Y2Q19) Mind as the creator (1)

[Rik vanKeulen]

Yogachara states the mind is the creator of appearances. Think of examples from your own life, which show how dominant the mind is in determining our perceptions. The examples don’t necessarily have to follow the mechanisms decribed by Yogachara.

[Rik vanKeulen]

Trying to kick-off with two examples, but I hope we can come with more examples. Mind as the creator (whether we follow yogachara or not) is, I believe, one of the key aspects of Buddhist philosophy. If we don’t get convinced about this, we could well continue chasing happiness in external objects.

1) What we call music by a rock band or orchestra, is on a CD a digitally encoded file: ones and zeros, stored as a series of pits in the disc’s reflective material. A laser detects the pits, generates an electric current, and that creates vibrations in the speaker. Then the air vibrates. In our ear organ, the stereocilia, little hairs in our ears, pass on the message to our nervous system, after which many different parts in the brain are ‘switched on’ and consciousness perceives sound. This creates a appearance of sound in our ear consciousness, of which our mental consciousness then states: the music of this rock band, of that orchestra. We are 100% convinced it is the real music from the CD. Pretty funny to consider that we can get so attached to music: but where is the music, in the CD, in electric current, in the vibrations, in our nervous system???? Should we conclude hearing music, is just the creation of the mind? (One of my friends writes music blogs, so I told him to write about the above. Later he told it was one of his least popular blogs…… it was just too much to accept for the music loving audience of his blogs….). And while writing, I looked at the fridge in front of me: realising the same counts for my visual perception, for every perception going on at this moment…..

2) This happened at Maratika cave – a cave linked to Guru Rinpoche – in Nepal. I was doing some meditation in the ‘meditators corner’. 4 others were also regular visitors, each doing their own thing. We would come to the cave in the morning, do our meditation, for lunch go out, each to their own place, and after lunch come back and do our afternoon sessions. Nepal as a big lunch, called Dahl Bhat. So we were all struggling against sleepiness in the first half of the afternoon session and often one of us would dose off. I am a big favour of ‘double salty liquorish’ which I had brought from the Netherlands, and that would keep me awake after lunch. At a certain moment, seeing people struggling with sleep, I offered this liquorish, warning them that it was a very salty sweet. Within seconds, they looked terrible shocked looking for a place to spit it out, not really something you would do in such a holy pilgrimage place. I quickly told them, this is the medicine which will keep them awake after lunch. Their faces suddenly lightened up: this was exactly what they needed. After that my fellow meditators looked forward to ‘double salty liquorish’ after every lunch! Just the change in concept – from very salty sweet to medicine to keep one awake – changed the appearance of this liquorish in their mind completely. So what is in a liquorish, can’t be much, it rather seems a creation of the mind.

[Floris Veen]

Thx Rik for your nice examples. Here some recent examples from my side. Last summer at the end of the retreat in Loenen we enjoyed our victory lunch and shared our experiences we had during the week. It was interesting to hear that like myself several people had the experience of a different perception of sounds.The simple turning of the page of a book suddenly sounded very intense and vivid. Not at all the way it is normally perceived. On the side of the action of turning the page nothing was substantially different from normal, but to our ear consciousness the perception had changed probably due to the effect of meditation practice. It changed the whole experience of the perception of that sound. So on the side of the person something changed that made the perception a different experience. I think this shows that the way something appears tot our mind is determined by our mind. Likewise we apprehend seemingly similar objects every time just a little different depending on our minds. The new toilet bowl I bought last week that should bring a nice new experience to going to the toilet, suddenly became an annoying object when I didn’t seem to manage to get it to hang in right way.The whole feel around the object changed when I looked at it lying there on the ground, waiting to be hung. And this all happened in my mind!

[Rik vanKeulen]

Falling in love is also a great example: within hours, days, weeks that other person triggers a whole range of perceptions in the mind, increasingly with more emotions, fantasies, desires, etc. You are over the moon. The story becomes ever bigger, while the person did not really change that drastically in that period. Buddhism says that a whole lot of karma related to that person from previous lives is suddenly leading to butterflies in one’s stomach. That follows the yogachara theory quite well: a lot of the over-the-top feelings and perceptions, as well as the consciousness being aware off it, are both caused by the ripening of karma.

[Manita Roose]

Sinterklaas!
As a young child I believed that Sinterklaas really existed. I was excited to see him and a bit scared of his helpers

As a grown up, I can still see the magic of the myth. It’s not completely gone. And I’m aware of the discussion about the helpers.
So my perspective is very different now.

[Author]

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