It’s not all in the mind

Sept 2013

     Here I am wondering how to write this article and wondering what and how it is I am able to wonder anything at all. I know I want to write about the mind and the body, somehow, but how do I proceed? In common language “the mind” is usually used to refer to the thinking-feeling “I”,  that which allows us to be aware of the world and our experiences, the agent of oneself that is apparently separable from the body.   I’m not satisfied with that, because it doesn’t actually say anything. It’s sort like saying, as I read recently, that experiences, including near death experiences, are just experiences. What are experiences? What is the mind? I’m particularly unsatisfied with the idea that the mind is separable from the body. Who has a mind without the agency to produce it? A human mind cannot be conflated to divine consciousness, even if we think of  the human mind as a part of divine consciousness.

I am also unable to concede the popular notion that everything is all in the mind, because this feels inherently unsatisfactory. It feels to me like I would have to agree that my mind “cooks up” all existence, and I cannot buy that. Fortunately, I’m in good company.

     In Buddhism, all phenomena (subjective and objective) are  said to be dependent upon causes and conditions where nothing arises uncaused.  Every cause has a previous cause, a previous context, and situation, so that every phenomenon arises from previous phenomenon. It is interesting that such a perspective sits well with modern Western psychological thought and that it contrasts with our earlier philosophic tradition. The latter had a far more mystical idea about the nature of mind, the psyche. The psyche was seen as a sort of conflation of the soul and thought that was  somehow independent of everything material,  a sort of spiritual ether. Contemporary psychology, and Buddhism, sees the mind as inherently relational, and thus not independent of anything, nor ethereal.

     The mind, seen relationally, arises in a dependent way upon both internal and external things. Pain, for example, is thus not all in the mind as much  mind itself is not a creation of itself. We are responsive, relational beings.  There really is an outside world, and there is a relationship we have with it. This relationship is incredibly complex and entwined. If this was not so, we would not be able to share our experiences with one another, nor with other sentient beings. I note here that there is certainly a school of Buddhist thought that declares the material world as nothing but a projection of our minds, but this is not shared by other schools of Buddhism. The Dalai Lama, for one, considers it more ‘coherent’ (in his words) that there is a reality that consists of both the subjective mind and objective objects in the material world.

     The relational dependence of the mind upon inner and outer realities is what Buddhists call the philosophy of ‘dependent origination’ in which there is a continuum and complexity of attributions. We are thus able to say, we are made of star dust; we are continuous in substance with the rain and the oceans; we join with our ancestors as we tread this earth – mystical phrases that house actualities. The basic elements that make the universe make our bodies and our brain, that give form and language to our minds (the archetypes of divine potters that contrive bodies and give them breath, has something essentially true to say here).

     Our intentions, our will, our activities in the world thus matters incredibly, for these have a real bearing on all else in our subjective and objective lives. This how, what, and whether: the how we live our lives, what thoughts we think, how we manifest those thoughts, whether we are generous towards others and ourselves, and so on, is where  psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy comes to their own. The changes and choices we make really do change our relationships with ourselves, one another and our physical environment, and the matter of our own brains (brain plasticity). The mind truly is a relational state of being. A change at the level of mind, changes fundamentally everything because the mind is not separate. Life really isn’t all in the mind, for the mind is merely an integral part of  it.