The mind is not physical – that’s the first point. It doesn’t mean we haven’t got a brain. The mind is inextricably linked with our physicality: mind and body are inextricably linked, but they’re not the same entity, they’re not the same thing. This is Buddha’s view.
Then you’ve got different levels of mind. You’ve got the grosser level, which is the sensory consciousness, which clearly depends upon the presence of a decent working body: eye consciousness, tongue consciousness, and so forth. Consciousness and mind, these words are synonymous, broadly speaking.
Then we have mental consciousness – mental consciousness – which is the thoughts and feelings and emotions. That’s where the workshop is, as Lama Zopa says, you know?
One of our main jobs in knowing our mind is to learn to distinguish between the sensory consciousness and the mental consciousness –this point is huge, and when we get it, it’s a revelation.
We know we’ve got love and compassion and anger and jealousy – we know they’re there and that they mightn’t be to do with eye consciousness, let’s say, but in our culture, in our world – if we’re samsaric, put it that way – we so identify with being the body that our senses dominate our lives. As Lama Yeshe puts it, we make the body the boss.
We know we have intellect, we know we have thoughts and feelings and emotions, but our sensory consciousness is at the forefront of our being. From the second we wake up in the morning until the second we go to sleep at night, we’re mainly aware of our self as our body, you know? The tiniest experience on your skin, it can shock you, or slightly stub your toe when you get out of bed, your day’s ruined.
The Buddha’s saying we’ve got mental consciousness and we have sensory. But we’re so dominated by our sense of being the body that we don’t make a distinction.
There’s always this example I use, a simple example to show the radical difference between them, although they’re so linked. This is giving us a doorway into how we can learn to change our mind, because that’s the fundamental point. If Buddha says we can get rid of the rubbish – anger, depression, jealousy, and we know how primordial they are – then we’ve got to get a doorway in.
How can we do that? What does that mean? This is really giving us one indicator: by making a distinction between the sensory and the mental.
A simple example: I might look at this cup and I’ll say, “What a really nice-looking cup. That’s a very pretty cup.” I might say something like that.
So, of course, we all assume, as I look at the cup and you hear the words come out my mouth, we assume without analysis that my eyes are seeing a pretty cup. Well, from the Buddhist perspective, don’t be ridiculous!
Sensory consciousness – spelling it out – is that part of our mind, which, remember, is not physical, that functions through the medium of the physical – in this case the eyeball, the eyelid open, the nerves, all the bits and pieces all working together – to enable a cognition of the eye consciousness.
The definition of mind in Buddhism is 1. that which is clear, or luminous, in other words not physical; and 2. that which can cognize, that which can know, that which can be aware.
One way they talk in Buddhism is the mind, the subject, always has something it cognizes, the object; so every moment our mind is cognizing something. So each of the five sense consciousnesses has their own object that they cognize, it’s very specific.
Now, eye consciousness can only cognize two things: shape and color. The senses are like dumb animals, actually, but we give them enormous power, as Lama points out.
Looking again at the cup, if eye consciousness can only cognize shape and color, we must ask ourselves, “Well, that’s interesting, which part of my mind is cognizing a pretty cup?” Because those words came out of my mouth, my mind must be thinking it.
Well, that’s your mental consciousness, that’s where the workshop is: all the millions of thoughts and feelings and emotions, all our viewpoints and opinions; millions of thoughts in there – and this is just at the grosser level that we function at day-to-day, forget about the subtler levels.
What’s happening is this: the millisecond my eyes go to the cup – and I’m really not kidding – quicker than Google, my mental consciousness is accessed, where all my memories are, you know? If I haven’t lost my memory, and I’m not just looking blankly at the cup, then in a billionth of a second, I’ll access my mental consciousness where all those thoughts are stored, and based on what I’ve developed in this life – the taste I’ve got, what I think, and it’s red, and it’s this, and it’s a cup, and it’s that, there’s millions of thoughts – quicker than Google, out of my mouth will come the words that are expressing the thoughts in my mental consciousness: “What a pretty cup.” Now, that happens in like a billionth of a second, doesn’t it?
In other words, they’re all opinions, thoughts, viewpoints that I project onto that thing called a cup. So, the difference between the sensory and the mental, this alone is incredible and can really show us, from the Buddhist perspective, the way the mind works. And this can be a powerful basis for really learning to practice.
So what’s an example of putting this into practice? Let’s say when you get out of bed you stub your toe – the tiniest event, you stub your toe. So, what’s happening here? There is an unpleasant feeling experienced by the tactile consciousness – it’s a sensory experience – but a millisecond later you get angry.
We assume, don’t we, that the unpleasant feeling and the anger are virtually the same experience: “Well, of course I’m angry, what do you think, I stubbed my toe!”
But if you have this view that sensory is one and mental is another this can be a basis for practice. You can’t control the sensory, you can’t stop that unless you cut your nerves off: an unpleasant feeling happens, that’s just the nature of having a body, you have a sensory experience. But we can learn to change the response, which is mental consciousness, a thought, an opinion, a viewpoint, in this case anger. In the end, that’s the one that causes the most suffering, that’s the one that dominates us – and that’s the one we can change.
We spend our lives having opinions about the objects of our five senses – people, events, things – but we assume that they’re objective facts, that’s the shocking part.
Even just this point should be like a revelation for our mind. This is the doorway into practice: that we can change our mind.
When Buddha says you can change your mind, that’s what he means, that’s all he means.