feeling, from perception, from fabrications,’ that would be impossible.”
“…of dependently co-arisen consciousness, ‘Apart from a requisite condition, there is no coming-into-play of consciousness.”
“’I have attained this path to Awakening, i.e., from the cessation of name-&-form comes the cessation of consciousness, from the cessation of consciousness comes the cessation of name-&-form.”
“Consciousness, thus unestablished, not proliferating, not performing any function, is released.”
“The subduing of desire & passion for consciousness, the abandoning of desire & passion for consciousness: that is the escape from consciousness.”
“Then, householder, you should train yourself in this way: ‘I won’t cling to form… feeling… perception… thought-fabrications; my consciousness will not be dependent on thought-fabrications.’ … ‘I won’t cling to consciousness; my consciousness will not be dependent on consciousness.’”
“…when one doesn’t intend, arrange, or obsess [about anything], there is no support for the stationing of consciousness.”
It remains apparent to me that any investigation of the mind, by using the mind itself, will run into inherent functional limitations. It is understandable how many people, like the Dalai Lama, believe consciousness is literally part of everything in the world, and some regard it as the fundamental source. This makes complete sense regarding how we come to experience everything with consciousness, yet it is a solipsistic first person point of view formed from using one’s consciousness to find what is fundamental in its own experience. The fact that our experience is based upon consciousness doesn’t prove consciousness exists in everything beyond our mind, it is only an expected outcome and limitation of such an investigation.
The Great Way
The Great Way has no gate;
there are a thousand paths to it.
If you pass through the barrier,
you walk the universe alone.
Wu men
Good article, even my potato vodka soaked brain grasped the point – which makes said floating brain wonder – what’s with all the indulgent masturbatory sophistry in the comments section?
Nah. Masturbation is a poor analogy for what we do here. With Masturbation there’s an end in sight, maybe even some relief
“With Masturbation there’s an end in sight, maybe even some relief.”
Even though your statement leaves me with no possibility of hope, I just can’t stop giggling.
Cheers.
In my comment above with the quotes I wasn’t saying yes to Minkfoot’s request. I was trying to respond to Shinchan Ohara’s comment, but it didn’t show up under his.
Why did older Ch’an Buddhists argue awareness is fundamental and universal then?:
For example, read the 2nd post by Asus here:
http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=9510
SH, consider for a moment the possibility that consciousness arises from the brain, add to this the fact that there are no nerves in the brain, then consider that because of this there would be no trace within one’s experience of consciousness of its origin. If this is the case, then using consciousness to look within could look no further than consciousness itself. Consciousness would be experienced along with everything. Wouldn’t this lead one to say such a thing? Would it make it true?
Also consider that a mind secluded from all sense impressions, given it has no nerves to sense its own embodiment, would likely experience itself as limitless and empty. Ever notice how our thoughts seem to float in some abstract space? …both empty and limitless? Just another part of our system’s setup.
Consciousness is not the same thing as awareness in the 5 skandhas. Consciousness involves attention to memory and memory processes permit for its continuance.
What the older Ch’an Buddhists meant by One Mind was a non-conscious, non-graspable awareness that both includes and does not include the 5 skandhas. So using the 5 skandhas to understand this non-conscious, formless awareness is futile, but this non-conscious awareness allowed for the transparency through which we experience the 5 skandhas.
Red Pine’s commentary Heart Sutra argues for the same thing: “I am aware, therefore I neither am nor am not.”
“There is a lot we can learn and discover about the universe we are living in. We can, in fact, even discover the ultimate answer. Yet that ultimate answer does not fit into any box. When you think you’ve found the ultimate box, that’s when trouble starts.”
http://www.kfc.com.sg/userfiles/menu/bg_92.jpg
I have no problem with boxes.
“Actually, I think maybe it does matter.
It matters because we will only be able to solve our problems when we are willing to look at life realistically, and see it for what it is.”
“Weak as water”, said She Who Must Be Obeyed (in the Rumpole of the Bailey series).
What has seeing anything got to do with dropping mind and body?
Alright, I grant you the mystery of an ultimate answer to life’s problems, but after that I must go to my room and wash my eyes out. Tear drops will fall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C7DiZc0sFg
HOW CAN I BRING THE TRIPLE GATE ON THE LAMP IF I KEEP DROPPING IT!
Oooooh! Pointing to the heart of the matter… ouch with diamond tipped chainsaw. Skeletons from the Zen closet bleeding out all over that question.
HS, yes what you call a non-graspable awareness is said to be attained by ‘guarding the sense doors’ as in the proposition I gave above, “Also consider that a mind secluded from all sense impressions, given it has no nerves to sense its own embodiment, would likely experience itself as limitless and empty.”
I’ll go with this box. Besides this, the ultimate question for me is not the origin of my existence it is how can I live in accordance with existence? How can I lesson the discordance?
“Consciousness is just an illusion” can also be understood if consciousness is an emergent phenomenon of the brain.
HS, look at how consciousness is used in this quote, “Then, householder, you should train yourself in this way: ‘I won’t cling to form… feeling… perception… thought-fabrications; my consciousness will not be dependent on thought-fabrications.’ … ‘I won’t cling to consciousness; my consciousness will not be dependent on consciousness.’”
Consciousness not dependent on consciousness. Sounds like what you call a non-graspable awareness. Awareness is consciousness. It is often described as “unestablished” consciousness.
The problem for emergentism is it leads to causal closure and overdeterminism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism#Jaegwon_Kim
That’s why many people become reductionists or eliminativists. Reductionism and eliminativism are obviously ridiculous.
Instead, it makes sense to view a non-conscious awareness, wherein no memory exists, that involves into higher tiers of complexity, giving rise to the skandhas.
This is because qualia has an ontological distinction from neural activity.
If mind is not cut off from the world, there has to be something that does not demarcate it, right?
Also, read this. It’s a nice summary of Schopenhauer that leads to a non-dual conclusion:
htt
p
://www.philosopher
.eu/texts/schopenhauer-and-the-philosophy-of-mind/
evolves into higher tiers* TYPO, sorry
This comment section seriously needs an edit function.
or a bad translation.
thinking non-thinking
ends up where
uh- that last was with regard to david s at 10:01- this reply business has got to
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“It was shown recently that replacing classical geodesics with quantal (Bohmian) trajectories gives rise to a quantum corrected Raychaudhuri equation (QRE). In this article we derive the second order Friedmann equations from the QRE, and show that this also contains a couple of quantum correction terms, the first of which can be interpreted as cosmological constant (and gives a correct estimate of its observed value), while the second as a radiation term in the early universe, which gets rid of the big-bang singularity and predicts an infinite age of our universe.”
