Where is your Mind?

[Kyonin]

Hi Meitou,

What I'm about to say is just personal and it's what I understand from all the things I've read, observed and felt.

The mind is everywhere in our bodies. According to some ancient Asian philosophies, the mind is all over us. We think and process information with the whole body, specially the brain and the gut. Mind is being aware one exists, and it converts information gathered from our senses, into thoughts.


Thoughts are very powerful because we mistakenly believe they are us, that they shape who we are. But we are not thoughts since they are a tool to help us navigate and understand the universe.

When we sit zazen, we let thoughts go as if they were clouds floating away in the sky. When the thoughts go, we can finally perceive the mind, which is crystal clear. No wonder why the mind is often referred to as a mirror

Gassho,

Kyonin
Sat/LAH

[Eishuu]

Kyonin's answer is beautiful and probably nothing else need be said, but I woke up this morning and remembered the word 'citta' and how it means 'heart-mind'. It made me realise that what we call 'mind' in the West tends to be very head-centric.

So, I had a quick look at definitions of mind in Buddhism. https://www.thoughtco.com/citta-449530 https://rethinkingreligion-book.info...ana-and-manas/

Early Buddhism seems to have made a distinction between 'subjective mind', 'cognitive faculty', and 'sensory consciousness'. I don't know how Zen deals with these kinds of definitions and whether they were still used by the time Buddhism got to Japan. It made me realise how big this subject is and how Buddhism has been dealing with it from the beginning.

Gassho
Eishuu
ST/LAH

[Jundo]

Another way of approaching the what/where is the mind issue is to look at plants. Do they have a 'mind'? They certainly have a level of awareness. Is that 'mind'? Does algae have 'mind'? Is mind like a dimmer switch that gets brighter the more complex the organism? If awareness arose with the first life, then that is maybe where 'mind' started. But we don't know that. Maybe consciousness is everywhere and in all things. I really like the cosmic consciousness idea. That makes a lot of sense to me. If we can experience mind without self then is that cosmic consciousness?

Our mind is different to animals' minds in degree (and in kind?) because we developed language during the Upper Paleolithic, which allows us to think in concepts (what my husband calls 'the mad ramblings of the left hemisphere', with all its labels).

I happened to hear this today, which was interesting (just a few minutes long) ...

Bees are quite the intellectual insects, even among others in the animal world. Scientists recently discovered that honeybees have the rare ability to understand the concept of zero as a numerical value.

Christof Koch, a leading neuroscientist in the field of consciousness, describes the hidden complexity of the bee brain.

---

CK: Their brain contains roughly a million neurons. By comparison, our brain contains roughly one hundred billion, so 100000 times more. Yet the complexity of their brain is staggering. Per unit volume, their brain is obviously much less — I mean it's smaller than a piece of quinoa — but the complexity is staggering. It's ten times higher in terms of the density of our cortex. They have all the complicated components that we have in our brains, but in a smaller package. So there's no reason to presuppose there's something radically different about them.

...

SP: So you're talking about the consciousness of an individual bee — not just the hive. Because you know we sort of have this sense that the hive has this complexity, and it's sort of like an organism in itself. You're talking about individual bees here.

CK: I'm talking about the potential for sentience in individual bees. That's correct. Because a priori, there's no reason to exclude them. Why?

Because they can't talk? Lots of people can't talk, babies can't talk. Patients can't talk. That's rather arbitrary.

https://www.ttbook.org/interview/how-do-we-wrap-our-minds-around-bee-consciousness

This was interesting too ...

Every so often, a new discovery revolutionizes how we understand another species. That’s what happened when German scientist Karl von Frisch cracked the mystery of the honeybee’s waggle dance — the dance that shows the rest of the hive precisely where to find a new food source miles away.

https://www.ttbook.org/interview/waggle-dancing-karl-von-frisch

Early Buddhism seems to have made a distinction between 'subjective mind', 'cognitive faculty', and 'sensory consciousness'. I don't know how Zen deals with these kinds of definitions and whether they were still used by the time Buddhism got to Japan. It made me realise how big this subject is and how Buddhism has been dealing with it from the beginning.

As far as I know, for the most part, Zen folks tend to be less analytical of such things. Early Buddhist were big analyzers and hair splitters about aspects of reality, experience and the mind. Zen was something of a reaction against that, as were more into dropping the analysis into unity.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Eishuu]

So interesting about the honeybees. I think there's so much we don't know about other beings and how they experience things. I'm sure we are much more similar than we usually think. I did wonder if animals often seem a lot more present than humans because they are not constantly thinking in concepts.

