Finding the Mind Excerpt

Finding the Mind A Buddhist View Robin Cooper

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Introduction

Introduction In the Forests of the Night The way lies under the foot of every person.1 Do¯gen

When I was fifteen, one night I turned the radio off in my little bedroom in North London and lay down on the bed staring at the ceiling. ‘What is going on?’ I thought to myself. ‘Here is this living awareness, contained in this one human body that it calls its own, among millions that are mysteriously “other”. Why? What’s going on?’

The only way I could think of to solve the conundrum of my own subjectivity was to meditate. Goodness knows where I got that idea from, but still I squeezed my eyes closed and waited. But then what? I didn’t actually know what meditation was or what to do next. I made a resolution to learn, but the chance didn’t come until six years later, under the stress of my university physics finals. The meditation teacher was a Buddhist, and I began my journey of exploring the mystery of awareness using Buddhism.

I wanted what I had wanted at fifteen – to explore what it was to be aware. I wanted to find the mind.

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Finding the Mind

Discoveries in the forest Imagine you are a lone explorer wandering in a dark unknown forest. Making your way uphill to get more of a view, you come across an overgrown road winding through the dense trees. With mounting excitement you hack your way through the brambles and follow the road along a ridge. Some flagstones, a crumbling wall, a ruin, and then, with a gasp, you stumble into a longabandoned city, with great stone buildings and traces of formal gardens graced by waterways.

The Buddha used this image of a traveller finding a forgotten, overgrown city to describe his wonder at discovering the ancient glory of the human mind, his own mind.2 The city in its full splendour is the birthright of every human being – it represents a mind fully awakened (Buddha means ‘Awakened One’). The Buddha wasn’t content to leave the city of the mind in ruins, and he later elaborated his city image to convey what he did with the rest of his life: showing how to restore the city of the mind to its potential glory.

The Buddhist project is simply to expand the scope of your awareness, and to cut through whatever brambles confine it.

Buddhists seeks wisdom, which is seeing things as they really are without the veils of mistaken preconceptions and self-centred needs. They also seek love and compassion, which means bringing other people into the sphere of your awareness, and giving them a value equal to yourself. The Buddhist project necessarily has the human mind as its field of work: that neglected city with such a grand future. This book is about finding the mind, finding your own mind. But more than that, it describes Buddhist approaches to restoring the mind to its full potential.

Do you know what your mind is? You and I are in the crumbling, uncared for city of experience that is human life, not even aware of its potential, usually taking it for granted. We’ll 2

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Introduction

Figure 1

come at the mind from different angles: we’ll look at awareness, consciousness, perception, subjectivity, and so on, and by the end of the book, we may have a sense of the Buddhist view of the mind.

Buddhism is centred on the mind – on understanding and transforming human experience. But it takes an exploratory approach, it asks us to seek: it is not a revelation of religious truths. The Buddha saw that we are all in a tough predicament, as human beings. We are constantly anxious about what we lack and what we may lose, and in chasing security we easily cause pain to others. But the Buddha did not offer to save us through faith in his truth – instead, he asked us to explore. Be aware, probe the edges of your awareness, explore, and find your mind.

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Finding the Mind He remembered the time when he was on his own, when he felt as if he was wandering in a dark forest. We are fortunate in that, although we are all explorers of our own experience, the ancient road we can follow has been kept clear by a great succession of insightful people down the ages. So this book too is not a substitute for personal exploration, but a rough guide to finding the mind, informed by Buddhist tradition and practice, especially the practice of meditating in mindfulness.

Attending to experience Finding the mind 1 What happens if you close your eyes for a minute and attend to your experience? I mean a whole minute, not just a couple of seconds – give it time. What you’re doing is a miniature meditation.

What did you notice? I’m not going to tell you – how could I know? All sorts of things happen when you attend to your experience. (All sorts of things happen when you don’t, but you may miss them.)

