Exploring the mind-body connection

Strolling on Hampstead Heath recently, an old schoolfriend was telling me how he and his wife have been trying to get out of England for five years now, trying unsuccessfully to get a place in France. The other old schoolfriend we were with was nurturing fantasies of buying a sailing boat, learning to sail, and sailing off around the world with his wife and severely autistic son – again, just to get away from Clapham, just to escape from being in the same place their whole lives. (My taxi driver today, from Pakistan, also said he would do anything to get out of London, but he saw no way out.)

Edward admitted that this sailing adventure was never going to happen, and that even if it did it would probably be a mess. This was a lighthearted escapist conversation, but it still reminded me how often we want to be somewhere else, how we think it will solve our problems, yet how little control we really have when it comes to escaping. Not least when we get older, which me and my schoolfriends seem to have done rather more quickly than expected – we have morphed into our parents.

How can we get to where we want to be? Which is happy, wouldn’t you say?, and free? We have to understand and control our mind. This life is one thing – but to sail safely through all our future lives we definitely need to gain more control of our minds. A sailing diploma or enough cash for an overpriced French house is not going to cut it. Our future lives are nearly upon us. Now is the time to get ready for where we’re going next.

Carrying on from How to know your own mind. 

Geshe Kelsang talks about some of the ideas that we learned at school and so on, to wit:

Some people think that the mind is the brain or some other part or function of the body, but this is incorrect. The brain is a physical object that can be seen with the eyes (Ed. Well, not right now hopefully) and that can be photographed or operated on in surgery. The mind, on the other hand, is not a physical object. It cannot be seen with the eyes, nor can it be photographed or repaired by surgery.

Since the time of Descartes, which I touch on in this article: Your mind is empty even if it doesn’t feel like it, Westerners have been hit over the head with a reductionist, materialistic worldview that our mind is somehow contained in our body or, more specifically, our head. We are apparently wandering around with a shrunken mind lurking behind our eyes; whereas the mere act of observation shows us that our mind is kind of everywhere, isn’t it? We develop universal love, as in this last article – where is our mind at that point? We might be in Africa wishing people to be happy. Or we’re in England thinking about our mom, or even in another realm – for even if she has passed away, she is still appearing to our mental awareness wherever she is. Our mind can even go to the past or the future – in fact, where is the past and the future outside of our mind?

The mind is extraordinary. Wherever or whenever we think of anything, our mind is there. How can we say that about our squidgy brain? Our brain doesn’t go anywhere – it just sits tight in our skull. Mine does anyway, and it’s probably just as well. Therefore, as Geshe Kelsang continues:

The brain, therefore, is not the mind but simply part of the body.

Even amongst Buddhists we often say, “my brain” or point to our head when we mention our mind – it’s just so deeply ingrained in us. However, if our brain and our mind are the same, why do we need two different words? When we think “my brain,” we typically think of that grey blob filling our head. When we think “my mind,” we think of more nebulous things like our thoughts, anxieties, or joys.

The mind is said to be “clarity”, which means that it is formless awareness. A friend and Buddhist monk called Wangden wrote this on Facebook last week in answer to someone’s question about “What does clarity mean”?

“I find it helpful to think about specific minds. For example, if you see your friend walking towards you, you may have a mind of affectionate love. What shape is that love? Is it triangular? Square? Octagonal? Maybe it’s a three-dimensional shape like a cylinder or a pyramid? The question is absurd, because affectionate love has no shape. What color is this love? Sometimes in my country we use colors like red and pink to represent love. Do you feel that there is a red or pink thing within you that is your love? My answer is no. Those colors may symbolize love, but I don’t think it literally has a color. Does it have any other physical form? How much does it weigh? How wide is it? How much volume does it take up: 50 mL? 2  gallons? If you keep asking questions like these you’ll find it’s quite natural to agree that your love has no physical form. And you can do the same with respect to compassion, anger, faith, jealousy, etc. With enough contemplation it will become clear that mind has no physical characteristics. This lack of physical characteristics is what we call clarity.”

The relationship between the mind and the brain

There is a relationship between certain levels of awareness and the brain, meaning they can impact one another. This shows us, however, that there is a relationship between them, which in fact means that they cannot be the same thing because relationships pertain between two or more things.

