Forests of Imagination

Chapter 4:The Nature of Mind from 'Know your Mind'

by Urgyen Sangharakshita

'Our ordinary experience is firmly and securely based on the subject-object dualism. All our knowledge, all our thinking, takes place within this framework - subject and object, me and you, 'me in here' and 'the world out there'. But the Enlightened mind, we are told, is completely free of such dualism. This, at least is one of the key doctrines of the Yogacara: cittamatra - 'mind only'.

Between the experience of non-duality and our ordinary, everyday dualistic consciousness, there is obviously a great gulf; and to move from one expereince to the other will entail a complete and absolute reversal of all our usual attitudes. This reversal, this great change- this great death and rebirth, even - is what the Yogacara terms the paravrtti.....(tranls. as) - 'turning about'.

.........'Basically the cittamatra doctrine denies the reality of matter as a separate category from mind. The objects of our perception, it says, are not external objects as such, not objects as opposed to ourselves, the subject. We perceive mental impressions, that's all. The significance of this insight is that if one removes the notion of an object, one also effectively removes the notion of a subject. In this way one breaks down the notion of a self that is separate from the world, to be left with 'mind only'. This 'mind only' is not mind as opposed to matter, but a completely different conception of mind.'

'.........So, rather than being able to make a sharp distinction between subject and object, all one can really say is that there is a 'perceptual situation' (to use Guenther's expression) comprising two opposite poles. One pole is the experience of what I call myself, together with everything I have under my immediate control; that is the 'subjective content' of the perceptual situation. And then, at the opposite pole, there is everything and everyone that is independent of my direct control - the 'objective content' of the perceptual situation. When one becomes Enlightened, that perceptual situation still occurs, but one no longer identifies oneself with its subjective content, which means that the whole perceptual situation is expanded, clarified, illuminated, enlightened.

The Yogacara interpretation is not so much that there is a thing called 'mind' and a thing called 'matter, and that the thing called matter is discovered actually to be mind. It's not like discovering that what one thought was a jug is in reality clay. It's more that citta or mind is the term applied to that undifferetiated substratum which has been polarized into subject and object, mind and matter. Mind and matter are just symbols for the two poles of the one perceptual situation, and it's sometimes very difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.If one can attenuate that subject-object polarity a little, for example in meditation (the Yogacara, remember, came out of meditative experience, not philosophical reasoning), then one's experience is transformed.

There is ofcourse the question of how we all come to share more or less the same 'objective content'. The general, though perhaps rather implausible, Yogacara view is that we have a common perception to the extent that we have a common karma - to the extent, that is, that we share a common mental outlook. The 'objects' more or less coincide because the 'subjects' more or less coincide. This concensus reality, however, is real for practical purposes only.

When you attain Enlightenment, the element of resistance to the objective content of the perceptual situation is no longer there. You no longer have a will that is separate from that of others. It's as though you utterly identify with others, and with what they are doing. You no longer want one thing while they want another, or want something from them that are are unwilling to give. What they want, you want; what you want, they want. You don't experience another person as a sort of brick wall that you are coming up against, and you no longer experience yourself as a separate and conflicting solid source. You experience others in a completely different way: they become diaphanous or transparent, because your will is not coming into collision with theirs. This completely different, more relaxed, lighter, and freer attitude, taken to the nth degree, is something of the nature of Enlightenment. The world is the same but you see it differently. Perhaps one could say that it's like what happens when you fall in love, only much more so. Even though everything is there as before, the world looks almost physically different.

The Yogacara describes the process of becoming Enlightened in terms of the transformation of what it calls the eight vijnanas into the five jnanas. Vijnana is usually translated as 'consciousness' but that is not exactly accurate. The prefix vi- means 'to divide' or 'to discriminate', and jnana means 'knowledge' or 'awareness', so we can translate vijnana as 'discriminating awareness'. Vijnana therefore refers to awareness of an object not just in a pure mirror-like way but in a way which discriminates the object as being of a particular type and belonging to a particular class, species, or whatever. The first five vijnanas are the five 'sense vijnanas' the modes of discriminating awareness that operate through the five senses - through the eye with respect to form, the ear with respect to sound, and so on.' ' Guenther uses the term 'perception' where other translators use 'consciousness', so that for example, instead of eye-consciousness' we have- more correctly, in my view - 'visual perception'.