“There is a lot we can learn and discover about the universe we are living in. We can, in fact, even discover the ultimate answer. Yet that ultimate answer does not fit into any box. When you think you’ve found the ultimate box, that’s when trouble starts.”
What does this mean?
“We can, in fact, even discover the ultimate answer”, but “When you think you’ve found the ultimate box, that’s when the trouble starts”.
So, you can discover the ultimate answer, but not know what it is? Or do you mean the ultimate answer is, I don’t know? Isn’t that also a box?
Thinking non-thinking, the universe sees itself without mental constructs defining what is.
When you thinks about that box, you arises back in that box.
If Lui was here he would say that the ultimate answer is JUST THIS.
Or he might not.
If Fred were here he’d. . . oh. . . wait. . . there is no Fred.
😉
In my twenties I investigated Western philosophy but gave up after a while. To me, it looked similar to physicists looking for the “atom” — the smallest irreducible part that makes up the universe. The more they looked the more they found. And the deeper they went, the more complex and strange it got.
It seems to me that all of this theorizing is “the finger pointing at the moon”.
This is why I was attracted to Zen Buddhism.
“The problem for emergentism is it leads to causal closure and over determinism:…”
HS, brain based consciousness does not necessarily lead to determinism. A great book with various thoughts on consciousness is ‘I am a Strange Loop’ by Douglas Hofstadter. The basic idea is that the processes of consciousness function much like looping information. In such looping the effects become infinite not deterministic. Somewhat akin to placing two mirrors facing each other produce an infinite regress, or close to it.
“Emergentism strives to be compatible with physicalism, and physicalism, according to Kim, has a principle of causal closure according to which every physical event is fully accountable in terms of physical causes. This seems to leave no “room” for mental causation to operate. If our bodily movements were caused by the preceding state of our bodies and our decisions and intentions, they would be overdetermined. Mental causation in this sense is not the same as free will, but is only the claim that mental states are causally relevant. If emergentists respond by abandoning the idea of mental causation, their position becomes a form of epiphenomenalism.”
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhRhtFFhNzQ
.
This is a good TED talk by David Chalmers that deals with the epistemic division between conscious experience and the observable mechanistic empirical world. The subjective experience of red cannot exist physically, and to deny it doesn’t exist is absurd.
To quote a friend:
——
“Let us reflect upon the matter. Light, in its wave-particle dual form, hits the retina where light sensitive cells convert received light into electrical impulses. These impulses are ion molecules which move from outside the axon to within it. The moving wave of these is the impulse. This impulse travels through the optic nerve and reaches the neuron cells in the occipital lobe from where they are further directed. All of this is physical. There is only pure darkness within the skull. The retina is nowhere to be found. Though it is certainly correlated with physical activity, it is not-physical, yet it exists. Consciousness is ontologically distinct from the physical.
If we were to zoom into the brain and explore it as if it were a giant machine, factory, or mill, nowhere and in no process would we discuss conscious states such as satisfaction. We might experience the neural correlates of satisfaction, rising levels of the molecule dopamine, but never the experiential felt quality of satisfaction. Indeed, we may be dissatisfied that we have found ourselves within a giant brain. Satisfaction is internally, phenomenologically known; not externally, physically known. It is first person, not third-person knowledge. Consciousness cannot be known by materialism/physicalism and it cannot be a material substance; though, it is correlated to it as mass is correlated to gravity.” – Ontologistics video “Mind Transcends Brain” on Youtube”
—-
The point is: full knowledge of the brain does not tell us anything about the subjective experience of redness or satisfaction. If you lived in a dark room your whole life, studying the neurophysiological underpinnings of the experience of redness, this doesn’t tell you how it phenomenologically feels to experience redness. If you finally step outside the dark room and experience redness, you get new phenomenological first-person information. You cannot reduce redness to the neural dynamics of the brain given how the neural machinery does not include experiential qualities.
MOREOVER: correlation does not prove brain activity generates the mind, the mind causes the brain, brain is only mind, or that mind is only brain and body. For example, there is a perfect correlation between DNA and species, but this correlation does not prove that the DNA causes the species. “Correlation indicates a relationship, but we cannot assume what kind of relationship”. What we need for this is metaphysics.
I believe type-F monism, which is very similar to Ch’an, to be the way to answer this. My reformulation of Nagarjuna’s Shunyata argument points to the possibility of an intrinsic elementary level of formless non-conscious awareness that precedes & suffuses w/ reality. For example, under my view, chemical reactions where some of the molecules involved end up producing more copies of themselves and creating cycles with external energy sources have an elementary level of awareness that evolves into more complex forms of experience. Christof Koch, close friend of Francis Crick, recently adopted such a view in “Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist”.
My argument to reach such a solution is as such:
1) everything empirical is contingent.
2) what is empirically contingent lacks a fixed self-nature (i.e., “an independent essence that comes to define it”)
3) the mind projects the illusion of fixed self-natures onto the empirical world.
4) the self and mind lack an inherent fixed-nature
C) the mind is not cut off from world given its lack of an inherent nature
C2) given the mind’s ontological distinction, mind has an element (non-graspable awareness) that is fundamental and universal
Another very interesting book is called ‘Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness’ by James H. Austin. Definitely not a book for everyone because it has a lot of dense text on biological and neurological science which was beyond much of my ability to understand. The author is a Zen practitioner and includes personal stories to add to his ideas. I found some very interesting thoughts in this book and I recommend it to anyone seriously interested in the subject.
HS, any claim to know some non-embodied awareness has the same problems you pointed to. How could such a non-physical source interact with a physical embodiment?
Anyone claiming to have had an insight experience into such an awareness did so while embodied and quite alive. Their claims do not take this into account. Their consciousness was not dead. Awareness is simply an aspect of consciousness, like how thinking is another, etc.
“Though it is certainly correlated with physical activity, it is not-physical, yet it exists. Consciousness is ontologically distinct from the physical.”
There are many non-physical phenomena which arise from the physical and yet are distinct. Heat rises in relation to friction and pressure. Gravity from the warping of space due to large masses. A flame is dependent upon its physical fuel and does not exist independent of it.
“There are many non-physical phenomena which arise from the physical and yet are distinct. Heat rises in relation to friction and pressure. Gravity from the warping of space due to large masses. A flame is dependent upon its physical fuel and does not exist independent of it.”
Those are all physical… Are you arguing for non-reductive physicalism?