Gassho
Eishuu
ST/LAH

[Meitou]

Hi Meitou,

What I'm about to say is just personal and it's what I understand from all the things I've read, observed and felt.

The mind is everywhere in our bodies. According to some ancient Asian philosophies, the mind is all over us. We think and process information with the whole body, specially the brain and the gut. Mind is being aware one exists, and it converts information gathered from our senses, into thoughts.


Thoughts are very powerful because we mistakenly believe they are us, that they shape who we are. But we are not thoughts since they are a tool to help us navigate and understand the universe.

When we sit zazen, we let thoughts go as if they were clouds floating away in the sky. When the thoughts go, we can finally perceive the mind, which is crystal clear. No wonder why the mind is often referred to as a mirror

Gassho,

Kyonin
Sat/LAH

Lovely Kyonin, beautifully expressed

Eishuu, yes this

It made me realise how big this subject is and how Buddhism has been dealing with it from the beginning.

It can be a huge subject when we really start getting into it. I think I'm fascinated by it because I passed 50 + years of this life not even questioning how I think or what my mind is, I'm still amazed by that!

The story of the bees is really thought provoking and in a way quite unsettling. I had never seen a cockroach in my life until I moved here, when I saw the first one it terrified me, so on the basis of know your enemy I did some research which revealed that they are just extraordinary creatures - how could they not be sentient beings? Another huge and fascinating subject.

Gassho
Meitou
satwithyoualltoday/lah

[Kotei]

Thank you everyone for your postings,
I can't add anything new, but enjoyed placing my mind on them.

I didn't know, that bees can recognise a human face.
I once kept a mantis shrimp as a pet, that started begging for food, when I entered the room (it did not wave at others).
Bees are so incredible good at math. In the dark hive, they receive the waggle-dance information about the direction of the food-source in relation to the sun and the distance.
Next day, different time, they fly out and calculate 'on the fly', where the food source is.
They can even fly directly from one food source to another, only knowing the direction/distance from the hive at different sun-positions.
They practice social feeding (all having the same amount of food in their stomach... feeding each other). Oh, and of course, the food-source is already marked with scents for navigation, when close to it.
They are very peaceful, but when they decide to attack for defence, they mark the attacker with their scents, too.
And of course, they sting, where it hurts... they detect CO2 and fly, where your air comes from (maybe best for attacking bears :-) )

Gassho,
Kotei, loving the bees, he's living with.

[davidh]

The question

This amazing, vast thing we call Mind , which is empty and clear but also contains the Dharma, creates my world and everything in it and from which all beings come forth, where is it? Is it the same as awareness? Where did it come from?

brings to mind the Buddha's Arrow Parable - "I don't care where it came from, just get that damn thing out of me!"

But seriously, as a psychiatrist with a clinical interest in the mind, I think this is an important question and I spend a fair amount of time thinking about it and reading about it. There's a lot of pseudo-intellectual BS written about mind and consciousness, but I can recommend some great books if you have a serious interest in the question.
Daniel Dennett - "From Bacteria to Bach and Back, The Evolution of Minds". Dennett draws on Western analytic philosophy and neuroscience to come up with a well argued account of mind which is not incompatible with Buddhist thinking.
Evan Thompson - "Waking, Dreaming, Being; self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation and philosophy", does the same but with a much more explicit Buddhist perspective.
Douglas Hofstadter - "I Am a Strange Loop" - some hardcore fractal mathematics to show that mind is not confined to the individual, but exists across and between individuals. I am made of everyone I have ever known, and they are made of me.
Jaak Panksepp - "The Archaelogy of Mind, neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions" and Antonio Damasio "Self Comes to Mind, constructing the conscious brain" are both books by respected neuroscientists who give clear answers to how mind fits in brain, also how at the end of the day we are 'just' animals with big brains, and that animals also have minds and consciousness, which is an important concept for buddhists to consider imho.
Dan Siegel - "Mind, a journey to the heart of being human". Dan Siegel is a Buddhist who is also a psychiatrist and neuroscientist so I feel a special bond with him. While very rich in big ideas, this is also a very readable and personal book and I would recommend this as a good starting point for anyone interested in the field.

