Mind/Body Problem solution

Only a quick stub of basis of the idea.

I've never liked it when people describe the fruits of meditation as seeing the world like a film. This seems to enhance the problem of the self being separate from the world. And it is Dennett's problematic Cartesian Theatre.

But recently I find a use for this.

If someone asks what the path of Buddhism is you could argue it's seeing the difference between the Samsaric world of causation and motion which is the film that is unfolding, and the seeing itself.

In our busy lives we spend most of our time "absorbed**" into the film.

A monk once asked a pupil "what does an orchestra wait for before playing?" and of course it is silence. Music exists within a silent space. So in the same way the film of sensory and perceptive mind objects is all playing out in a "silent" space. You cannot experience this silent space directly because you are hearing a symphony play, but implicitly the sounds exist because of the silence that was proven at the start.

That story of the impatient pupil demanding the monk teach him what enlightenment is while having his tea cup filled to over flowing. The pupil grows angry accusing the monk of being so stupid that he can't even pour some tea. The monk replies that the pupil is like the cup: too full to receive teaching. But of course there is a deeper analogy here because he is also teaching enlightenment, because the mind is like an empty cup and the world only can exist within it because it is empty. The vast manifestation of the world around us so solid and real is only there because the mind is silent and empty.

Now this is a revision of plenty in this blog.

The new point is to reconsider the analogy of the film as the manifest reality of the world, and the cinema as the silent empty mind hosting this.

Quick point: the mind is not "watching" the world. "Watching" is a process that occurs all by itself in consciousness. When consciousness arises then manifestation happens "within" the consciousness. The egotistical view is that the consciousness happens and then there is still "someone" being conscious. Consciousness does not need a viewer. Consciousness is the word that we give to the appearance of things. While this indeed does require a thing and a watcher for the consciousness to arise, once the consciousness is there, there is no second viewer inside the consciousness owning the consciousness. Consciousness is all you need for things to manifest. There is no watcher of consciousness. Consciousness IS the watching.

So the Cartesian Theatre is better now. There is no "watcher" sitting in a seat manifesting the film. The film IS the manifestation and it effectively watches itself.

We are "inside" the cartesian viewer of Dennett's construction.

So what is the cinema in this analogy then?

It is the Mind within which the manifestation of the world happens.

So now Body/Mind issue. How many Minds are there? 

We start off down the path that well there is this body and senses and thoughts and perceptions and "my world." Sitting in the cinema seat there is one viewer paying their ticket and seeing their version of the film.

It all looks very like One. And then there are other people sitting in other seas doing the same thing so really there are many minds.

But we have shifted this along now. We are "inside" that cartesian viewer. All there samsaric events are projected into the film screen now. Even the thoughts of I am sitting in this seat have now been projected onto the cinema screen. Even the idea of lots of people sitting in seats is now projected into the film.

The "One" is now part of samsara, the one is in the film. The "many" other people is now also projected into the film.

The cinema now is the open silent space and white canvas onto which all this film activity is manifest. It is One cinema, but it is boundless so it is an unusual one. And the key thing is it is no longer connected to a mortal finite self which is now projected into the film.

So the body/mind problem arises because we don't step back far enough; we fail to step back behind even ourselves. And when we do this obviously we enter this odd world apparently impossible where we have stepped back behind our self. So who stepped back if we are behind our self? Well this is the remarkable thing actually letting go of the self is possible, and when we do this we find "we" were always behind our self all the time. We were the silence and emptiness that allowed even our whole precious self to manifest.

So the innovation here is that the very bizarre act of letting go of the self, seemingly impossible and contradictory from the perspective of the self, is suddenly no issue at all from the perspective of silent pure Mind of which there is kind of One but lets not put a boundary on it.

From the perspective of the person sitting in the cinema it's that moment when they realise that actually they and everyone in the cinema is part of the film they are watching. The "watching" itself is part of the film.

I have made realisation like this before, but always was left with someone in the seat looking at the realisation. The Matrix (1999) film is no different. Yes the viewer of this film gets the existential wake up that perhaps they are not sitting in a cinema, but that just get replaced with sitting in the Nebuchadnezzar. Do Neo, Morpheus, Trinity ever wonder whether The Matrix reality they are trying to crack might just be part of a greater Matrix that keeps people busy by giving them an escape path from the world matrix and a whole new game of trying to defeat the matrix - which is of course just another way to keep people taking blue pills. Red pills are just a different kind of blue pills. There is no end to the telescoping Inception (2010) or time frames like Primer (2004). How many realities can there be? Once we have shown a way from one reality to the next by mathematical induction it is infinite. The point is that all causal phenomenal "realities" with story lines and narratives are part of a Great Film. There no getting out of the grand narrative like this. You can't talk, or blog your way out as any move like this is just laying a new narrative and a new chapter of the story.

The getting out is when we let go of the "character" we are following, who we want to proceed through time and narrative, and even get out. We let go of Neo and leave him to his world. We let go of our self and leave them to the causal ocean of Samsara to live and die, where things unfold all by themselves. All the thoughts and plans and narratives find themselves projected into the cinema screen. When we see the full expanse of reality we see it was always there, but just for a split second we got absorbed into following the life and thoughts and predicament of a character. I say "we" got absorbed, well such a thought is just the predicament of another character. We let go of them all.

So this solves the Mind/Body problem because once we let go of an identity and narrative then we also solve the problem of "how many?" We can count the people in a story, but they cannot count the readers. Well its me we think, I am reading. But that is just another narrative. Who is reading you?