Also, I got my B.S. in Neuroscience, david s. There’s more we don’t know in all honesty. Read this quote from eminent Neuroscientist Lieberman:
“I am a neuroscientist and so 99% of the time I behave like a materialist, acknowledging that the mind is real but fully dependent on the brain. But we don’t actually know this. We really don’t. We assume our sense of will is a causal result of the neurochemical processes in our brain, but this is a leap of faith. Perhaps the brain is something like a complex radio receiver that integrates consciousness signals that float around in some form. Perhaps one part of visual cortex is important for decoding the bandwidth that contains motion consciousness and another part of the brain is critical to decoding the bandwith that contains our will. So damage to brain regions may alter our ability to express certain kinds of conscious experience rather than being the causal source of consciousness itself. ” “I don’t actually believe the radio metaphor of the brain, but I think something like it could account for all of our findings. Its unfalsifiable which is a big no-no in science. But so is the materialist view- it’s also unfalsifiable (Lieberman, 2012).”
Materialism is stupid. As Chomsky said:
Chomsky argued the Hard Problem of Consciousness “doesn’t make sense, since there is no cogent way to frame the physical at all – physics, he says, has no definition of ‘the physical’ since it abandoned contact mechanics with Newton – so he says the question ‘is the brain, or this table, physical’ doesn’t make sense, since nothing is physical, there are just different parts of the world that we try and make sense of. His essay ‘Naturalism and Dualism in the Study of Language and the Mind’ makes his position clear” (Brain Science Podcast, 2011).
HS, well if anyone can explain it I might consider it, but so far I haven’t heard anyone do so. Yet we have ample evidence of the physical nature of the brain’s processes and the types of additions to consciousness these have. As for Chomsky’s quote he is talking of how even science has entered into areas of study in which notions of physical entities are being questioned. I’m all for this shift, but we do not have to resort to thinking that sickness is caused by spirits do we? Nor that mankind is the center of the universe and is the most important aspect of its reality. We will still be hurt by bullets and rocks.
David S, physical processes are not conflated with the actual “qualitative image” of the experience. Did you check out my quotes from Ontologistics?
Also, check out Henri Bergson’s “Matter and Memory”.
I do not believe explicit memory is “stored” in the brain. If you accept that qualia (or the qualitative image and experiential felt quality) is not reducible to the brain, then you have to accept memory is not stored in the brain regardless of consciousness being emergent or not. This means there is more likely a holographic aspect to memory stored in another field.
The Lankavatara Sutra, which was fundamental to Zen practice, argues the store-house consciousness (alaya-vjnana) is fundamentally pure.
The hippocampal autoassociator hypothesis of memory storage does not explain how explicit or episodic, not procedural, memory is stored in the brain. It only shows retrieval is dependent on LTP in hippocampus and the rhythmic dynamics there (e.g., hippocampal theta precessions). A memory is a fleeting qualitative image we experience, and when it is retrieved during a dream or waking life, it is much an imperfect image of the reality we experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_and_Memory#Various_forms_of_memory
” Defending a clear anti-reductionist position, he considered memory to be of a deeply spiritual nature; the brain serving the need of orienting present action by inserting relevant memories. The brain thus being of a practical nature. Certain lesions tend to perturb this practical function, but without erasing memory as such. The memories are, instead, simply not ‘incarnated’, and cannot serve their purpose.”
“Bergson distinguishes two different forms of memory. On the one hand memories concerning habitude, replaying and repeating past action, not strictly recognized as representing the past, but utilizing it for the purpose of present action. This kind of memory is automatic, inscribed within the body, and serving a utilitarian purpose. Bergson takes as an example the learning of a verse by rote: Recitation tending toward non-reflective and mechanical repetition. The duration of the habitual recitation tends toward the regular and one may compare this kind of memory to a practical knowledge or habit. “It is habitude clarified by memory, more than memory itself strictly speaking.” Pure memory, on the other hand, registers the past in the form of “image-remembrance”, representing the past, recognized as such. It is of a contemplative and fundamentally spiritual kind, and it is free. This is true memory. Bergson takes as his example the remembrance of the lesson of learning the same verse, a dated fact that cannot be recreated. Pure memory or remembrance permits the acknowledgment that the lesson has been learned in the past, cannot be repeated, and is not internal to the body.”
=======
Here is a good quote I find interesting:
“On the biological front, both Deacon’s and Hofmeyer’s chapters are of great interest for now they ask the great question, just what is information? Deacon focuses on the problem of content, i.e., how information – that is, a code – actually specifies content. Two machines can be synced up to send/receive and correctly code/re-encode a sequence of high-low voltage blips. But in what sense is this information? Deacon labels it merely syntactic. The (semantic) question of the mapping to the content this information describes yet remains. Deacon has no particular solution. What Deacon is discussing (only indirectly) is actually the fundamental problem of perception. The light received from the surrounding environment – the ambient optic array – is transduced by the brain to a neural code (information). But a code, say three dots, “…”, can stand for a “S” in Morse code, the three blind mice, or Assad’s nose, i.e., multiple possible domains. This is the fundamental problem – what is the domain to which a code is mapped? How can the brain use a code to specify the external environment – the image of the external world (or the “content” of our perception) – without already knowing the domain, i.e., what the world looks like? The problem stated in terms of “qualia” as done by Chalmers has been simply a misleading statement of this more general problem of the origin of the image of external world – the content of perception. This leads me to what is a major gap in this interesting book, namely the complete neglect of, nay, failure to grasp the significance of, the great theorist of perception, J. J. Gibson (The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems) and his concept of information as residing in the invariance laws that define the transforming events of the external world. No model of the brain can ignore this fundamental, basic form of information. This structure of invariants is what the brain is using to specify (or be “specific to”) the external world. This “specific to” must be further placed within Bergson’s conception that the brain is in effect a modulated reconstructive wave passing through the holographic universal field, modulated by these invariants, and “specific to” a subset of the field – now an image (One can see Time and Memory my book). But Bergson’s model requires the dynamic motion (over time) of this field to be, just as Davies wondered, non-differentiable. It is a solution to Deacon’s problem of “content” and a conception of information that is revolutionary – and incapable of being handled under current notions of computation, or Shannon’s notion, or machine models of information. Perhaps someday the information theory folks will discover it.”
– Stephen E. Robbins
I think how materialism is thought of is too simplistic. More can be said to fill out our understanding.
Read my post at February 10, 2015 at 8:39 am.
Also be sure to read my other posts closely.
Explicit memory is not stored in the brain even though procedural memory is.
