I was at the inaugural
Wisdom & AI Symposium
in November, and the topic of consciousness came up. We seemed to be talking about it in several ways but, without a common definition, it was difficult to work out exactly what we were talking about. This got me thinking …
One very common question people ask in interviews when I inquire whether they’ve been noting their thoughts is: “Well, what are thoughts?” I usually nod sagely at this, and try to sound really wise as I turn it back onto them: “Yes!
That
is the question!”
Of course, I’m only
half
joking. I try not to answer because answering this ourselves is a significant part of the practice—that and “Who thinks?”—but also because it’s complicated by the variety of ways that people think, and an interview is not long enough to get into this. (I wrote about ways of thinking in
a previous tip
.)
But, it is a very interesting question which I should really address in conjunction with neuroscience, psychology and Buddhist tradition. Instead, I’m going to cheap out and share
my own personal thoughts
in the hope that it’s interesting and informative, and to give a schema or taxonomy that might be helpful for meditative enquiry.
The way I think about thinking is as a kind of spectrum, or hierarchy, of mental activity. I’ve even taken to calling it “mentation” now because of this; I don’t want to limit people’s idea of mental activity to just verbal thoughts. But, that would be the first type of mental activity, and these verbal thoughts—the voice in your head—are, from what I can tell, what most teachers seek to refer to by “thoughts”.
There are also non-verbal thoughts. For me, these feel like
intelligent leanings
for want of another way of putting it. I notice these when I’m trying to work something out. The mind is busy processing away, but the verbal thought is merely “Hmmm?!”: 🤔
Being aphantasic, I don’t see images in my mind, but I’m a bit of an outlier; ~97% do. So, this is another mode of “thought”: mental images. I suspect that what I described as “intelligent leanings” would be experienced visually by most people. For me, a conceptual model of the idea “appears” (is experienced) as that “leaning” in my mind.
I’d put
concepts
at this layer of cognition, too. Concepts are coarse grained, composite ideas of how or what something is, e.g., the idea of a dog, or London.
We also have emotions and “feelings”. We often use these synonymously, but we also use “feeling” for bodily experiences, e.g., “the lush feeling of warm water on my cold hands.” Of course, Buddhism uses “feelings” (
vedanā
) to refer to the affective feeling tone (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), so it might be better to use “sensations” to refer to bodily experiences and leave “feelings” for
vedanā
. But, there is that—
vedanā
—too!
Talking about sensations reminds me that all sense experience is known in the mind too. The sight and sound of wind blowing through trees, and the leafy smell of the forest. The taste of food on the tongue. We’re used to putting our attention
in
to these objects but the fact that we know we do shows that they are known; they have a mental component. In fact, we
only
know them through the mind.
Emotions are a constellation of feeling-tone, bodily sensations, and mental tendencies appearing together and giving the mind a particular flavour. For example, affection has a pleasant tone, comes with a softening of the heart, and inclines the mind towards approach or inclusion. Irritation, on the other hand, has an unpleasant tone, a tightness in the body, and an inclination to push away.
Closely related to emotions are moods. I think of moods as an
emotional
stance that permeates experience. There’s a temporal aspect to this; moods last longer than emotions. If emotions give the mind a particular flavour, a mood is when that emotion has taken root and suffuses experience. For example, what’s going on when we’re “feeling a bit down”. I think of these as more solid, or robust versions of “mind states”, which I see, fundamentally, as a kind of background
perceptual
stance.
It turns out that there is no single Pāḷi term for “mind state.” The Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta uses
cittānupassanā
, but that means something more like “contemplation of mind.” In English “mind state” is just a loose shorthand that we use to bundle together a bunch of mental factors, including affective tone (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral), the behaviour of the mind (e.g., busy or quiet, coherent or fragmented, etc.), how the attention moves (e.g., steady vs scattered, narrow vs wide, sticky vs mobile) and so on.
My definition of mind states as “a kind of background
perceptual
stance” is purely phenomenological—not in the Satipaṭṭhāna sense where we are directed to identify greed, hatred or delusion—and seeks to refine the more general way we think about them to something that, rather than being clearly conceptual, is much more
perceptual
. That is, it’s more about the way we sense or feel the world than it is about how we think about and conceptualise the world.
As such, mind states seem to colour all of experience. They’re much more subtle than being, or feeling, in a particular mood, and somehow seem to form the background “reality” that we experience. Frankly, we don’t even notice them most of the time. It’s just how the mind seems, regardless of its content.
I remember the first time I saw a mind state change. I was on a one-day retreat with Bhante at London Insight. I was outside doing walking meditation and the difficult relationship I had with my father was on my mind. I didn’t realise it, but there was also a mind state of “preoccupied sadness”. As my mind settled into the rhythm of walking, the thoughts about my father fell away. The mind state persisted for a while longer, and then shifted to “joyful equanimity”. The distinction was so striking it seemed as if the gap between the two mind states—the “reality” as it was, and the “reality” as it became—peeled up like old wallpaper! My mind, though, had been focused on the walking. Until this happened, I hadn’t even realised the mind states were there. They were just “reality”.
As another example, imagine going to a concert. You have a wonderful time, and when you come out, even though you’re dealing with the business of navigating trains, buses, etc., and you can be frustrated with the traffic, tired and eager to get home—and consumed in the process of doing so—you feel that, somehow, all is great in the world. It’s this colouring of the world as great, despite the frustration with the traffic, that I’m calling a mind state; the donning of
world is great
tinted glasses after a delightful concert.
Going further, are low-abstraction percepts, for example the subtle impression of time and space that are experienced but not particularly consciously, more as an assumption, but subtler. Fine-grained time may be experienced as an anticipatory leaning into the next moment or reaching back to what just happened. Space gives location: here versus there and, to continue the scientific theme, gravity’s effect gives us up and down.
The most subtle layer, for me, is “consciousness” itself. I think of consciousness in two ways: 1) as a faculty, the ability to be aware; and 2) as a function, the process, or means, of becoming aware of things. Being aphantasic, these are only really “visible” to me by inference but Bhante talks about “the screen of consciousness”, so maybe it’s all a bit easier for him to see.
For me, however, consciousness is inferred as a field, or sphere, of awareness. I infer something like a bubble or goldfish bowl in which everything is being experienced. While not quite accurate, I feel like “I’m” at the centre, and everything arises and passes away within this sphere.
I say “infer” because I realise I don’t actually experience this kind of consciousness, this “sphere of awareness”. It’s an inference based on the content. When I hear a sound, the sound comes with a sense of direction and distance; it’s
over there
… and this sense, this way of “seeing”
infers
the goldfish bowl.
Of course, I’ve only scratched the surface here.
All
of experience arises in this way. Experiences are made up of multiple layers of higher and higher abstractions, from “raw” form (sense impressions) to the final construct that we experience, e.g.,
my wonderful dog Sid
.
If it’s of interest, I’d like to write a follow up on working with all these phenomena but, for now, our job as meditators is to dig into these experiences, see them arise and pass away, see their layers and how they’re constructing and constructed. To see if we can get a sense of their skilfulness. To see what arises in our minds and, more importantly, what doesn’t. Is there anything known that isn’t known through the mind?
Eventually, by doing this, we come to recognise that everything,
everything
1
, is “mind,” and that, by “mind,” we simply mean an ongoing stream of experiences and the container we infer for them.
—
1. This is not to say that there’s no world out there, even Yogācāra (the so-called
mind-only school
) didn’t claim that.
