Robina’s Blog
2 September, 2021
We all wonder when did things begin? When did I begin? We all deeply assume there has to be a first moment. If we have a religious philosophy that asserts a creator, we track ourselves and everything else back to a creator, don’t we? The Christians have extensive teachings on how it’s possible for there to be a First Cause.
What’s Buddha’s view? The law of cause and effect runs the universe. And if you have cause and effect then by definition you cannot have a first cause. What caused it? It’s just not viable. The universe consists of matter and minds: they’re both the product of the unceasing, beginningless process of cause and effect. Matter and minds, therefore, are beginningless.
This is hilarious on first hearing! Why? Because we have the primordial assumption that way back somewhere there has to be a first moment. In his various discussions with scientists, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said – and I’m paraphrasing – “Big bang? No problem! Just not the first big bang, that’s all.” That’s pretty tasty!
As far as I, this person, is concerned, because Buddha clearly shows that mind and body are not the same, we can track them back and back to different sources. Right now, they’re combined, they work together interdependently, but they’re separate. Mind is not physical: this a fundamental point that’s at the center of Buddha’s views about the universe, happiness, suffering, and so forth.
If we can prove he’s wrong, then the entire world view of Buddhism collapses into a heap of incoherent nonsense.
Think of our mind – our thoughts and feelings and emotions and unconscious and subconscious: this entire spectrum of our inner being – as a river of mental moments. We can track these moments back in an unbroken chain of moments and will inexorably get back to the first moment of conception.
We all know, and Buddha agrees, that the moment before conception the egg was in our mother’s body and the sperm was in our father’s body. The mind? That comes, simply, from the previous moment of that very river of mental moments.
According to Buddha, we do not track any part of our being back to a creator. We don’t need creating! And that’s where the law of karma comes in: as His Holiness the Dalai Lama calls it, “Self-creation.” Basically every millisecond of what any being thinks and does and says just naturally programs the mind, leaves seeds in the mind that will ripen in the future as our own experiences, our own person.
So, what’s the experiential implication of this view? It’s that our mind and what’s in it are our own; it all comes from what we put in the mind before. We are our own creator.
But we’re so used to thinking now that we are made by someone else; that the outside world, the people, the things, the events, are the main cause of what I am. Therefore I’m angry because she did this, and I’m jealous because he did that – and, indeed, I’m happy because this or that happened. We blame the outside world for our happiness, too!
We definitely believe that our thoughts and feelings and tendencies come from our parents: that’s the basis of the materialist philosophical view. This, for the Buddha, is totally not possible!
For Buddha, what’s in mind at this moment is mine, regardless of what triggered it, it’s mine, it’s my jealousy, my love, my compassion. This consciousness is one’s own. This is something that gets deeper and deeper and deeper as we go along in our practice. We really learn to own what we think and feel. It’s yours. It’s your mind.
Therefore we can change it. As Lama Zopa Rinpoche says, we can mold our mind into any shape we like.