SamsaricHelicoid, you often repeat yourself, including re-pasting the same lengthy quotes from other thinkers. This makes your arguments harder to follow, and also creates a chore for anyone who might try to engage in discussion with you: we have to read the same text again and again, in case there’s some nuance or change.
Maybe as a matter of etiquette, we can all look for ways to be more concise? (I have frequently been guilty of spraying verbal diarrhoea on this blog, so it applies to me just as much)
This topic is clearly important to you, and you’ve done a lot of research, which is admirable – thank you for sharing your efforts. I like much of what you write, but disagree in parts. Happy to discuss further, if we can both be brief.
Ahem.
Shut up, Grand Canyon. You don’t realize how important this question is.
Why don’t you read the Lankavatara Sutra? These guys argue memory and qualitative experience are non-local and not localized in brain activity.
I think a holographic approach to conscious experience is one step in the right direction.
Excuse me, I meant explicit memory. Procedural memory is obviously stored in the brain but explicit memory is not.
The problem is these topics are too tough to discuss without quotes.
I’ve read a lot on the question for the past 4 yrs. Not a day has gone by where I haven’t obsessed over this question. I’ve been moving more towards accepting the metaphysics of the Lankavatara Sutra. To me, everything in that sutra makes sense.
I got into Zen because of this question. I don’t like how Brad Warner dismissed as not important considering the Lankavatara Sutra argues explicit memory is not stored in the brain.
If I don’t quote the sophisticated arguments, what I say will sound insane. I can try to paraphrase the quotes in order to make it more concise.
Also, read these 2 important posts:
February 10, 2015 at 8:02 am
February 10, 2015 at 8:39 am
Sure, it’s difficult subject matter, mainly because ordinary language isn’t equipped to handle it. So we create all sorts of conceptual jargon, and tie ourselves in knots wrestling over the jargon.
Language (well, English at least) only provides us with 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives: ‘I am aware that…’; ‘you are aware of…’; ‘he is aware…’.
When we start talking about ‘primordial consciousness’, or ‘qualia’ or ‘non-abiding awareness’, whatever we’re referring to is only accessible in the zero-th person (to coin a jargon). As soon as we try to word it, we have to use sentences with subject and predicate, which confuses things, and blinds us to the very awareness we want to discuss.
In your comment at 7:39am, you mention four premises and two conclusions. I broadly agree with all four premises and the first conclusion. But how do you derive your second conclusion C2 from them?
“C2) given the mind’s ontological distinction, mind has an element (non-graspable awareness) that is fundamental and universal”
Please, in your own words. Particularly, what do you mean by “given the mind’s ontological distinction”?
I will answer with a dream I’ve had:
“I once had a dream where I told my friend outside a store that he is nothing but a fiction of my mind. It was raining and at first he acted incredulous and denied it. Thus, I pointed to the horizon and lightning bolts came out. He started crying and asking what was the point of it all then? My dream zoomed into his face, and I responded with some particular statements I don’t quite remember. It believe it went like this, “I am that I am, you are what you are.” This was before I got into Buddhism.”
I have had many dreams like this.
Now, here is my question to you: given the evolutionary phylogeny and the extinction of the Homo floresiensis through wars with Homo sapiens, where does ‘your’ mind fit into all of this, and if this mind can be said to either arise or cease or neither?
The last thing I saw before waking up was his crying face zoomed in.
It is incorrect to say he died when I was awoken. It is incorrect to say he is still alive when I was awoken.
There is no clear distinction between awakening and falling into sleep. There is a blurring of dream and reality.
This mind never arised nor ceased.
This song is beautiful and eloquently illustrates my point:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEB1_4bAVYA
“Today a young man on acid realized that life is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is but a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.” -Bill Hicks, from Tool’s Third Eye
Therefore, there exists consciousness but also Consciousness (with a capital C to imply its vastness) from which we are never separate, like waves on the ocean. Or to put it another way: “The Self is the real book. You can glance anywhere in that book; nobody can take it away from you. Whenever you are free turn towards the Self.” –Ramana.
It’s a case sensitive situation, you see. When Maharshi says “turn towards the Self” he’s not talking about your facebook profile.
And also, Brad aren’t you the same guy who wrote “There is no God and he’s Always with you” ?
How is your book and its conclusion different from the scientist’s exactly?
I had a dream where Han Shan appeared after I gave a poem, and there was a bright effusing light. I woke up and used my hwadu, and had an out of body experience, or an impersonal third-person perspective of sorts, where time stopped or etc. It was weird and there was a massive headache.
actually idk if han shan, could have been stonehouse. It was just a smiling monk btw after the poem. Looked like han shan though.
i was going to write down the poem but i was too sleepy
but it involved something about orioles, glistening petals flying to the moon, and pain
HS, regarding the quote from Stephen E. Robbins, such notions would be compelling if there was more evidence than this. I would be open to this if such evidence can be gathered.
I do see problems in such explanations though. Namely the same ones you mentioned earlier about the difficulty in explaining a how a causal link would be formed between the non-physical and the physical. Also, how would such a ‘field’ or ‘store consciousness’ differentiate between our individual memories? Obviously I can not see your memories. Why wouldn’t my field of memories then be called my ‘self’? Isn’t a central part of Buddhism that there is no permanence to self?
It seems far likelier that our memories are part of our embodied existence and stored here. How exactly is unknown at this time, but I see no need to externalize memory in looking for an answer. It seems to me that more can be looked at concerning an embodied memory than a disembodied one. Our understanding of the brain is in its infancy. It will be many years, decades, centuries before the question of memory will be understood.
It seems to me that at this time many people are eager for answers as to how memory works who then just simply move the issue into another unexplained realm. Why would moving the issue of qualia into a ‘store consciousness’ be better at explaining its existence anyhow? It doesn’t seem like an answer, just a move to retain some notion of a human astral body beyond death now becomes a non-graspable awareness. I think the religious tendency is very interested in such an endeavor, thereby placing human consciousness once again into a central feature of reality, becoming yet another expression of the ego’s attempt to escape death.
Why do humans continue to believe we are so necessary?
We are not necessary. There is no ‘self’ to the field of memory (storehouse consciousness), but it helps give the illusion of a self through the discriminative individual mind.
Everything I’ve argued is perfectly compatible with the Lankavatara Sutra (Red Pine transl.), early Ch’an, and Bodhidharma’s Teachings (Red Pine transl.)
Everything I say can be experienced phenomenologically in deep states of meditation or in solitude within natural scenery. It just so happens there is a different aspect of reality that interrelates with the ‘physical’ realm, but it isn’t a New Agey way or supernatural way that any of this happens. This other realm that relates to supposed physicality of life is holographic and qualitative.
