Understanding the Mind

Beginningless Mind: Inferences from Cause & Effect

Body & Mind — Form & Formlessness

The mind is neither physical, nor a by-product of physical processes, but is a formless continuum that is a separate entity from the body. When the body disintegrates at death, the mind does not cease.

The person of this life is a self imputed onto a human body and a human mind. We are all very familiar with our own body. Every part of it is given a name: face, hand, eye, heart, brain, and so forth. Actually, when we point to our body, all we can only ever point to is a part of our body. So, strictly speaking, we can say that there is nothing to our body other than its individual parts collected together and given the singular name body.

However, we would probably find it very difficult to name just one part of our own mind. (The terms mind, consciousness, and thought are synonymous in this context.) Buddha detailed many parts of the mind, some of which are like cancerous growths causing all our sufferings, pains, and fears. These are called delusions, and they function only to disturb our inner peace and thereby rob us of lasting happiness. The essence of Dharma practice is to remove these delusions from our mind and cultivate virtuous minds in their place. To know which parts of the mind to abandon, we must have an accurate understanding of our mind.

For any moment of consciousness, there are at least 5 mental factors, these being the ‘parts’ of the mind. These five accompany every instance of consciousness:

1. contact perceives an object as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral
2. feeling experiences the object as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral
3. attention focuses the mind on a particular attribute of the object
4. discrimination identifies the object as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral
5. intention moves the mind to the object

It is inappropriate attention (i.e., exaggerating the good/bad qualities of an object) along with mistaken discrimination (i.e., considering the object to be intrinsically good/bad) that stimulates the seed of a delusion (e.g., attachment or anger). We can see these five mental factors, plus the deluded mental factor of anger (coloring one’s intention), at work in the following definition:

Anger is a mental factor that observes an animate or inanimate object, feels it to be unattractive, exaggerates its bad qualities, considers it to be undesirable, becomes antagonistic, and develops the wish to harm the object.

We can question whether any of the mind’s factors, like the parts of the body, have physical form. If intention, for example, does not have size or shape, then it lacks qualities characteristic of form. Unlike say, our hand, an intention does not take up space and has no spatial dimensions, no matter how large or small the scope of one’s aspiration. The mental factor intention also lacks other properties of matter such as color and temperature (except perhaps metaphorically). But, although the mind may not be matter, perhaps it is energy? However, even types of energy such as visible light and radio signals have waveforms with measurable frequencies. Can our intentions be distinguished in terms of megahertz?

We can proceed like this through all the remaining mental factors and conclude that, since none of the parts of the mind have form, then mind as a whole is also formless. Also, the kinds of things that obstruct physical objects are not what obstruct the mind: a fallen tree can obstruct the path of a vehicle, yet delusions obstruct us on the path to liberation. The implication of this is that the continuum of mind must be distinct from the continuum of the body, as discussed in the previous essay: if body and mind have qualitatively different natures, then each must have arisen from qualitatively different kinds of causes.

Cause & Effect — Intention & Feeling

Every physical action has an effect, and every mental action also has its own respective effect. Buddhists often describe the action or cause as like a seed, and the effect as like the ripened fruit. There is also a definite relationship between the cause and effect in that a virtuous intention will always yield a positive effect, and a non-virtuous intention will bear forth a negative effect. These positive and negative effects are experienced as states of happiness or suffering, in varying degrees. Therefore, we can say that every pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral feeling is caused by a corresponding virtuous, non-virtuous, or neutral intention, respectively.

As mentioned above, every moment of consciousness has the all-accompanying mental factors feeling and intention (among others) which arise, abide, and cease together. However, this is not to say that an effect (i.e., feeling) arises at the same time as its very own cause (i.e., intention). Rather, feeling is always the effect of some previous action, not the effect of the current action, since an effect and its cause cannot exist simultaneously.

       Past                Present             Future
 Feeling (effect)
  Intention (cause)  Feeling (effect)
                      Intention (cause)  Feeling (effect)
                                          Intention (cause) 

(Hover your mouse over the arrows...)

So, if we look at our present state of mind, whatever feeling we are now experiencing is the result of some previous intentional action. And, reacting to this, whatever intention we make now will not ripen until a future moment of consciousness. This shows that no individual moment of mind is self-caused or self-contained. That is to say, one always has to make reference to a previous moment of mind to explain its cause, like the chicken and the egg. Of course, this leads to an infinite regress, back into beginningless time, wherein we find no first cause for the mind. And again, it cannot be the body which gives rise to the first subjective experience of this life, since the body and mind are not part of the same cause-and-effect continuum, given their radically different natures.

Looking forward, we can imagine our last moment of consciousness if this life. We will be experiencing a feeling that was caused by some previous moment in our mental continuum. Since intention accompanies every moment of consciousness, this action is not ‘wasted’ but will give rise to its own future effect, without fail, even if in the next moment we have died. Can we say that at the time of death we have experienced all the as-yet unripened effects of our previous actions? Seeing things this way, we necessarily infer that the mind is without beginning and without end, else we claim that it is possible that an effect can arise without a cause or that some causes never give rise to their future effects.

Maybe we are not entirely convinced by the various lines of reasoning given above, but perhaps we can say they merit further investigation. Contemplative meditation is a means of familiarizing our minds with Buddha’s teachings. In the case of the nature of the mind, even if we do not yet have full conviction in the law of actions and their effects, we can still appreciate how such a worldview would impact on our daily lives: every thought counts; every decision matters.