TL: DR
Our minds are embodied, we are lumps of meat and our minds work mainly through the lump of meat in our skulls BUT this lump of meat is one of the most wonderfully complex structures in the universe and is continually interacting with other lumps of conscious meat (through this forum for example); when you strip away the words and concepts what you are left with is raw experience which is fundamentally shared with all animals (Panksepp says mind is present in all mammals at least, Damasio traces it back to single-celled organisms, Siegel wonders it mind is present in some way in all physical matter). Maybe mind is a transpersonal thing and the brain-meat is merely a kind of mind-transponder that connects us to other minds. Does a dog have buddha-nature? Yes.

Gassho
SatToday

David

[Jishin]

The question



brings to mind the Buddha's Arrow Parable - "I don't care where it came from, just get that damn thing out of me!"

But seriously, as a psychiatrist with a clinical interest in the mind, I think this is an important question and I spend a fair amount of time thinking about it and reading about it. There's a lot of pseudo-intellectual BS written about mind and consciousness, but I can recommend some great books if you have a serious interest in the question.
Daniel Dennett - "From Bacteria to Bach and Back, The Evolution of Minds". Dennett draws on Western analytic philosophy and neuroscience to come up with a well argued account of mind which is not incompatible with Buddhist thinking.
Evan Thompson - "Waking, Dreaming, Being; self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation and philosophy", does the same but with a much more explicit Buddhist perspective.
Douglas Hofstadter - "I Am a Strange Loop" - some hardcore fractal mathematics to show that mind is not confined to the individual, but exists across and between individuals. I am made of everyone I have ever known, and they are made of me.
Jaak Panksepp - "The Archaelogy of Mind, neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions" and Antonio Damasio "Self Comes to Mind, constructing the conscious brain" are both books by respected neuroscientists who give clear answers to how mind fits in brain, also how at the end of the day we are 'just' animals with big brains, and that animals also have minds and consciousness, which is an important concept for buddhists to consider imho.
Dan Siegel - "Mind, a journey to the heart of being human". Dan Siegel is a Buddhist who is also a psychiatrist and neuroscientist so I feel a special bond with him. While very rich in big ideas, this is also a very readable and personal book and I would recommend this as a good starting point for anyone interested in the field.

TL: DR
Our minds are embodied, we are lumps of meat and our minds work mainly through the lump of meat in our skulls BUT this lump of meat is one of the most wonderfully complex structures in the universe and is continually interacting with other lumps of conscious meat (through this forum for example); when you strip away the words and concepts what you are left with is raw experience which is fundamentally shared with all animals (Panksepp says mind is present in all mammals at least, Damasio traces it back to single-celled organisms, Siegel wonders it mind is present in some way in all physical matter). Maybe mind is a transpersonal thing and the brain-meat is merely a kind of mind-transponder that connects us to other minds. Does a dog have buddha-nature? Yes.

Gassho
SatToday

David

Please show me your mind.

Gasho, Jishin, _/st\_

[Jundo]

I just like this ...

John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was a scientist-philosopher who introduced the concept of wormholes and coined the term “black hole”. He pioneered the theory of nuclear fission with Niels Bohr and introduced the S-matrix (the scattering matrix used in quantum mechanics). Wheeler devised a concept of quantum foam; a theory of “virtual particles” popping in and out of existence in space (similarly, he conceptualized foam as the foundation of the fabric of the universe).

... It's a concept that has gone by many names over the last few decades from ''genesis by observership'' to ''participatory universe'' to the current fashion, ''it from bit.''

Typically there is a diagram, a cartoon actually, which consists of a giant U with an eyeball on top of one stem looking back at the other. The skinny unadorned end of the U is the Big Bang, he ]Wheeler] explained, tracing his finger along the loop.

''The model of the universe starts out all skinny and then gets bigger,'' he said. ''Finally it gives rise to life and the mind and the power to observe, and by the act of observation of those first days, we give reality to those first days.''

An excerpt dated Jan. 29, 2002, from Dr. Wheeler's journal reads: ''No space, no time, no gravity, no electromagnetism, no particles. Nothing. We are back where Plato, Aristotle and Parmenides struggled with the great questions: How Come the Universe, How Come Us, How Come Anything? But happily also we have around the answer to these questions. That's us.''