The storehouse consciousness does not make us unique, but it simply influences rebirth. Or put into another terms, it influences how we conceptualize each proceeding moment. It will also influence our next rebirth when we die, but we will have no memory of what has happened. It’s like a dream… For example, have you ever had a dream of being in an entirely different role or character, yet there was still awareness without retrieval of memory? I have had dreams where I have fallen in love and also told a friend he is nothing but a fiction of my mind.
I once had a dream where I told my friend outside a store that he is nothing but a fiction of my mind. He denied it, so I pointed to the horizon and lightning bolts came out. He started crying and fell on his knees, and I responded with some statements I don’t quite remember. It went like this, “I am that I am, you are what you are.” This was before I got into Buddhism.
It relates to the brain in the sense there is an underlying holographic field, perhaps in dark matter. There is a reciprocal interaction between this modulative holographic field and the brain that consolidates and retrieves memory. However, the qualitative image of explicit memory itself is not possible within the brain itself, for that is an ontological conflation, as the Ontologistics quotes pointed out.
It also affects our perception of motion.
For example, look at Clive Wearing. As a consequence of not being able to hold episodic memory for longer than ~7 seconds, he is stuck with a very strong sense of present moment without realizing it. The storehouse consciousness gives a continuity to narrative lives and lived experience. The storehouse consciousness is more readily accessible than our commun
Its relation is difficult to decipher, but there is no doubt the materialist conception of life is too simple-minded. I recommend reading the Lankavatara Sutra. It’s not good to treat it like doctrine, but I do feel a lot of what it has to say is applicable to questions like The Hard problem of Consciousness when supplemented with readings of genius figures like Henri Bergson and contemporary commentaries on him.
I have had many dreams like that. Once I had a dream I was talking to someone. I became aware that I was dreaming, and I sat down talking with the person. I eventually broke into tears after I realized how real he or she was. I have had many profound dreams like this, such as the other one I mentioned above about a friend crying asking, “What is all this for?” (I forgot to mention that part). I responded while pointing to the horizon with lightning bolts come out… and I told him he is nothing but a projection of my mind (or was it fiction, I forgot). I forgot to also mention it was raining.
I forgot the conversation, but I do agree with Socrates when he said, “That nothing is ever learned, it is simply recalled or remembered.” It’s because reality is nothing but One Mind.
There is some truth to Biocentrism from Lanza, and I think it has something to do with the storehouse consciousness and One Mind from Lankavatara Sutra. Regardless, if materialism is shown to be the case, there is no point to practice this path anymore and the McMindfulness approach is more accurate.
Words, words, and more words with no correlates in the reality of here and now. You write about imaginary universes that only exist in dictionaries.
The reality of here and now is One Mind. Read Lankavatara Sutra.
Schopenhauer called it the “Will”, but I think it’s more accurate to view it as One Mind.
“When you think you’ve found the ultimate box, that’s when trouble starts.” ~ Brad
“Consciousness is just an illusion.” ~ Nishi
So Nishi’s box is where the trouble started? Oh no, it started way before that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEB1_4bAVYA
“I do not believe explicit memory is “stored” in the brain. If you accept that qualia (or the qualitative image and experiential felt quality) is not reducible to the brain, then you have to accept memory is not stored in the brain regardless of consciousness being emergent or not.”
HS, you have found what makes sense to you.
But I do not see how externalizing such notions as qualia have anymore power of explanation because of the problems I’ve already mentioned. I am capable of changing my understanding though. It just seems like an intellectual, language based issue to me. How qualia becomes a problem is based somewhat on how we understand the issue. It may be that this issue is closely tied to how we ascribe meaning with abstract conceptual thinking itself. It may be that the experience of qualia is simply a way we describe our relation to any particular sense impression, not some external event. Why would such an experiential affect be a problem? We label a sense experience with a term called ‘red’. Does it exist in reality? Well from a label point of view no, because we made that label, but in an experiential one yes. Isn’t this ‘problem’ a conceptual one at heart based upon our definition and labeling of such an experience? People get to thinking that after having created a label that then this means that it confirms what was in essence an experience is now an object. Then thinking is moved into asking where does this object exist? But isn’t it just a mental object? It doesn’t leave the issue of how consciousness comes to be in processes of the brain out of playing a central role in the answer.
Likewise, what is called awareness is so completely part of consciousness that I see no sign that it is not yet another label for an aspect of consciousness. The ability of our minds to shift and change makes many experiences possible. With various senses coming into combination comes our perceptions of the world. If our minds shift away from processing other functions such as the senses and intellect, a more base function of consciousness, which can be labeled awareness, could still operate. In such states the experience would present itself as a singular one, not dependent on the processes of the intellect, nor bodily senses. I have had such an experience. I don’t think this was evidence of another realm, although I can see how some Buddhists would interpret it in that way.
HS overall I respect your view and would be very interested in learning something which shifted my view, but my experience at this time doesn’t lead me in that direction, and considering all those religious and mystical explanations which failed to bring usable knowledge to issues of cosmology, biology, history, etc. I remain skeptical of slipping once again into answers which place human’s into a central feature of reality.
HS, regarding the some Buddhists who claim to know of ‘store consciousness’, they could be correct, but it is also quite possible that the experience that they drew that conclusion from was an affect of altered states of consciousness, and well within the realm of possible experience of our complex brain processes. Such experiences could be seen as a mind in such a state where it doesn’t differentiate in a normal manner, and possibly its perception of its own memories are conceived of as a vast storeroom, much like how dreams reconstruct features of our emotions from the previous day into vivid imagery.
One thing I think about regarding the knowledge Buddhism makes regarding consciousness is how limited it is by the very premise of using consciousness to look into itself. On the other hand, the methods of inquiry science has developed have revealed many facets of consciousness that would be impossible to discover from one looking into their own experience. A book called, ‘Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind’ by V. S. Ramachandran has various examples of altered consciousness caused by malfunctioning brains. None of the odd experiences mentioned could possibly be explained through those people looking at their experiences. Their experience would simply be what it was. People who see only ovals instead of faces. Ghost appendages. Etc. But with a scientific inquiry answers could be formed and investigated. This makes it more clear to me how limited Buddhist notions can be when it comes to making claims of experiencing other realms. These may be moving experiences, but do they exist externally? Can they be considered any proof at all?
I wouldn’t think so. But this is only my best guess given what information I have.
