I like jazz. If I hear just one trumpet note, I’ll bliss out and, that second, I’ll say, “Wow! Divine Miles Davis!”
But for a couple of years before I was a Buddhist I was a radical feminist – and I mean seriously radical! – and I’d given up listening to jazz. I thought men were the main cause of all suffering – on the planet, in the universe! I had nothing to do with anybody who had something between their legs! And so I stopped listening to male music. Because jazz was mainly the boys, right? (Actually, there have always been amazing women playing jazz, but they weren’t heard.)
Anyway, the story here is, one day I was sitting in a café in Dharamsala, up in McLeod Ganj. I’d just done my first serious retreat – a three-month Vajrasattva retreat – soon after I became a nun. You’re very sensitive, very open, after retreat. Remember, I’d had nothing to do with jazz for a while; and you certainly don’t listen to any music during a retreat. And suddenly, the sound of John Coltrane’s music came out of the speaker in the café. Well, I nearly fainted with bliss!
How the mind works
So what happened in that moment? We’d say that I had a powerful sensory experience, wouldn’t we? That’s how we’d interpret it. But there’s more to it than that, for sure.
When you study the mind in Buddhism you learn the two ways the mind functions. This is important. You’ve got mental consciousness and sensory consciousness. As far as the modern view of the mind is concerned, they’re all a function of the physical.
But not for Buddha. We’re not talking about the brain here. The mind is not the body. It might sound shocking to us, but the mind is not the brain. What Buddha is saying is there’s consciousness – mind and consciousness are, broadly speaking, synonymous – and there’s body; two different things but inextricably linked. Without insulting neuroscientists, you could say that the brain is the physical indicator of what is happening in the mind, at least at the grosser level.
Mental consciousness is intellect, thoughts, feelings, emotions. Then the sensory is the experiences of the mind through the medium of the body. This is the way to say it. Technically, in Buddhist terms, the physical ear does not hear sound; ear consciousness does. Ear consciousness is that part of our mind that functions through the medium of our ear – all the physical bits working nicely – in order to perceive sound. The object of ear consciousness is sound.
The way it’s said in the texts is that mind is the subject and whatever it cognizes is its object. Every moment of mind has a particular object that it cognizes – to be aware, to cognize, to know: these verbs are synonymous. The act of cognizing is the function of mind.
The senses are limited
The sensory consciousnesses are very limited in their capacity for cognition. They’re like dumb animals. But, as Lama Yeshe says, “We make the body the boss.” Big mistake. Ear consciousness doesn’t cognize “Miles Davis”; it doesn’t cognize “divine”; it only cognizes sound.
But we give the senses so much more power than they actually have because we don’t have a good understanding of Buddha’s approach to the mind. He says we have the senses, yes. They’re the interface between us and the world, aren’t they? Without the senses we have no way of experiencing the world out there; this is the level we function at. We’re living in a sensory universe. Buddha calls it the desire realm.
Mind cognizes like a mirror: it reflects
But then we have mental consciousness. Even knowing the sensory is not your mental consciousness is already powerful. We don’t get fooled by what the senses tell us. This is the skill we need to learn. It’s huge.
As Lama Yeshe says in his book Mahamudra, the mind cognizes like a mirror: it reflects what appears to it. This is a very interesting way to put it. We would never think of it like that. And as Lama Zopa would say, the way the world out there appears back to us is, as they say in the texts, in the “aspect of what is in the mind.” So whatever’s in my mind determines the way things appear to me.
These seem such simple statements, but they’re outrageous: they express the essence of the entire Buddhist view. The mind is the boss, the mind is the creator. Literally.
Mental consciousness
In the experience of hearing Miles, if ear consciousness can only cognize sound, what part of my mind was cognizing “Wow! Divine Miles Davis!”? The mental consciousness.
What happened was, the millisecond I cognized the sound, quicker than Google – literally! – my mental consciousness was accessed. Everything we’ve ever experienced is stored as memories in our mind; all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, all our tendencies, all our habits are all kept there; nothing goes astray. And, you know what? They’re all opinions, ideas, viewpoints – conceptual stories made up by our mind.
So, my mental consciousness was accessed and in a millisecond, based on my own mental programming, up came the thought, the opinion: “Wow! Divine Miles Davis!”
Attachment makes the object appear delicious
And, because of my past programming, even before the opinion, the first thing that was triggered was pleasure. And nothing wrong with pleasure – “the more pleasure the better!” as Lama Yeshe would say.
And nothing wrong with saying it’s music. It is music, relatively speaking, not a painting. It is Miles Davis, it is trumpet. These are conventional facts. And it might even be best quality music, relatively speaking. There’s no argument about these at a relative level.
So what’s the problem? The problem is attachment, which kicks in instantly. And why it’s a problem is because it exaggerates the deliciousness of the object, the sound. And it’s so powerful, it permeates the entire experience, it overwhelms the experience.
Ignorance makes the object appear inherently delicious
And not only that. Attachment is driven by the root delusion, ignorance, which causes the sound to appear self-existent, out there, having this inherent deliciousness, as if deliciousness is built into the music, coming from the music.
And we believe it a hundred percent, right? We believe it. We don’t ever doubt it. In other words, we don’t think for one split second that the divine jazz music is a story that our mind is making up. We never think that.
But that’s what Buddha’s saying. That actually, we are making up an elaborate story. We make it more than it is. As Rinpoche says, “delusions decorate on top of what is there layers upon layers of characteristics that are not there.”
The workshop is in the mind
So, the mental consciousness is where the workshop is, as Rinpoche says. That’s what we have to become intimately familiar with so that we can unpack and unravel the seeming chaos in there and do the job of distinguishing between the delusions and the virtues. And then we need to weaken the power of delusions and grow the power of the virtuous actions, eventually perfecting the mind. That’s the job of a Buddhist! And it’s very tasty!