Funny how this seems to have gone out of fashion. Its not like there is a consensus yet on the problem. Is what was said about Death the actual answer?
Quick racap.
So Descartes observed that the natural world is always composed from parts. Anything you chose can be broken into parts. However the self is indivisible. There is just the atom of Self. This is the same self he deduced must exist because everything can be doubted except that there is doubter. In fact this is a type of SRH argument (if you look back in the blog). I believe that unity is what Kant calls the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.
Another way to arrive at this problem is with the issue of freedom of choice. Looking at a body you can see all the nerves firing and organs functioning all causally. One thing is caused by another. Yet when we apply it to our own experience we don't see our self being forced to do things by causes but rather we seem to be the origin of action. We have choice. It is this way in which we originate our actions that is the whole source of morality, sin and suffering in all religions.
In Buddhism for example there are both ways of thinking. There is cause and effect which is absolutely central to ending suffering. Buddha explains that literally all phenomena have a cause. The phenomenon of suffering thus has a cause, and so we can end it. But at the same time we are held accountable for our actions and poor decisions lead to bad outcomes. A King visits him one day and Buddha expounds his teachings to him. After he has gone Buddha says "he is done for." Buddha knew that the King had killed his own father to assume the throne. This act had been so ignorant and had caused such an indelible imprint that the King would not be able to gain liberation in this lifetime. But without freedom what chance do we have to be liberated other than by luck.
The answer to this is simple but subtle. The world is just the way it is. That is true for us all and you would be foolish to suggest the world was any other way than what it is. The whole problem comes from seeing the way it is in the wrong way. Of being confused about the way it is.
Importantly this mistake is more than an intellectual misunderstanding it is a matter of the heart also. We think and feel about the world wrong. We have the wrong moves within our heart and pursue the wrong things the wrong way.
What is that mistake? It is grasping for things with our hearts too much.
This is the same mistake as mentioned about Death and Ego. That anchor that we have thrown into our lives, that belief we have in being "our self" is a matter of self love and attachment and grasping.
So how does self attachment and love lead to the Mind/Body mistake?
Let us repeat that core fact: the world is just the way it is. All problems arise in looking and interacting with it it wrong.
So lets look at how things are. There are distinct senses: we see, hear, touch, smell and taste. And what the West misses out we process all this stuff into things which we think about giving us the 6th sense of Mind. Importantly get clear that this is all there is. There is nothing "out there" that doesn't fit into one of these areas of experience.
There are some fuzzy areas like memory. I imagine what I saw yesterday. I'm not quite sure myself whether that counts as seeing or mind. Its a mixture of both. Our memories can be very vivid. Dreams also. And that experience when we are reading, where we forget completely about the world and actually live the experience we are reading about. Afterwards we have no recollection of "our" world and seem to remember having been through what we were reading. This is not seeing with our eyes, but its hijacking the process of vision with our mind to create "visions". Hallucinations are the same process of our mind hijacking our vision process. When we day dream it is the same. We image the life we want, or perhaps we imagine what frightens us, and we live that as though it is coming through our senses.
Meditation is absolutely critical for getting clear on all this. Meditation is the simplest but hardest thing we can do. In its basic form we just need to observe some object closely without breaking our attention. When our attentions drifts we pull it back as soon as we notice. And we just do that a bit every day, day after day. Meditate through the excitement, through the boredom, through the "what is the point" and the "why am I doing this?" and the "I want to do something else", through the ... whatever comes up we just meditate through it and keep our mind on the object. That is all.
The most common object is the breath. We carry that with us everywhere, we can't get away from it and while we are breathing we know we are alive. we can close our eyes, forget our smells and tastes and sounds and most importantly forget our mind and our thoughts and just feel the sensation of the breath. We don't think much but we do use the mind to be "clear that we are breathing in, and breathing out" as Buddha says in the Anapansati Sutra. Just a little bit of mind, and gradually reducing level of mind. Obviously when we start a huge amount of mind. Lots of: I need to do this tomorrow, Wow I hate that person did they really do that, Can't wait for the end of meditation I want to watch TV... oh I'm supposed to be watching the breath let me get back to that. This is normal and it quietens down slowly over many days and weeks and months.