I’ve read parts of VS Ramachandran’s Tell Tale Brain and other numerous books by Antonio Damasio and other Neuroscientists like Nicolelis. I did afterall get my degree in neuroscience. I did well in classes such as Functional Neuroimaging and more. However, Neuroscience does not have much to add to metaphysical discussion, which was the first thing I was taught in my Design of Methods class. We were taught to simply form a hypothesis and set an alpha value. If after gathering data (with set controls, IVs, and DVs), we statistically analyze it and get a p-value less than the set alpha value, the results are significant and the null hypothesis is rejected. The information can then be used to form predictive models or analyze patterns, but it does not say anything about the nature of reality which involves a different dialectic, that of metaphysics and praxis of practices involving gnosis (i.e., in our case, just sitting with no intent to get anything).
I am convinced by Stephen E. Robbins theory, inspired by Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson explicated in Time and Memory: that there is a universal, qualitative holographic field our brains attune to in varying frequencies. This universal holographic field has an elementary awareness at the null scale of time, and there is a non-differentiable flow of time which Dogen would agree with. Read my post at February 9, 2015 at 4:53 pm . Stephen E. Robbins gives a good argument for this from his background in computer science and physics. It is also compatible with the Lankavatara Sutra and my personal experiences on and off the cushion. I agree, however, reifying and clinging to any perspective is detrimental to practice, but materialist inclinations and biases are very destructive to all Dharmic practices.
The Lieberman quote shows how materialism is also unfalsifiable, so it is incorrect to assume Neuroscience points to materialist definitions of brain and mental experience (i.e., emergentism or reductionism). I still believe in the importance of not getting lost in woo woo thought and losing connection to basic immediate experience in day-to-day life, but I also believe the mind is definitely not cut off from the world. The mind, being not cut off from the world, is thus a fundamental aspect in both world and individual’s mind. Here is a koan I gave to Shin Chan: check February 10, 2015 at 9:52 am and February 10, 2015 at 10:08 am .
The present moment is the totality, but it also mind. At the null scale of time (the present moment) there is an elementary level of awareness. It’s not faith to believe this, but rather experience. This awareness is not one that involves memory (4th skandha) for its continuance or attention to memory, which is what the 5th Skandha consciousness is. A non-conscious awareness without basis in memory is difficult to conceptualize. This is why we sit without clinging to anything, doing away with anything, wanting anything, and want not wanting.
If awareness OF not-x (NOTE, consciousness is always OF something, which depends on memory) was not fundamental, there is then no reason to practice. A libertine path, like the Carvakans, is thus the best. One Mind was and should still be fundamental to the practice of Zen.
Bodhidharma’s number 1 book was the Lankavatara Sutra afterall, and his discourses (transl. by Red Pine) say the same thing. That link to Dharma Wheel also shows how previous teachers accepted it.
I appreciate our discussion, but without One Mind, we are no longer dealing with Ch’an/Zen but something else entirely different.
HS, I have to be away from my computer for a while, thanks for all the quotes and links.
A labyrinth of illusions stretching to the horizon.
Whatever Dogen said about the nets and snares.
“So abandon all practice founded on intellectual comprehension, running after words and holding to the letter, and learn the about-face which directs your light to the inside, to illuminate your own true nature.
By themselves, body and mind drop off, and your original face appears.
If you want to attain awakening, you must practice awakening, without delay.”
Great faith, great determination, and great doubt in the practice to awaken to the ONE Mind, that all beings and things in this world share.
But you cannot “share” the “ONE Mind” because your are obviously OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND!!!
Seek help from a licensed psychotherapist immediately.
Grand Canyon, so far this week you’ve dumped on ethnic minorities, homosexuals, autism sufferers and the mentally disabled. Plus a few choice expletives. That can point to just one diagnosis.
Seek help. I hear padded cells are pretty plush these days 😉
Nichiren/SGI folks like to talk about Shariputra being oh, so smart, but one of the last to attain enlightenment, because he was so wrapped up in intellectual nonsense. The blog comments remind me of that. Also, I’ve been spending way to much time intellectualizing shit at home and not enough time doing zazen. Anyway.
Awesome post, Yoshiyahu!
“Although the scriptures proclaim ‘Thou art That’, it is only a sign of weakness of mind to meditate ‘I am That, not this’, because you are eternally That. What has to be done is to investigate what one really is and remain That.”
http://www.prahlad.org/gallery/forty_verses_on_reality_by_raman.htm
The bottom line is…
You were born (Screaming, probably traumatized by it. But you can’t remember birth, never mind what happened before then… and even if you vividly ‘remember’ past lives, it’s pretty surely a fantasy or hallucination).
You will die (sooner than you hope, probably in severe pain. And you can’t say for sure what happens after – but most likely when you’re gone, you’re gone).
And in between birth and death you’re on your own. Everything you know and perceive comes via your own dubious first person subjectivity. You don’t ever really know what weird shit will happen next, and you don’t ever really know if any other person understands you or cares about you or not, or if everyone thinks you’re scum: yo’ mama, yo’ papa, yo’ dog. You never know if the world is a friendly place, or if it’s out to get you, or its completely disinterested (a fair bet). You don’t know how real your memories are; you don’t know how biased and distorted your self-image is; your deepest beliefs could be proved wrong at any time.
You don’t know for totally sure whether anything you perceive has real existence. It’s just that you noticed some things seeming to happen again and again (like the sun rising every day), so you started trusting them.
You can create whatever stories you want to give a false sense of security: God, One Mind, The American Dream, a Low Sodium Diet, True Love. But deep down you know there’s woodworm in all those crutches.
That’s what you’ve got to work with, folks. Buddha say Make the Best of It.
And have yourself a real nice day! 🙂
And yet, and yet…
“…somebody has sold you a bill of goods by informing you that you were born, and that memory stays very firm with you. Initially, you did not have this memory of birth, but your mother or your parent or somebody else rammed it down your throat. Subsequently, this concept was constantly reinforced with steady effort like driving a nail into a wall. As a result, that memory has become very strong with you; ultimately, this very concept is strangulating you.”
-Nisargadatta Maharaj
… true. Even my birth and death are unproven hypotheses.
“Actually I don’t remember being born, it must have happened during one of my black outs.”
-Jim Morrison
A monk said: “Your disciple is sick all over. Please cure me.”
The Master said: “I shall not cure you.”
The monk said: “Why don’t you cure me?”
The Master said: “So that you neither live nor die.”
