Standing Up for the Mind

If a fish could talk and understand human language, and if you could ask it what living in the water is like, I doubt it would have any idea what you were talking about. Water is the medium that fish live in, just as air is the medium we live in. It’s something that we take for granted, and I imagine the same is true for fish.

Just like living in a physical medium, we are immersed in a cultural medium, a contemporary worldview that includes strong assumptions about the nature of the mind and the natural world. For example, Cartesian dualism—the belief that mind and body are two completely different things—seems to be generally accepted as common sense. A conflicting assumption that the mind is just the brain seems to also be broadly accepted. We absorb these views about reality by osmosis from the culture we swim in. We tend to take them for granted, the way fish take water for granted.

Modern culture is dominated by science and technology. The empirical and theoretical methods of science have been incredibly successful in mastering the physical domain. They have given us unparalleled power over nature.

Modern medicine has vanquished many of the ills of the past and vastly extended our lifespans. Computers and the internet give us access to unbelievable amounts of information, extraordinary abilities to collect and analyze data, and endless possibilities of interacting. Industrial technologies exploit natural resources on a vast scale and transform them into an amazing diversity of products to be consumed by billions of people. The development of atomic weapons has even given us the power to extinguish human life altogether.

Science has been so successful at mastering the physical domain, from the microcosmic to the cosmic, that it is hardly surprising that people feel that all truth must be based on science. However, there is a domain of knowledge outside of the physical domain.

Science has very little to say about the mind itself despite the tremendous amount of theorizing and scientific research about brain functions that’s been done in recent years. In fact, it is hard to imagine how the third-person methods of science will ever be able to find purchase in the subjective realm. Yet, it is commonly assumed that science will be able to explain the mind by explaining the brain.

The Mental Domain

The introspective, philosophical, and ethical methods developed by Buddhists over the past 2,600 years have been incredibly successful at mastering the mental domain. They offer Buddhist practitioners ways of taming the mind, developing empathy and compassion, and transforming obscurations into wisdom. Ultimately, they even lead to the complete extinction of delusions and suffering.

The mental domain is central to the Buddhist project. Delusion and suffering are mental phenomena. The extinction of delusion and suffering is Buddhism’s raison d’être.

Liberation does not come about through an external agent. It comes about through recognizing the true nature of the mind. When you don’t recognize the nature of thoughts, feelings, and emotions, you are deceived by them and ceaselessly driven by your own projections. When you do recognize their nature, you are freed from this compulsion.

Not recognizing the true nature of the mind is like peering through a plate-glass window from the wrong angle, trying to see if your friends are sitting inside a restaurant. All you see are reflections of the outside. Gazing from that angle, you won’t be able to tell if your friends are there or not, no matter how hard you look. Trying to eliminate delusion and suffering from the physical domain is approaching things from the wrong angle.

Opening the Door

Holding tightly to materialistic beliefs, which take the physical domain to be the dominant or exclusive reality, shuts the door to the realm of the mind. That’s why it’s essential to surface these beliefs and challenge their validity. Implicit in these views is the assumption that whatever is mental has no causal capacity, that the mind is the brain, and that the mental domain can be reduced to the physical domain. Some materialists even assert that the mental domain is completely illusory: that whatever is not established by science does not exist.

In the past, I have relied on traditional Buddhist teachings to overcome these reductionist views. I now have doubts about the adequacy of this approach for people living in the modern world. Materialistic assumptions undermine the power of the Buddhadharma by dismissing the importance of the mental domain.

Philosophy Essential Reads

How the Upanishads Transformed the Human Mind

There Is a Massive Blind Spot in Our Knowledge

There isn’t much ammunition in Buddhism to counter such metaphysical beliefs since they are inextricably tied to contemporary opinions about science and technology. Fortunately, materialist dogmas are being challenged from within modernity itself. I believe that if Buddhism is to come to terms with modernity, we must use the tools of modernity to address the metaphysics of materialism head-on.

Particularly during the past couple of decades, powerful voices within the philosophy of mind have begun to contest these reductionist views. This has led to a fascinating and illuminating debate. Even though the language of philosophy is quite different from the language of Buddhadharma (and sometimes quite impenetrable to the uninitiated), don’t think of this as a detour from our journey. We can use it as another way to investigate the nature of our projections and the nature of reality. That’s what I’ll explore in future posts.

This post is adapted from Into the Mirror: A Buddhist Journey Through Mind, Matter, and the Nature of Reality.