We can/should also meditate to purify our hearts. Mind is not just about physical feelings and sensations its about emotional feelings and intentions. As we watch we see that our mind is disturbed ultimately by what we feel. Suppose the neighbour starts mowing the lawn. That is not by itself a distraction. It's just a sound to begin with. We might not even notice it if in deep meditation on the breath. But if we do notice it, very quickly our mind steps up, judges and decides what it is. And then we are in trouble cos that starts thoughts. And if we then start to feel emotions like annoyed then it really becomes a distraction. And what comes with the initial feeling of annoyance? Lots and lots of energetic thoughts. "Why did they have to do it now?", "That is just typical can't the neighbour mow at a normal time like everyone else", "I bet they didn't even need to mow the lawn, can't they just chill out like me and be peaceful" (note the irony its not the neighbour who is not peaceful, it is me). And then this triggers the memory and we start to think more elaborate thoughts. "That is it. This is the last time that neighbour annoys me and messes up my peace. I'm moving house. No wait that would mean the neighbour wins. Right I'm going to start making noise when they are sunbathing so they know what it feels like." and so it goes on. But this is actually the absolutely best stuff to meditate on. So we get a grip and look at the clouds of dust and dirt that have been blown up inside us and we return to watching our breath and it all settles again. Though it isn't fast until we have lots of practice at focusing on our breath. Once we get back to the breath we can then even enjoy looking at all the stuff that just went through our minds, examine it and see what a real mess we have in there. Eventually we can enjoy seeing this stuff, like our own little soap-opera inside that we don't really need to care too much about. we can always return to our breath and it just goes away.
Now when we start to get to the point where we can always just return to our breath and the mess in our heads reliably starts to calm down we realise we have other choices than to just get dragged in when things like anger distract us. Most importantly if you are also following Buddhas Teachings (and most meditation these days doesn't give you full teachings as well - which is like being put on Prozac without ever examining why you are struggling) you will observe that the true nature of all this mental stuff is that it is temporary. There is no feeling or thing in our minds that has been there since we were born and will survive our death. That is a good and a bad thing to realise. It means that no happiness will ever last, but it means neither will any sadness. If we see that firmly we are really entering the neutral space that I need for the Body/Mind problem.
Before that sounds depressing--never finding lasting happiness--once we start to put down the temporary feelings and comings and goings of our mind: the endless changes of feelings and thoughts the constant striving to pursue that good feeling we just had (as Avici sampled into his song Levels: "Ooo oo something I get a good feeling yeah, you know a feeling that I never never had before") once we realise that good feelings and bad feeling come along and then go away, we realise we don't need to hold onto them. And that is the key moment when a new feeling happens called Joy. Now this Joy does not come and go in the same way as the other feeling. It is rather that when the other feelings go, they leave room for Joy. Usually that is described as: once the clouds go the sun can shine. This is linked to Jhana and that is a huge other subject. But once we are at least aware there is a neutral space then we have what we need to grasp Body/Mind.
So in the neutral space we can just let things come and go. This is the way the world is.
Objection I hear. But the world is not made of thoughts and smells and sights and sounds it is made of things. If I eat just thoughts and tastes and smells I will die. I need to eat real food.
And this is absolutely correct. The world is just the way it is. I am not saying anything here that is not just the way it is. But what is the actual difference between eating a real plate of chips and having the sights, feelings, smells, tastes, sounds and thoughts of eating a plate of chips? They are identical!
Well very slightly different. Normally we will just casually think "I am eating chips, whatever, now time to think about something else." But that is actually just a thought of eating chips. I spoke in previous blogs of the "ship" we drag around with us. It is just a fixed statue of eating chips. Its not the actual event right now of eating chips. If we actually stop while eating chips and look at what is going on we will see a bewildering load of stuff. That is if we just look at the way the world is, rather than casually what we think it is, we get a totally different view. They are both "eating chips" in a casual way, but the person experiencing their senses while they are doing it is really doing it! How ironic given that at the start of this paragraph the person messing around with sights and tastes looked like they would starve! They are the ones really living and the person who just "eats chips" on Monday and "eats chips" on Friday and just "eats chips" the same way every time, they get bored of "eating chips" and they get bored "of life" and they die inside. That neutral space is the key to living. This is what the religions are in search of. Life!