Shinchan Ohara, you never answered my question in relation to my dream. I’m going to post it again, a bit modified for concision, given how the formatting of this comment section can make things a bit confusing. Also, check out the poems I posted on One Mind on the bottom at February 10, 2015 at 6:00 pm:
“I once had a dream where I told my friend outside a store that he is nothing but a fiction of my mind. It was raining and at first he acted incredulous and denied it. Thus, I pointed to the horizon and lightning bolts came out. He started crying and asking what was the point of it all then? My dream zoomed into his face, and I responded with some particular statements I don’t quite remember. It believe it went like this, “I am that I am, you are what you are.” The last thing I saw before waking up was his crying face zoomed in.
This was before I got into Buddhism.
I have had many dreams like this.
Now, here is my question to all of you:
Given the evolutionary phylogeny and the extinction of the Homo floresiensis through wars with Homo sapiens, where does ‘your’ mind fit into all of this, and if this mind can be said to either arise or cease or neither?
It is incorrect to say he died when I was awoken. It is incorrect to say he is still alive when I was awoken.
There is no clear distinction between awakening and falling into sleep. There is a blurring of dream and reality.
This mind never arised nor ceased.
Read the Lankavatara Sutra.”
Here are some poems from older Chinese Ch’an Buddhists on the One Mind that is beyond conceptualization and intellectualization:
====
My mind is like the autumn moon / clear and bright in a pool of jade / nothing can compare / what more can I say.”
– Han Shan (Cold Mountain)
====
“Cold Mountain has a line
My mind is like the autumn moon
I have a line of my own
my mind outshines the autumn moon
not that the autumn moon isn’t bright
but once it’s full it fades
how unlike my mind
forever full and bright
as for what the mind is like
what more can I say.”
– Stonehouse (Shiwu)
====
– “Look for the real and it becomes more distant
try to end delusions and they just increase
followers of the Way have a place that stays serene
when the moon is in the sky it’s reflection is in the waves.
Trying to become a buddha is easy
but ending delusions is hard
how many frosty moonlit nights
have I sat and felt the cold before dawn.
Stripped of conditions my mind is a blank
emptied of existence my nature is bare
often at night my windows turn white
the moon and the stream visit my door.
Work with no mind and all work stops
no more passion or sorrow
but don’t think no mind means you’re done
the thought of no-mind still remains
No mind in my work the wind through the trees
no work in my mind the moon in space
windsound and moonlight wear away
one layer then another.”
– Stonehouse (Shiwu) (multiple poems combined as one, each stanza is an individual poem)
====
– “That which is called the City of Illusion contains the Two Vehicles, the Ten Stages of a Bodhisattva’s Progress, and the two forms of Full Enlightenment. All of them are powerful teachings for arousing people’s interest, but they still belong to the City of Illusion.
Yet since there are neither Buddha nor sentient beings, neither subject nor object, where can there be a City of Precious Things? If you ask, ‘Well, so much for the City of Illusion, but where is the Place of Precious Things?’, it is a place to which no directions can be given.
All we can say is that it is close by. It cannot be exactly described, but when you have a tacit understanding of its substance, it is there.”
– Huang Po
====
“If you use your mind to study reality, you won’t understand either your mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind, you’ll understand both. Those who don’t understand don’t understand understanding. And those who understand, understand not understanding. People capable of true vision know that the mind is empty. They transcend both understanding and not understanding. The absence of both understanding and not understanding is true understanding.
Seen with true vision, form isn’t simply form, because form depends on mind. And mind isn’t simply mind, because mind depends on form. Mind and form create and negate each other. That which exists exists in relation to that which doesn’t exist. And that which doesn’t exist doesn’t exist in relation to that which exists. This is true vision. By means of such vision nothing is seen and nothing is not seen. Such vision reaches throughout the ten directions without seeing: because nothing is seen; because not seeing is seen; because seeing isn’t seeing. What mortals see are delusions. True vision is detached from seeing.
The mind and the world are opposites, and vision arises where they meet. When your mind doesn’t stir inside, the world doesn’t arise outside. When the world and the mind are both transparent, this is true vision. And such understanding is true understanding.”
– Bodhidharma
Those poems show how the One Mind (non-abiding awareness) was fundamental to Zen/Ch’an practice:
http://www.dharmawheel.net/viewtopic.php?f=69&t=9510
(read Astus first post…
it’s the 2nd post on that topic)
Non-abiding awareness, that is non-conscious, non-reflective awareness, is fundamental and universal in the world. It, however, cannot be grasped. This is why we sit without clinging to anything, doing away with anything, wanting anything, and want not wanting.
To abandon this to abandon everything Bodhidharma stood for… to contradict the Lankavatara Sutra.
SamsaricHelicoid,
That is a darn handsome box full of fine ideas that you are putting together here.
What do you plan on doing with it after it’s done?
Cheers.
More Shikantaza and study.
SamsaricHelicoid, I had read your question, but didn’t have an answer yet. I will attempt an answer in my next comment.
But PLEASE, stop repeat-posting long quotes… it makes it EVEN MORE CONFUSING for people (including me) who wish to read and take part in discussion.
Also, the internet costs money – repeat posts waste disk space and cpu on Brad’s server, which are not free, and some readers may have to pay for bandwidth.
I apologize. I’m muse used to talking on forums where there is an edit function.
I tend to edit posts at least 10 times.
I man I know! Not being able to edit. . . I’m not sure why Brad likes that setting. I used to run a music forum and edit was key to keeping things tidy. People who say mean things can just delete them later, and grammar, spelling, and incoherent posts can be sorted.
Oh well, I guess Brad is a permanent post kind of blogger. Mediation will just have to also mean meditation 😉
Even that started with a typo! Ha!
“Also, the internet costs money — repeat posts waste disk space and cpu on Brad’s server, which are not free, and some readers may have to pay for bandwidth.”
Seriously, dude? What is this AOL circa 1998? Lol. . . .
Q: How many performance artists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: I don’t know either. I left at intermission.
[Response to SH @ 6:07pm]
Re: Your dream. It was a dream, just that. The ‘friend’ in your dream was ‘alive’ within the context of that dream. In your waking life it makes no sense to say he is/was/will be either alive or dead. Most people don’t ascribe personhood to dream characters. Do you?
Re: “Given the evolutionary phylogeny… where does ‘your’ mind fit into all of this, and if this mind can be said to either arise or cease or neither?” I don’t see that homo floriensis or evolutionary phylogeny are relevant to this discussion.
Apart from that, I have never had any experience whatsoever of my mind. ‘My Mind’ is a philosophical concept. I directly experience thoughts, dreams, sensations, emotions, hallucinations – I call them ‘mine’ because I believe that nobody else can have direct experience of them. ‘My mind’ is just the sum total of those phenomena of experience that I believe are private. I have another philosophical concept called ‘the Material World’: it is the sum total of phenomena that I believe can be shared (to some extent, in principle) with other sentient beings. I believe (as a working hypothesis) that I am a sentient being, that there are other sentient beings, and that they also have ‘minds’.
