In Hinduism, the mind is a double-edged sword. It is the centre of all we consider either good or evil. In contrast to philosophies that separate us from God, where good or evil is attributed to external agents, in Vedanta the mind is, in reality, the creator of everything.
This is the one concept of Hinduism that is hardest to get one’s head around – that the world as we know is unreal in actuality, and that all we experience is only true to a certain extent and no more. It is this one concept of Maya and the subterfuge of the mind that finally stops us from truly realising our true self. In most cases, it is much easier to just think of God as someone or something external and attribute characteristics to him/her/it and get on with life.
The unreality of the universe is not outright unreal. It is relatively unreal, that is, unreal compared to the reality of the foundation or the basis of the universe. Thus it is called mithya – unreal real. It is this concept of the unreality of our reality that people from time immemorial have butted their heads against, some with success and others with despair.
All schools of philosophies in Hinduism, from dualism (dwaitham) to non-dualism (adwaitham) to special approaches to adwaitham (Vishist Adwaitham) agree on the universe being unreal. Only the approach they adopt in illustrating this unreality differs or only the method they offer in overcoming this unreality differs.
Thousands of years ago, our ancients broke down how the mind works, and what it can do for us (or against us) depending on the control we have over it.
In life, we humans go through our ‘reality’ based on our reaction to stimuli from our environment. The stimuli is sorted out by our senses and our brains and presented to the mind for decision-making, for storage as memory and for stitching together the mosaic of our lives.
This sorting out is initiated by the senses (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell) which send electrical impulses to the brain for collating into either a visual picture, a memory or an action response which ‘we’ as the mind/personality/ego decide to act on. In general, this process is supposed to follow the basic input, process, output method of dealing with everyday things.
But not quite, since the information has to be fed into a background and shot off in the appropriate zone to find a collaborative piece for it to make any sense. That means we already have a field of information that we need to relate new stimuli for it to work at all. New material without a corresponding fill-in in our brain puts us in a panicky state and this is clearly seen in babies, who need to be introduced to new things gradually.
The ancients went a bit further than most when delving into the workings of the mind. They started with ten senses, five of action and five of mental understanding. The five senses of action – the karmendriyas (Karma/Indriyas ) – are the five elements that make us act – eliminating, reproducing, moving, grasping and speaking. The five sense of understanding (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell) are called the jnanendriyas (jnana/Indriyas).
In all philosophies of Hinduism, the senses are deemed as unreliable. What you sense is not the truth or reality. It is only the sum of what we receive through our senses and this will vary according to what our minds are attuned to.
So, right from the start, we are duped by the senses because they are designed only to take in/receive information to the limits of their function and can do no more than what is demarcated as their boundaries. They do not present the world/universe as it really is, only as what they perceive the world to be. And they can be defective (see note below on synaesthesia).
And it doesn’t get any better. The mind, that elusive thing called manas in Sanskrit, has its own agenda. In the first instance, the manas is ruled by one or the other of the trigunas - Tamas, Rajas and Satthwa. It is this triple strand of attributes or qualities that determine how we respond to any given situation. The trigunas are tamas (indolence/dullness), rajasic (fieriness or active) and satthwa (balanced or pure) gunas.
The closest English translations we have of this gunas is ‘attributes’ or ‘qualities’ but it does not explain everything. In lay terms the gunas tinge our minds, and either ‘force’ or ‘allow’ it to make decisions based on a preset ranges of habits or behaviour. ‘Forced’ in that the conditioning is so great that the individual has no chance of making a decision other than what is stored up. This can be called a character trait or tendency. Or that overpowering impulse that you have to give in to.
‘Allowed’ in the sense that when one has worked at making the conditionings more malleable, one can make a decision that can go against our instinctual behaviour (against that reaction of our mind that is so conditioned so as to appear as our innate nature). This is achieved by rational analysis of one’s own self – one of the hardest endeavour ever taken by man.
It is our mind, then, which decides based on how we are tinged in our personality.
Tamas, Rajas and Satthwa. Modern day researchers talk of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, with the latter seen as being same as the unconscious mind by some and as a separate entity from the unconscious mind by others.
The mind, according to the ancients, is made up of our unconscious mind, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. What we in daily lives say is the conscious mind is actually the subconscious mind that the ancients talk of.