So as we look at the way things are: where is the Body now? It's not so clear. I can feel my legs and my arms hanging beside me. I can see my body. If I look in the mirror I can see my eyes. I can look straight into my own pupils to see that they are the black holes out of which I look, or into which light goes (which of these is true used to be a real heated argument). But like "eating chips" this is all just senses and thoughts. When I pick up an apple I can feel it in my hand, and I can see it, and I can think a number of things. I can think "I have an apple in my hand" or I can think "there is a weight in my hand and I can see a red globe in my hand." both are actually fine. If I am handing out dessert I will probably go for the former thought as I need to give someone an apple, but I can still examine the sensations as I do it. The point of this is to show how fluid our thoughts are. The idea "there is an apple" is not so fixed. Its useful. It may be the answer to a question, and it may be part of what I have to do, but its just a thought as well and we can put it down and think about it differently or even something complete different. Thoughts are quite fluid. And that applies to the Body. We can examine it in many different ways. There is no single thing called "the body." As Descartes observed it has many parts, not just physically but also in how we experience it.
We can certainly see that when an apples comes into contact with our hand we feel something. And this is observing how our sense experiences are caused by interaction with the world. But is it so weird now to just look at an apple touch our hand, and at the same time get the feeling of something touching our skin. We are just watching what is going on. As said at the start we are just watching the way the world is.
And now what of Mind? We had a good definition of the mind above. It is all the processing and thoughts that come with our senses. Indeed everything in this blog entry, all the exercises and descriptions are actually mind being applied to what we experience. When I say "feel the apple in your hand" what I am doing is asking the mind to direct itself at the feeling of the apple. Or if you have no actual experience then imagine it. That is all mind.
Do we still have the Mind/Body problem? Yes we do but it lies now just in Descartes belief that the Mind is centred around something. when we says the Mind is indivisible (in fact it feels like a single point in space at the centre of experience), or we say that Mind is somehow separate from our Body what we are doing is looking at the point we have placed the anchor in (as described in previous blogs). That feeling of Mind "being something" comes from holding on to it. We have a grasp of it, a clenched fist holding onto it like a rugby binding, or when we grab some ones arm, or we grasp for something we want on the shop shelf, or we get hold of some food we want. In all these cases we are making contact with a thing and where we hold it is the point of interest. Likewise we have a strong grasp of the world, as if it might slip away from us if we let go. That point where we have the world held onto that appears as the point at the centre of the world that looks out at all our senses and into the outside world that is full of other people. That anchor point is actually just a choice. We can let go with training. We won't die if we let go. We won't even lose anything. It will make no difference at all. Except that we will no longer be dragging a ball and chain with us through the world and life. We will be free. But to really get here we need to just let the world be exactly as it is and we do that by entering that neutral space. I say "entering" the neutral space, this is how it may seem. But really it is an escaping from the cage of non neutrality that we have been stuck in/to.
Warning the first thing we do to get free is just throw everything away. Quit our job, end our relationships, give up everything and just do nothing. This is okay, but its just the same grasping problem in return. You can indeed let go of something by throwing it away. Because in the West we hold so unbelievably tightly Eckhart Tolle does suggest throwing forcefully away. But in space when you throw away it has an equal and opposite reaction. So we turn around and try and get back by throwing away the emptiness we have created and so we end up oscillating. With practice we get better at just uncoupling and drifting along, calmly just side by side things. Indeed two objects drifting side by side on the same path through space are indistinguishable from two object coupled together. We can just let go through the easiest of touches with practice.
So Body and Mind is not a real problem. If we just look carefully and easy at the world just as it is, we will see for our self how things are and the problem will seem irrelevant after a while.
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