Fathoming the Mind

Inquiry and Insight in Dudjom Lingpa's Vajra Essence

B. Alan Wallace, Dion Blundell, Eva Natanya, Dion Blundell, Eva Natanya

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781614293293
• eBook ISBN: 9781614293408
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Bestselling author B. Alan Wallace delivers the long-awaited followup to his Stilling the Mind: Shamatha Teachings from Dudjom Lingpa's Vajra Essence (2011). This companion volume stems from an oral commentary Düdjom Lingpa gave to the next section of the Vajra Essence, in which he elucidates the cultivation of contemplative insight, or vipashyana, into the nature of existence as a whole. The revelation appears in the form of a fascinating dialogue within Düdjom Lingpa's own mind: various aspects of his mind pose questions to his own primordial consciousness, and the pithy and provocative replies tap into the very ground of being. The ensuing dialogue explores every stage of the path to buddhahood in this lifetime, from the very beginning to the unexcelled result of the rainbow body, signifying enlightenment. Everything you need to know to attain buddhahood is complete in this text. As Wallace continued to reflect on Dudjom Lingpa's writings and their relevance to the modern world, he was inspired to elaborate extensively on his original commentary. The book includes new introductory essays and an afterword, revealing the texts' contribution to the contemplative revolution triggered by the discoveries of Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein.

1. The Nature of the Mind

To achieve a consensual body of knowledge concerning the nature and origins of the mind that is comparable to scientific knowledge about many aspects of the objective, physical world, mental processes must be approached with the same spirit of unbiased empiricism that has inspired the past four hundred years of scientific inquiry. This means that mental phenomena should be observed with all the diligence and precision that Galileo and Darwin applied to physical and biological phenomena. William James recognized this fact in the late nineteenth century, but psychologists abandoned introspection, ostensibly because it failed to yield rigorous, replicable results. James was well aware of the challenges facing the first-person, scientific exploration of the mind, but he concluded that these were common to all kinds of observation: “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.”⁷⁷

Nineteenth-century scientific attempts to use introspection to investigate the mind were primitive, faltering, with only rudimentary means for refining attention skills in general. The leading US researcher in this field was Edward B. Titchener (1867–1927), who created the largest doctoral program in the field of experimental psychology in the United States at the time, after becoming a professor at Cornell University. Having devoted his life to the development of introspective techniques, he observed that the main difficulties of introspection are “maintaining constant attention” and “avoiding bias,” but a further difficulty is “to know what to look for.”⁷⁸ But as we have noted previously, with the rise of behavioral psychology toward the beginning of the twentieth century, the direct observation and exploration of the mind by means of introspection was abandoned with the rise of behavioral psychologists, who simply decided to view the mind as nothing more than physical dispositions for behavior. From this time onward, the scientific study of the mind has been dominated by the ideological and methodological constraints of materialism. As we have seen, this approach gained further momentum with the rise of neuroscience in the 1960s, at which point experts in this field simply decided that the mind should be viewed as a biological function of the brain.

As we noted in the opening discussion on the śamatha practices of mindfulness of breathing, taking the impure mind as the path, and awareness of awareness, such advanced training in mental balance and concentration provides just the skills needed to engage in rigorous investigations of the mind and its role in nature. When the achievement of śamatha is conjoined with a range of practices of vipaśyanā, such research has illuminated four aspects of the mind’s nature, based on replicable, empirical discoveries made by thousands of contemplatives throughout Asia. These are the phenomenological nature of consciousness, the essential nature of the mind, the ultimate nature of the mind, and the transcendent nature of consciousness that lies within the very ground of the whole of reality.