... https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/12/s...s-of-time.html

Wheeler's hunch is that the universe is built like an enormous feedback loop, a loop in which we contribute to the ongoing creation of not just the present and the future but the past as well. To illustrate his idea, he devised what he calls his "delayed-choice experiment," which adds a startling, cosmic variation to a cornerstone of quantum physics: the classic two-slit experiment.

...

Wheeler conjectures we are part of a universe that is a work in progress; we are tiny patches of the universe looking at itself — and building itself. It's not only the future that is still undetermined but the past as well. And by peering back into time, even all the way back to the Big Bang, our present observations select one out of many possible quantum histories for the universe.

Does this mean humans are necessary to the existence of the universe? While conscious observers certainly partake in the creation of the participatory universe envisioned by Wheeler, they are not the only, or even primary, way by which quantum potentials become real. Ordinary matter and radiation play the dominant roles. Wheeler likes to use the example of a high-energy particle released by a radioactive element like radium in Earth's crust. The particle, as with the photons in the two-slit experiment, exists in many possible states at once, traveling in every possible direction, not quite real and solid until it interacts with something, say a piece of mica in Earth's crust. When that happens, one of those many different probable outcomes becomes real. In this case the mica, not a conscious being, is the object that transforms what might happen into what does happen. The trail of disrupted atoms left in the mica by the high-energy particle becomes part of the real world.

At every moment, in Wheeler's view, the entire universe is filled with such events, where the possible outcomes of countless interactions become real, where the infinite variety inherent in quantum mechanics manifests as a physical cosmos. And we see only a tiny portion of that cosmos. Wheeler suspects that most of the universe consists of huge clouds of uncertainty that have not yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. He sees the universe as a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet fixed.

Wheeler is the first to admit that this is a mind-stretching idea. It's not even really a theory but more of an intuition about what a final theory of everything might be like. It's a tenuous lead, a clue that the mystery of creation may lie not in the distant past but in the living present. "This point of view is what gives me hope that the question — How come existence? — can be answered," he says.

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse

Anyway, wife wants me to clean the garage today. That is a change I can make for sure!

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jishin]

I just like this ...





Anyway, wife wants me to clean the garage today. That is a change I can make for sure!

Gassho, J

STLah

It’s 9:49 pm central and past my bed time. Later gator.

Gasho, Jishin, _/st\_

[Jishin]

Ie....

IMG_0234.JPG

IMG_0235.JPG



The Wheeler Eye: universe (u) observing itself


In 1979, the celebrated physicist John Wheeler, having coined the phrase “black hole”, put it to good philosophical use in the title of an exploratory paper, Beyond the Black Hole, in which he describes the universe as a self-excited circuit. The paper includes an illustration in which one side of an uppercase U, ostensibly standing for Universe, is endowed with a large and rather intelligent-looking eye intently regarding the other side, which it ostensibly acquires through observation as sensory information. By dint of placement, the eye stands for the sensory or cognitive aspect of reality, perhaps even a human spectator within the universe, while the eye’s perceptual target represents the informational aspect of reality. By virtue of these complementary aspects, it seems that the universe can in some sense, but not necessarily that of common usage, be described as “conscious” and “introspective”…perhaps even “infocognitive”

https://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-self-observing-universe-wheeler_96.html

Gasho, Jishin, _/st\_

[Jishin]

The self selfing the Self or vice versa works out good too.

[emoji3]

Gasho, Jishin, _/st\_

[Jundo]

This "snake swallowing its own tail" Enso works too.



Anyway, great work on the garage today. I got all the screws in the screw drawer, all the nails in the nail drawer.

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jishin]

Ok, last one then I have to work.

IMG_0075.JPG

IMG_0076.JPG

[emoji3]

Gasho, Jishin, _/st\_

[Meitou]

David thanks for the book recommendations, I am fascinated by this subject but unfortunately not terribly smart, my mind wants to investigate but my brain freezes at the sight of the words science and mathematics. I probably veer more towards the pseudo intellectual bull school of mind so I will check those books out, especially the Dan Siegal, trying not to confuse him with Don Siegel, one of Clint Eastwood's muses. ( Yes, regrettably my mind is full of such useless information)
Jundo I love that snakey enso, it's impressive and thank you Jishin for the most excellent cartoons as always, you are like the Vajra Sword of Treeleaf, you always cut right through to the truth of everything.
Deep bows,
Meitou
satwithyoualltodayLAH