The Buddhist Science of Mind

B. Alan Wallace, Ph.D.

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

(http://sbinstitute.com)

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The Evolution of Science

• Galileo, rigorously observing physical celestial and terrestrial physical phenomena, launched a revolution in the physical sciences.
• Darwin, rigorously observing biological phenomena, launched a revolution in the life sciences.
• William James’s proposal to rigorously observing mental phenomena was thwarted by the ideology of naturalism and the dogma of scientism.

Naturalism and Scientism

• Naturalism is an ontological commitment to the the world as being “natural,” with no supernatural causes and entities, and an epistemological commitment to the best scientific methods to regulate one’s inquiry.

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• Scientism: (1) science is our only source of genuine knowledge about the world, (2) it is the only way to understand humanity’s place in the world, and (3) science provides the only credible view of the world as a whole. (Auguste Comte)

The Epistemological Hierarchy of Naturalism

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Beliefs of Naturalism

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Reason

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Experience

A Blind Spot in the �Naturalist Vision of Reality

• No scientific definition of consciousness
• No objective means of detecting consciousness or any mental phenomena
• Ignorance of neural correlates of consciousness
• Ignorance of necessary and sufficient causes of consciousness
• Ignorance of how the brain generates or even influences mental phenomena

Expanding the Scope of �Scientific Inquiry

• Occam’s Razor: “It is vain to do with more assumptions what can be done with fewer assumptions.”
• Apply Occam’s Razor to the insistence that mental phenomena must be physical, and what have you lost?
• Add rigorous first-person inquiry to the mind sciences, and what might you gain?

The Primacy of Introspection

William James:

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“Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always.” The word introspection need hardly be defined—it means, of course, the looking into our own minds and reporting what we there discover. Everyone agrees that we there discover states of consciousness.”

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Challenges of Introspection

William James:

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“Introspection is difficult and fallible; and ... the difficulty is simply that of all observation of whatever kind... The only safeguard is in the final consensus of our farther knowledge about the thing in question, later views correcting earlier ones, until at last the harmony of a consistent system is reached.”

Beyond the Darkness of Materialism

William James:

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“At present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and the Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will, or past successes are no index to the future. When they do come, however, the necessities of the case will make them “metaphysical.” Meanwhile the best way in which we can facilitate their advent is to understand how great is the darkness in which we grope, and never to forget that the natural-science assumptions with which we started are provisional and revisable things.”

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Buddhist Empirical Science �of the Mind

• Indian truth-seekers (śramaṇa) (c. 5,000 years ago) learned to develop stable, highly focused attention ~ samādhi

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• Gautama the Buddha refined sustained voluntary attention, with enhanced stability and vividness, and used it in unprecedented ways to explore states of consciousness and their objects ~ vipaśyanā

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• Gautama: “The mind that is established in equipoise comes to know reality as it is.” ~ union of śamatha & vipaśyanā

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The Psyche: The First Dimension

• The embodied mind, including conscious and unconscious mental processes, conditioned by the body, personal history, physical environment, and society

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• Studied indirectly by interrogation and examination of behavior and the brain, and examined directly through introspection

The Psyche: The First Dimension

• The embodied mind, including conscious and unconscious mental processes, conditioned by the body, personal history, physical environment, and society

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• Studied indirectly by interrogation and examination of behavior and the brain, and examined directly through introspection

Direct Perception of the Mind

Through the close application of mindfulness of the mind:

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• Observe the processes of origination, abiding, and dissolution of mental processes.
• Identify mental afflictions, which can be identified by the criterion that they disrupt the balance and equilibrium of the mind.
• Observe which mental states are wholesome and which unwholesome.
• Observe whether mental processes and states are stable or momentary, true sources of happiness or unsatisfying, personal or impersonal.

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Fundamental Causes of Suffering

Six root mental afflictions (Tib. རྩ་ཉོན་དྲུག་):

�1. Ignorance (Skt. avidyā; Tib. མ་རིག་པ་) Cognitive�2. Attachment (Skt. rāga; Tib. འདོད་ཆགས་) Conative�3. Anger (Skt. pratigha; Tib. ཁོང་ཁྲོ་) Emotional�4. Pride (Skt. māna; Tib. ང་རྒྱལ་) Cognitive �5. Doubt (Skt. vicikitsā; Tib. ཐེ་ཚོམ་) Cognitive �6. False views (Skt. dṛṣṭi; Tib. ལྟ་བ་) Cognitive

Authentic Mindfulness

Nāgasena:

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“Mindfulness, when it arises, calls to mind wholesome and unwholesome tendencies, with faults and faultless, inferior and refined, dark and pure, together with their counterparts… mindfulness, when it arises, follows the courses of beneficial and unbeneficial tendencies: these tendencies are beneficial, these unbeneficial; these tendencies are helpful, these unhelpful. Thus, one who practices yoga rejects unbeneficial tendencies and cultivates beneficial tendencies.” (Milindapañha 37-38)

Subtle Continuum of Mental Consciousness: The Second Dimension

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• A subtle dimension of consciousness which is accessed in deep sleep, at death, and when one achieves śamatha.