The Phenomenological Nature of Consciousness

While modern scientists and philosophers have proposed a wide range of definitions of consciousness, they have achieved no consensus, nor have they devised any scientific means of measuring consciousness. They have left us in the dark regarding the nature and origins of consciousness and its relationship to the body and the natural world at large. In the tradition of Buddhism originating in India and evolving further in Tibet for more than a millennium, contemplatives and scholars long ago identified two defining characteristics of consciousness: luminosity⁷⁹ and cognizance.⁸⁰ A definition of any entity is useful insofar as it enables one to identify that entity when it is observed and to distinguish it from all other entities. The Buddhist definition of consciousness satisfies these criteria, whereas the many notoriously diverse materialist definitions do not. The characteristic of luminosity (the Tibetan word for which may also be rendered as clarity) has a twofold meaning. The first is that consciousness is clear in the sense of being insubstantial, devoid of materiality. When observed directly, consciousness displays no physical qualities whatsoever — no mass, size, shape, velocity, or location — nor can it be measured or detected with any physical instrument. The second meaning is that consciousness illuminates, or makes manifest, all sensory and mental appearances. Were it not for consciousness, there would be no appearances of any kind. Consciousness enables us to experience visual shapes and colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations, as well as all mental processes, including thoughts, the arising of mental images, desires, emotions, dreams, and so on. The cognizance of consciousness refers to the experience of knowing and understanding the objects that appear to consciousness.

The obvious fact of the immateriality of consciousness has been fiercely resisted by materialists, who insist that the only things that exist are those that can be measured through physical means, namely, matter, energy, space, time, and their emergent properties. Over the past four hundred years, scientists have explored a vast array of physical entities, and without exception, their functions and emergent properties have also been found to have physical characteristics. But the materialists’ assertion that the mind and consciousness are functions or emergent properties of the brain is an exceptional claim that is unsupported by compelling evidence. It is well known that mental and neural processes are correlated; however, as noted previously, the actual nature of those correlations remains as much as mystery as it was during Huxley’s time. Indeed, he found ludicrous the very idea that states of consciousness could actually emerge from the activity of neurons: “How it is that any thing so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”⁸¹

Materialists would have us believe that there are only two options when considering the relation between the body and mind: either one adopts the mind-body dualism of Descartes, which is seen as having been discredited by contemporary science, or one accepts the view of materialistic monism, which is the metaphysical foundation for science promoted by Huxley. Both of these alternatives have proven sterile and unilluminating in terms of fathoming the nature and origins of the mind, so it is high time to escape the confines of this ideological straitjacket. Beyond the dichotomy of monism and dualism is the open expanse of a pluralistic universe, consisting of a wide range of phenomena that fall outside the categories of either mind or matter.⁸² These include such nonphysical phenomena as meaningful information, appearances to consciousness, the mathematical laws of nature, and mathematical truths in general — along with justice, beauty, and human beings, who possess bodies and minds but are equivalent to neither.

Among the diverse phenomena that do not consist of states of matter or of mind, information is of particular interest, especially as modern civilization evolves beyond the industrial age to the information age. With the widespread use of personal computers and the Internet, we commonly refer to the amount of information stored in such systems; and since the brain is viewed as a biological computer, there is much talk of information being stored in brain circuits and processed by neurons and synapses. Many scientists and journalists go so far as to claim that individual neurons themselves “consciously” process and relay information to other parts of the brain, without being able to explain how the individual “consciousnesses” of a hundred billion neurons in the brain coalesce into the unitary stream of consciousness each of us experiences firsthand.

The philosopher John Searle challenges this naïve belief: “The information in the computer is in the eye of the beholder, it is not intrinsic to the computational system . . . The electrical state transitions of a computer are symbol manipulations only relative to the attachment of a symbolic interpretation by some designer, programmer or user.”⁸³ In other words, meaningful, semantic information is not objectively present inside a computer in the same way that silicon chips are present. The information we say is stored in a computer exists only in relation to the conscious agents who create, program, and use computers. George F. R. Ellis further clarifies that bits of information “exist as nonmaterial effective entities, created and maintained through social interaction and teaching . . . Thus while they may be represented and understood in individual brains, their existence is not contained in any individual brain and they certainly are not equivalent to brain states. Rather the latter serve as just one of many possible forms of embodiment of these features.”⁸⁴

Consciousness — as the simple experience of being aware — is not an attribute of individual neurons or silicon chips, and there is no compelling evidence that such consciousness is an emergent property of the brain conceived as some kind of biological computer. The word “consciousness” has been used so often now in a loose and undefined figurative sense, in an almost playful effort to personify observed physical processes, that the scientific community sometimes seems to forget what it is we all experience as the fact of being conscious every day, which involves being aware. If we keep in mind such first-person experience, then it becomes readily evident that individual neurons just don’t have the experience of being aware. Yet a belief in some imagined existence of a “consciousness” that could be an emergent property of matter has in many cases become an unquestioned assumption that precedes virtually all relevant scientific research while ignoring scientific evidence to the contrary.