For example, we can be unconsciously swayed in the way we act or make a decision based on an external factor. Rather than our instincts coming in play or we being aware of what we are doing, external factors continually prime us in making a decision in which a judgement is passed without any analysis on our part. This comes from our subconscious mind which operates when we are awake and in action mode but of which we are not aware of.
New studies by psychologists at Yale, based on experiments to alter people’s judgments, have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
These reactions have been analysed to the nth degree and are most apparent in how marketing ‘helps’ us in making choice – through advertising and other marketing tactics. These subliminal tactics are part of our everyday lives, employed by our own selves in reacting to both overt and subtle stimuli.
The autopilot mode takes care of a very large percentage of our waking lives. While there are many things our lives that need concentration – from shaving to crossing the road to eating - many of these activities, because of their repetitive nature, are shunted off to the subconscious. How many of us can recall how we crossed the road, or how we ate this morning? Or how we hold the razor when we shaved? How do sportspeople continually keep making those amazing shots, or the perfect dive? How do people have a gut feeling that is spot on? Or never forget how to ride a bike or drive a car? The list is endless. And all are forms of our subconscious mind.
On the other hand, the conscious mind as demarcated by the ancients is one of concentration and awareness. This is called being mindful.
The conscious mind comes into play when there is a need to concentrate, to bring about a situation where all our abilities are required. This means we are very much aware of what we are doing and how we are doing and we are storing away this experience as something new and unique, or important to us.
In creating our reality, the mind uses all three states of consciousness, but with more emphasis on the unconscious minds.
Some researchers say the human unconscious mind resides along the spine and the nub of the brain, which is also called the reptilian brain (reptilian complex/R-complex). This part of the brain is enclosed by the mammalian brain (the paleomammalian complex (limbic system)) and both of these are covered by the human brain (neomammalian complex (neocortex). Please note that presently this theory of brain triune is accepted as true only by a smaller section of the scientific community.
And it is this lower brain that is the dominant power of our minds and which lends us our animal ways. It probably is the basis of the self-deluding, self-indulgent power that the ancients said was a mix of moha and maya; a power that leads to ego-preening, fault-shifting, making allowances for ourselves and those important to us, of hidden subjectivity that one can’t acknowledge and rejecting that which will not fit into our framework of references.
This deluding power is a mixture of both individual and cultural conditioning, a nurturing of ideals, creeds, traditions that aims to do one thing and one thing only – protect the ego, namely the mind and its waves of thoughts. This is the mind baggage that our ancients targeted through the spiritual efforts of sadhana, meditation to raise our awareness from the base level to a level where we could develop our intellect through vivek (discrimination) and vichar (analysis).
The mind, then, creates our personal reality, and each personal reality is based on a ‘background’ reality that is shared by others in the vicinity, or from knowledge factored into that reality through becoming aware of more information.
But none of these reality can be the same. Similar, but never the same as it is all invented inside of individual heads. It has no basis in the external, if an ‘external’ exists.
Science states is this way:
If we look at the nervous system there are basically two functions. One is sensory—the ability to respond to the outside world—and the other is the ability to do something about it, the ability to modify the world. As the nervous system gets more complex in higher animals there's another totally astounding property, which is the ability of the nervous system to invent things inside the head, which it can then make into reality.
- Neuroscientist Rodolfo R. Llinás, Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine.
Now this property/aspect of the mind to invent things inside the head and then making it our reality is what the ancients concentrated on. What this means is that we have a field of awareness inside of us, based on information we have stored up in the years we have experienced and we see this as the field of operations. Like the operating system in a computer, it is the RAM in the background that can make computing possible.
The triune, the trinity, the trimurti is an ongoing element of Hinduism and the ancients were spot-on in determining the brain/mind function according this tri-sectioning. The tamas or conditioned element is said to be found in the instinctive reptilian mind, the active element or rajasic bhava (attitude) is played out in daily life in the subconscious mind while man finds the truth of things/purpose of life only through the balanced approach of the satthwic attitude. The satthwic attitude comes about when the mind or manas is motivated by the buddhi or intellect and is in a state of mindfulness.
A higher stage of this conscious mind is called Constant Integrated Awareness (Prajnanam) - when one is mindful of everything in creation. In fact it is said that one achieving this state is God himself or herself, as stated in the mahavakya Prajnanam Brahman (Consciousness is God).