At first, meditation is simply attending. But to give meditation a chance of revealing something, even of altering your state of mind, you probably need your mind to quieten down a bit. We lack quietness in two ways – we are busy talking to ourselves, and we are rather bothered. Mental chatter might be planning something, or rehearsing what happened earlier, or perhaps working something out. As for being bothered, probably the most common form nowadays is at least a mild anxiety. But it 4

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Introduction could also be frustration with things not going right, irritation with somebody, fantasies and hopes for some sort of gratification, excitement, low spirits, or any of a thousand other emotions. With patience and a meditation technique that suits you, these thoughts and emotions can quieten down. Then your experience is less overwhelming, and you’ve a chance of attending to it.

A lot of us Buddhists have a habit of meditating. So every day I sit down with my eyes closed and do nothing for a while. If I’m not too dopey or agitated, I start to attend. Here is my mind.

What happens?

Sometimes I notice little aches and pains, a tension in my stomach, an impulse to fidget. Is it my body trying to distract me?

No it isn’t: I’ve found that mind is more complete and more real the more it is embodied, the more it fills my body, so the physical sensations help bring me down to earth.

Sometimes I am more an emotional being than a physical being: I notice excitement, or a longing, or I feel down or irritated, or just full of good cheer. The emotions are in my body too, though generally they set off trains of thought. And sometimes that is what I notice – thinking. Thoughts, usually in words like a busy procession of single-minded ants leaving their nest. Sometimes it’s memories and mental images popping up.

Probably something of all these activities is going on while I sit there quietly, and there is another input, too. That is sensory experience: the noise of the water in the central-heating pipes, the weight of my body pressing down on the seat, light filtering between my half-closed eyelids.

If I try and step back from it all, there’s an underlying sense of an inside and outside. There is me in here receiving all these impressions – even the thoughts and images seem somehow to be coming into my awareness. But is it real, that sense of me inside, peering out? Both thoughts and the sense of being inside looking at an outside do seem to evaporate when you hold them in a steady 5

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Finding the Mind gaze of awareness. If that enclosed ‘me’ was something real and solid, would it not become clearer under a steady gaze? As the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck noticed, if the more you look at something the more it isn’t there, then you know it’s not real.3 When the more you look at things the more they are there (like other people, who stubbornly persist), then you know they are real.

So it is in this ever-changing stream of experience that we are going to search for mind. What is it like? How is it structured?

What is it capable of?

In chapter 1, ‘The Windows of Experience’, we shall follow the Buddhist tradition of leaving these questions open as long as possible, so that we can look for our minds without too many preconceptions. Chapter 2, ‘The Garden of Impressions’, is about the source and destination of the experiences that stream into the mind. Which ones come from within, and which originate in the outer world? How do I perceive things, what effect do they have on me, and where is the ‘I’ that is having the experience?

In fact, does it matter whether I am really here, watching my experience, or not? Can I look harder, deeper, more objectively, or am I doomed to going round and round in circles, repeating the same mistakes over and over again? That is the topic of chapter 3, ‘The Mirror of Awareness’, which is centred on the Tibetan wheel of life. Chapter 4, ‘The Rills of Selfishness’, is about the mind’s tendency to home in on a limited part of experience, so that I cause myself a lot of trouble by overidentifying with my body, my preferences, my self-image, or whatever. Then chapter 5, ‘The Lasso of Compassion’, describes how we can begin to break down self-imposed mental limitations. We can extend our awareness to other people; and being fully aware of another person as a subject like ourselves entails love and compassion.

Compassion is a softening of the edges of our minds. But to what extent can our edges, our limitations be dissolved? In Buddhism there is an architectural symbol of the progressive 6

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Introduction liberation of the mind – the stūpa, described in chapter 6, ‘I Am a Miner for a Heart of Gold’. In chapter 7, ‘Mind Like the Sky’, we will look at increasingly open mental states, even a mind that is not trapped in the division of inner and outer, and directly knows experience without having to describe it in other people’s words.

These seven chapters complete a Buddhist meditation on finding the mind, and in the process liberating it from the straitjacket of its own ignorance. But Buddhists are not the only people to seek the mind and attempt to define what it is like.

The great traditions of Western philosophy, and a few decades of remarkable discoveries in the science of the brain, are noble attempts to make sense of the mind. How do their conclusions compare with those of Buddhism? That is the subject of the final chapter, ‘The Buddha in the Laboratory’.

But to go back to our central question: what is going on for you now? Who are you?

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