The root of much modern confusion about the nature of information arises from the conflation of quantitative and qualitative information. Quantitative information, as defined by physicists, is the pattern of organization of matter and energy, which is inversely related to entropy. Qualitative, or semantic, information is meaningful in that it has a referent that is known by a conscious being.⁸⁵ Quantitative information is objectively measurable, whereas semantic information exists only relative to a conscious agent who is informed. The chemicals and electricity inside computers and brains have no referents. In and of themselves, they aren’t about anything, and they don’t refer to anything, any more than the letters “S T O P” refer to anything apart from their being understood by conscious agents who have agreed among themselves what this sequence of letters means. This point was clearly recognized seventy years ago by the MIT mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener (1894–1964): “The mechanical brain does not secrete thought ‘as the liver does bile,’ as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.”⁸⁶ Unfortunately, materialism has indeed survived to the present day, in part due to materialists’ successful campaign to supplant this inconvenient truth with spurious conjectures.

Materialists tend to feel most at home in the mechanistic materialism that characterized physics during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. But cognitive scientists in particular have largely overlooked, misunderstood, or marginalized the revolutionary implications of quantum physics that emerged in the early twentieth century. As the physicists Časlav Brukner and Anton Zeilinger explain: “In classical physics a property of a system is a primary concept prior to and independent of observation and information is a secondary concept which measures our ignorance about properties of the system. In contrast in quantum physics the notion of the total information of the system emerges as a primary concept, independent of the particular complete set of complementary experimental procedures the observer might choose, and a property becomes a secondary concept, a specific representation of the information of the system that is created spontaneously in the measurement itself.”⁸⁷

Rather than viewing quantum systems as local, anomalous conditions created and protected from outside influences in physics laboratories, the eminent theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008), in collaboration with Bryce DeWitt, applied the principles of quantum physics to the universe as a whole, resulting in the field known as “quantum cosmology.” One startling finding was that for the universe at large, time itself disappeared from the equations: the universe is frozen. Only when they introduced an “observer-participant,” with a perceptual reference point in space-time, did time and a changing universe manifest. The evolution of the universe can occur only when a subjective consciousness declares his or her “now,” thereby establishing both past and future relative to that present moment. But past and future exist only relative to this observer-participant; they are not absolutely existent.⁸⁸ This interpretation casts a fresh light on the so-called measurement problem in quantum physics, which has remained unsolved since it was first identified almost a century ago. According to Wheeler, for a measurement to take place, a true observation of the physical world must impart meaningful information, signifying a transition from the realm of mindless stuff to the realm of conscious knowledge. Rather than thinking of the universe as matter in motion, he proposed that one could regard it as information being processed, and this requires the participation of conscious observers who are aware of such information.

A major reason why scientists so widely believe that consciousness must emerge from matter stems from the current scientific understanding of the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. According to modern cosmology, the universe began with the emergence of matter and energy following the Big Bang, roughly 13.7 billion years ago; our planet formed about 5 billion years ago, and organic life first emerged roughly 3.5 billion years ago. Over the course of biological evolution on Earth, there is no physical record indicating the first emergence of conscious organisms, for the simple reason that consciousness is physically undetectable. But it is assumed that the first conscious organisms evolved from more primitive, less complex, unconscious organisms, so the emergence and development of higher and higher levels of consciousness in living organisms must be correlated with increasing degrees of complexity in their brains.

The logic of this argument appears to be irrefutable until one notes a simple fact that is almost universally overlooked by cosmologists and biologists: This entire narrative of the history of the universe and of life on Earth is based solely upon physical measurements. If you ask only physical questions and perform only physical measurements, the universe you conceive on this basis will contain only physical entities. If there were in fact nonphysical influences on the origin and evolution of the universe and living organisms, physicists and biologists would fail to discover them, as long as they limit themselves to the current methods of scientific inquiry. In short, the modern scientific view of the universe and humanity’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoché
• Foreword by Tsoknyi Rinpoché
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Nature of the Mind
• 2. Revealing Your Own Face as the Sharp Vajra of Vipaśyanā
• 3. Revealing the Ground Dharmakāya
• Epilogue
• Afterword:
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Translator
• Copyright