We call this the super-conscious mind – that which is aligned to the divine/cosmic awareness. This is where the reality of the world is known, where the cosmos and you become the same, in which your true identity is discovered.
Swami Vivekananda “criticises most popular religious ideas to the extent that they are based on faith and belief alone (which is mind-based), rather than direct personal experience (which goes beyond the mind)”. In his search of God, the Swami tested gurus by asking if they had a direct experience of god. Ramakrishna Paramhansa said he had, and Vivekananda accepted it as true based on the conviction with which it was stated.
This direct perception is what the ancients urge people towards – to know the divine, the truth or the reality through realisation. Call it enlightenment or anything, the direct perception is the final step in all religions. Because it goes beyond the limits of the mind, it is accepted as the true way of discovering that “which by knowing, everything else is known”.
It is not easy, this discovering of the self. Through meditation and control of sense, it can come about. The ancients gave some ideas of how this can be done.
Laya, Vikshepa, Kashaya and Rasasvada are the other four obstacles to getting this direct experience. Laya is sleepiness, when the mind in a state of quietude brings on sleepiness to counter the prolonged inactivity it is subjected to.
Vikshepa is excessive tossing of mind from one object to another object, the making of castles in the air or holding conversations with one’s own self. This is the excessive monkey-nature of the mind.
Kashaya is Goodha Vasana (hidden subtle desires) which one never thought were there and the unconscious ambitions within the mind. They can take endless shapes.
Finally, Rasasvada is the bliss of Savikalpa Samadhi (lower Samadhi). This itself is an obstacle so long as it prevents you from enjoying the Highest Nirvikalpa Bliss. Vichara (analysis), viveka (discrimination), Pranayama, further earnestness and struggle in meditation will remove the above four obstacles.
Notes
A person bound by objective desires will try in various ways to fulfil them. He becomes a slave to his senses and their pursuits. But if he withdraws the senses from the world and gets control over their master, the mind, and engages that mind in thapas (penance), then he can establish Swa-rajya or Self-mastery or independence over himself. Allowing the senses to attach themselves to objects is what causes bondage. When the mind that flows through the senses towards the outer world is turned inwards and is made to contemplate on the Atma, it attains liberation or Moksha. – Satya Sai Baba
Synaesthesia - Sensory connections can even be crossed: One of the ways that it is easy for us to understand the unreliability of the senses is by considering the neurological disorder called synaesthesia. With this disorder, a person's brain connections are different from the typical. When, for example, light comes in the eyes (normally used for sight), the neurological connections might be to the smelling centers of the brain. Thus, one might experience smell when looking at certain objects, or may hear some particular color. How very different would be our descriptions of external reality if all human brains operated this way. (It is estimated that approximately 1 in 25,000 people naturally experience synaesthesia.)
The triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the paleomammalian complex (limbic system), and the neomammalian complex (neocortex), viewed as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution. The triune brain hypothesis became familiar to a broad popular audience through Carl Sagan's Pulitzer prize winning 1977 book The Dragons of Eden. Though embraced by some psychiatrists and at least one leading affective neuroscience researcher, the model never won wide acceptance among comparative neurobiologists.
Dr. Paul MacLean, Chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. says there are essentially three brains, each of which developed during a particular stage of evolutionary history. The earlier part of the brain, found in reptiles, could be called the reptilian brain, or R-complex. In mammals another structure appeared: the paleomammalian brain, with a new range of particularly mammalian behavior--care of the young, affection, mutual grooming, etc. This is the home of the limbic system and the capacity for feeling and emotion, for the sense of smell and sexuality. With the development of human beings came the most recent evolutionary structure, the neomammalian brain -- with a hugely expanded neocortex in the prefrontal lobes. The neomammalian or "thinking" brain brought with it the capacity for language, visualization, and symbolic skills unique to human beings.
As Vivekananda said: Imagine if you had an additional sense, an electric one – how would you see the world then? How indeed? Many people attest to seeing auras, that electrical or magnetic emanation that comes from every living thing. Many see halos and various other things. These people either have developed their senses to a higher level or are in possession of a ‘sense’ in addition to the ones all regular people have.
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