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• The ground-state of the psyche, from which all mental activities emerge and into which they dissolve, from life to life

The Substrate Consciousness

Nāgārjuna’s Commentary on Bodhicitta (Bodhicitta-vivāraṇa, vs. 34):

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“When iron approaches a magnet, it quickly spins into place.

Although it has no mind, it appears as though it did.

In the same way the substrate consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) has no true existence,

Yet when it comes [from a previous life] and goes [to the next],

It moves just as though it were real.

And so it takes hold of another lifetime in existence.”

Experiencing the Substrate Consciousness

The Vajra Essence:

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“The rope of mindfulness and firmly maintained attention is dissolved by the power of meditative experience, until finally the ordinary mind of an ordinary being disappears, as it were. Consequently, compulsive thinking subsides and roving thoughts vanish into the space of awareness. You then slip into the vacuity of the substrate, in which self, others, and objects disappear. By adhering to the experiences of vacuity and luminosity while looking inward, the appearances of self, others, and objects vanish. This is the substrate consciousness. Some teachers say that the substrate to which you descend is ‘freedom from conceptual elaboration’ or the ‘one taste,’ but others say it is ethically neutral. Whatever they call it, in truth you have come to the essential nature [of the mind].”

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The Relative Nature of the Mind

Panchen Lozang Chökyi Gyaltsen (1570–1662):

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“The nature of meditative equipoise is not obscured by anything, but is lucid and clear. Not established as anything physical, it is a clear vacuity like space. Allowing anything to arise, it is vividly awake. Such is the nature of the mind. This is superbly witnessed with direct perception, yet it cannot be grasped as ‘this’ or demonstrated with words. ‘Whatever arises, rest loosely, without grasping’: nowadays, for the most part, contemplatives of Tibet uniformly proclaim this as practical advice for achieving enlightenment. However, I, Chökyi Gyaltsen, declare this to be an exceptionally skillful method for novices to achieve mental stillness and to identify the relative nature of the mind.”

Yogic Perception

• Yogic perception arises by relying for its “dominant cause,” the union of śamatha and vipaśyanā.
• It results in a wide variety of modes of extrasensory perception, including remote viewing, knowing others’ mind, clairaudience, and recollection of past lives.

The Discovery of Past Lives

• Buddha: “When my concentrated mind was thus purified, bright, unblemished and rid of imperfection, when it had become malleable, wieldy, steady and attained to imperturbability, I directed, I inclined my mind to the knowledge of recollection of past lives.”
• The Buddha narrates how he recollected the specific circumstances of many thousands of his own former lives over the course of many ages of world contraction and expansion.
• “This was the first true knowledge attained by me in the first watch of the night. Ignorance was banished and true knowledge arose, darkness was banished and light arose, as happens in one who is diligent, ardent and self-controlled.”

The Emptiness of the Mind:�The Third Dimension

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Düdjom Lingpa:

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“By examining… whether the mind that is the all-creating sovereign of the body, speech, and mind… is really existent or really nonexistent, the mind is found to have no basis or root, so it is not established as having any shape or color. The five elements and five [sensory] objects appear like objects of the mind, and your own body appears as its base. But if all these are investigated from an ultimate perspective, they are found to be like space, not truly established as either one thing or many. Ascertaining the origin, location, and destination [of the mind] as objectless openness is the spontaneous actualization of the essential nature of the path of cutting through. This is not something freshly achieved, but is simply the knowledge of the mode of being of the nature of existence.”

Indwelling Mind of Clear Light: �The Fourth Dimension

• The ultimate, luminous, empty ground-state of consciousness, pervading all phenomena (jñāna)

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• Nondual from the non-local, atemporal, absolute space of phenomena (dharmadhātu) and the energy of primordial consciousness (jñāna-vayu)

Ontological and Phenomenological Knowledge of Reality

• Pristine awareness is realized by recognizing that things appear even though nothing exists from the side of the appearances, and that all appearances of the physical worlds and their sentient inhabitants have no existence apart from the ground sugatagarbha, while those appearances are of the same nature as the displays of the ground sugatagarbha.
• Padmasambhava: “Pristine awareness awakens within itself, and due to your eye of primordial consciousness penetrating wisdom, you perceive all the appearing phenomena of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa with unobscured extrasensory perception, like bright reflections of planets and stars in the great ocean, free of grasping and reifying them.”

Primordial Consciousness of Knowing the �Full Range of Phenomena

Buddha:

• “Whatever in this world with its deities…is to be seen, heard, sensed, and cognized, or reached, sought out and encompassed by the mind, that I know, that I have directly known.”
• Buddha: “It is in this fathom-long carcass with its perceptions and its mind that I describe the world, the origin of the world, the cessation of the world, and the way leading to the cessation of the world.”

Illuminating the Nature of the Mind

• Claims of exceptional ways of knowing call for research involving sophisticated, sustained training in first-person, contemplative methods to complement third-person, scientific methods.
• Such research should examine the broadest possible range of states of consciousness, and be conducted by skeptical, rigorous, open-minded psychologists, neuroscientists, physicists, philosophers, and contemplatives.
• A network of centers for contemplative research should be created for training professional contemplatives in collaborative research with scientists and philosophers.

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