I don’t believe that it makes sense to talk about ‘my mind’ existing when there is no subjective experience. I would guess that – when phenomena appear, mind appears; without phenomena, mind disappears. But, by definition, I have never experienced a time without any phenomena. So I am agnostic about whether mind arises or ceases ever.
As for your idea of a universal One Mind or a primordial awareness associated with physical matter. There may someday be scientific evidence for it, although I can’t see how at the moment. At present it’s untestable either by reason or by experiment, so I’m agnostic about that too.
I disagree completely when you say that Zen is no longer Zen if we lose the idea of a mystical, transpersonal universal awareness. Looking at all those old poems and quotes dealing with ‘Mind’, I note that none of them credit it with any properties or attributes… that’s because ‘The Mind’ was just a teaching tool in early Zen, a transitional object that students could temporarily attach to, while they got rid of attachments to material and intellectual hang-ups. Once a student no longer abides in phenomena, the artificial concept of ‘One Mind’ can be ditched too.
I think of a dharma (very small d) as the basic existent in Buddhist theory. A dharma is a momentary phenomenon: in itself it is neither subject or object (or it is both). It has no self-being so it doesn’t persist for any duration of time. Our concepts of self and other, and of persisting objects are built up from these dharmas. A particular dharma can only be part of one single sentient being’s experience, but the momentary dharmas are caught in a complex perpetual web of cause and effect.
Like ‘mind’, ‘dharma’ (in this sense) is just a teaching tool in the final analysis – to teach the more important lessons of dependent origination and impermanence. Deeply learning those lessons helps us deal with the ‘big stuff’ that Brad mentions like climate change and war.
That’s my take on it, I’m very open to correction by whoever knows more/better about this stuff
To HS regarding your comment from 1:21pm 2-10-15
“…a universal, qualitative holographic field our brains attune to in varying frequencies.”
Aren’t there huge gapping holes in such an idea? So how exactly would our brain attune to this and how could something non-physical interact with the physical? And what is contained in this holographic field? What is not contained in it? How would this resolve the same issues regarding determinism if everything was stored here? How would free will enter into this container, and if it wasn’t in the container how would it arise? This idea doesn’t seem to solve any of your initial skepticism of an emergent consciousness.
“…I also believe the mind is definitely not cut off from the world. The mind, being not cut off from the world, is thus a fundamental aspect in both world and individual’s mind.”
Even with consciousness as an emergent property the phenomena of consciousness would surely depend on the world. I find it odd you picture such a mind like an object that could be separate from the world, especially considering how the senses touch the world. Seems you’ve taken the word materialist too literally.
“If awareness OF not-x (NOTE, consciousness is always OF something, which depends on memory) was not fundamental, there is then no reason to practice.”
The fundamental teaching in Buddhism is the end of suffering. This is the reason for practice. One doesn’t have to believe in notions as you, or I do, to find reason to practice.
Ultimately neither you nor I know without a doubt that our concepts are ultimately correct, and it doesn’t matter either if we are actually looking to ease, or end our suffering.
Give me at least 6-12 months to answer to this.
“The point is: full knowledge of the brain does not tell us anything about the subjective experience of redness or satisfaction. ”
I would say, full knowledge of the brain does not tell us anything about mind as Bodhidharma used the word.
I myself start by relaxing until habitual activity in the movement of breath ceases– that can happen in the blink of an eye ’cause I’m familiar with the feeling, or not. When habitual activity in the movement of breath ceases, I relax the activity that comes into awareness, and the involuntary activity of muscles that is generated out of the stretch of ligaments and fascia sits. The mind that has no coughing or sighing, the mind like a wall, is where the sitting takes place.
Where the sitting takes place can move, in fact tends to move like there were waves on the level ground, and sometimes moves in response to things on the other side of the wall that are seemingly unknown to my senses.
If you have a $1.90, the subjective experience I describe can perhaps be found at the bottom of a cup of coffee from Peet’s, if the bottom of the cup drops out.
SamsaricHelicoid’s amateur philosophical musings are logically invalid and logically unsound because of two of the most common logical errors: invalid premises and non sequiturs. Even professional philosophers throughout history, including whoever wrote the Lankavatara, make these mistakes. Here is a slightly exaggerated example:
“All birds are green. The King of France is a bird. Therefore, the King of France is green and Jesus is the One True God.”
“Flying Fig”, eh?!
Reminds me of the local expression “trying to kill an ass by hitting it with soft figs” (Tuer un âne à coups de figues molles”).
Applies to any attempt to curb Grand Canyon’s foul mouthing…
Believe it or not, there are legitimate reasons for my recent obscene and offensive outbursts other than mental illness or deliberate trolling. Sometimes the most “compassionate speech” requires curse words and abusive language.
Post after post, comment after comment, I see mostly abstract conceptualizing about abstract concepts using logical fallacies, appeals to unsupported scriptures, and misinterpretation of science in failed attempts to support abstract conceptualizing about abstract concepts, etc…
Many of the people who comment here need someone who will slap them in the head and/or shout in their face “What is the reality of this moment, right here, right now??!!” like the Old Zen Masters in koans. One of Brad Warner’s worst weaknesses as a teacher is that he does not do that, and as a result delusions persist and multiply. Instructing someone to “just sit” can actually do more harm than good if they sit there endlessly ruminating about abstract concepts with no correlates in the reality of here and now. Contemplation can be mistaken for meditation and reinforce delusions and illusions.
WAKE UP!!
RIGHT NOW!!!
Give yourselves 30 slaps on my behalf.
Science itself is mostly the real failure, though not entirely.
If you want to agree with people like Patrichia Churchland or dogmatic eliminativist (look it up if you don’t know what it means smart one) Neuroscientists that we are nothing but a brain and its emergent processes, then go ahead Grand Canyon. You’re the real idiot.
Do you have any background in science at all?
Yeah, right! Because that skillful means is really going to work, isn’t it? ;P
Will you make it into the koan collections of the year 3000?…
A commentard came to National Teacher Warner’s cyber-sangha, and said:
“One Mind is universal, because homo floresiensis, and intrinsic brain gloop qua Rupert Lankavatara Sheldrake, ergo type f-monism”
Grand Canyon replied:
“You are a retarded queer cuntshit sand-n*****r”
On hearing this, the chains of cogitation snapped, and the commentard realized something.
… no, you won’t.