If someone performs surgery on our brain, this can of course affect our moods and thoughts. (It is the same when we have heart surgery). There are also many experiments around by now showing that when people meditate they rewire their brain. Buddhists tend to know already that when we meditate we change our awareness, so the fact that this shows up in our brain is not really here nor there. However, it is somewhat fascinating, and the changes observed in the brain do show that there is a relationship between certain levels of mind and our brain. This is rather like the relationship between a driver and a car, or between radio waves and a radio. Our grosser levels of awareness, such as our sense awarenesses, depend upon the body of this life – we cannot see shapes and colors without an eyeball, for example, even though our eyeball is not awareness itself.

What about deeper levels of awareness?

As for the deeper levels of awareness that we are aiming at in our clarity of mind meditation (which I am slowly getting us to), there isn’t a relationship. Our very subtle mind abides in our heart chakra and only manifests during deep sleep and the death process. When some highly realized Buddhist practitioners, such as Geshe-la’s teacher Trijang Rinpoche, pass away, they can be brain dead but not actually dead, meaning that their formless consciousness has not yet left their meaty body. In Trijang Rinpoche’s case, although his brain had stopped working and he should have been dead according to the Western paradigm, he carried on meditating for a week, abiding in his heart, his body warm. This is not even that uncommon. Well, it’s fairly uncommon; but it has happened a lot over the centuries with great Buddhist masters. In fact, it happened recently. The abbot of Segyu monastery was also brain dead and yet carried on sitting up in meditation, his body still warm several days later. Our deeper levels of awareness don’t need the brain of this life. This is non-local consciousness. I think we can say that our very subtle mind is not even human.

Even when we dream, our mind leaves this body to go to dream worlds. Although we’re technically still in this body, alive, our subtle mind can leave and come back when we wake and gross minds reappear. Then, as you know, there are phenomena such as out of body and near death experiences which all indicate that the mind can leave the body. The brain, though, cannot.

Mind/body connection

Geshe Kelsang says:

There is nothing within the body that can be identified as being our mind because our body and mind are different entities. For example, sometimes when our body is relaxed and immobile, our mind can be very busy darting from one object to another. ~ How to Transform Your Life

This is kind of common these days, isn’t it?! – humans don’t move for hours on end. However, our minds are still moving a million miles an hour, more than ever, possibly? Do we still need legs any more in our modern society?

In Buddhist scriptures, our body is compared to a guesthouse and our mind to a guest dwelling with it. When we die, our mind leaves our body and goes to the next life, like a guest leaving a guest house and going somewhere else. ~ How to Transform Your Life

This is not an abstract concept or distant future we’re talking about – within a few hundred months at most we’ll be leaving the guest house of this body and going to another one.

Buddha’s explanations of the mind/body relationship are very sophisticated and based on direct experience. He had a lot to say about how our mind is connected to our subtle body of channels, drops, and inner winds (prana, chi), where our very subtle mind is located, and how our subtle and very subtle minds manifest and subside. He explained the different types of relationship between our sense awarenesses, our sense powers, and the parts of our body. Therefore, it’s not as though Buddha dismissed the body, as it were, but he explained very clearly how the mind and the body have a relationship, meaning, as mentioned above, that they are not the same thing. You can read more about our subtle body in Venerable Geshe Kelsang’s Tantric texts, such as Tantric Grounds and Paths or Clear Light of Bliss.

3am questions

As Buddha pointed out, if we want to know who we are, then we need to understand the nature and function of our mind. We need to know that our mind is a formless continuum, and that when it leaves the body, we go with it. This body is very temporary, it “decays and dies so very quickly” as Je Tsongkhapa puts it. This world is not our permanent home. We are travellers passing through on our way to future worlds.

From understanding the difference between our body and mind, we gain the vitally important knowledge of who we are, where we came from, and where we might be headed. You know those 3am questions – “Who am I?! Where did I come from? Where am I going? What am I doing here? What’s going on? What the heck?! Everything’s so weird.” – before falling promptly back to sleep. Buddha, as you know, asked all these questions, but he also figured out the answers.

All we have time for now, but more is on its way … meantime, please leave me your comments in the box below 🙂