First of all, “mind” or “consciousness” are the words used to refer to our intellect, thoughts, feelings, emotions, unconscious, subconscious – the entire spectrum of our inner being: all of that’s our mind, our consciousness.
Second, the job of our mind is to cognize, to be aware, to know: these words are synonymous.
Third, your mind is not physical, it’s not your brain – that’s the biggest shock to us, the biggest shock. This doesn’t mean your brain doesn’t play a role. With no wish to insult neuroscientists, I like to say that your brain, and indeed all the other physical parts of us – the genes, the DNA, the chemicals – they’re basically indicators of what’s going on in your mind. The mind works interdependently with the brain and the body, but only at a grosser level.
Fourth, mind has much subtler levels of cognition – beyond the senses, beyond conceptuality – that don’t depend upon the brain etc. in order to function. These levels of cognition, of course, are not posited in the neuroscientific model. The genius Indian yogis of three thousand years ago discovered this level of mind.
Fifth, the other thing that’s shocking to us, whether you’re a philosophical materialist or a religious person who believes in a creator, is that your mind doesn’t come from anyone else. In both these cases, someone else makes you – someone else creates you, isn’t it?
God gives you a soul, and that’s what determines you are a human as opposed to a dog – he doesn’t give dogs a soul. Or, if you’re a materialist, your mother made you, your father made you, and you track yourself back to Grandma, Grandpa, and back to the monkeys. That’s the system we have, isn’t it, in relation to the physical. Well, Buddha doesn’t argue with that: it’s easily proven that your body comes from your parents.
But your mind doesn’t come from them, or a creator or anyone else. It’s your own. For Buddha, it’s just not viable that your anger, your love, your compassion, your kindness, your intelligence, your being good at football or good at music – these mental tendencies – can come from someone else. That’s too weird for the Buddha!
In fact, the more I think about and study and try to utilize these Buddhist views of the world – I’m not talking about high realizations – the more weird it sounds, the more strange it is, the more odd it is to think that you’re the handiwork of someone else: it’s a view that’s full of contradictions, even theoretically.
If you’re trying to practice Buddhism, really taking on board as your hypothesis the view that your mind is your own and doesn’t come either from your parents or a creator, then this demands the question: where does it come from– because it certainly can’t come from nowhere!
The mind is, as they call it, a mental continuum: these thoughts come from the previous thoughts, which come from the previous thoughts, and so on, going right back to the first moment in your mother’s womb. You can track your body back to the parents, but not the mind: you track that back to previous moments of that very mind, which, a few weeks before, was in another body; and so on, back and back. We came into this mother’s womb fully programmed with our own mental tendencies from before: they’re a bunch of habits.
And this, of course, implies the view of reincarnation, and the law of karma, which is absolutely central to the entire Buddhist worldview: if we can prove definitely that there’s no such thing as a mind that continued from a previous life, then the whole of Buddhism would collapse into a heap of incoherent absurdity.
You don’t have to just believe this, you take it as the view that you work with: you hypothesize it. What else can you do? First your teacher tells you that one plus one is two, so you take it as your hypothesis. You open your mind to the possibility. Then you go home and think it through, and then you prove it.
Same with this – just the same: you open your mind to the possibility: your mind is your own, it doesn’t come from someone else, it continues from a previous life. Maybe Buddha’s right, let’s look at it.
Intellectually, it’s not complicated, it’s not hard to hypothesize this – it’s just that we don’t like it, that’s all. It’s all there in the Buddhist literature from the great yogis back to Buddha, detailed. It’s up to us whether we want to take it on board or not.
One of the key factors for me, just personally, in trying to put my money where my mouth is – to practice this stuff, apply it in my daily life – is the experiential implication of this idea that my mind doesn’t come from someone else: my anger doesn’t come from someone else, my love doesn’t come from someone else, my being good at football doesn’t come from someone else: it’s mine – it comes from my past habit. That’s really delicious.
Because why? Because that means I have to stop being a victim, you know, stop blaming someone else for who I am – it’s quite profound. You take responsibility for who you are, you take this view on board: “It’s my anger. Yeah, my boyfriend punched me – you all saw it.” But we think the anger comes from the punch, you know, or we think the happiness comes from his kindness. No, it doesn’t.
This is a huge point, and fundamental in all of Buddhism: that what goes on in your mind is yours, and the things outside – the world out there – are merely catalysts, secondary causes of what arises in your mind, not the main cause. All the good as well as the bad. You own it.
When we take this view and put it into practice, then we are free. We become more and more powerful, more and more confident. Then we can really transform our mind into its marvelous potential for clarity and goodness – and, the bonus, fulfillment and joy!