What is important to understand about mind is that it is animative and is different than the five skandhas or aggregates being spiritually independent of them. Each aggregate, in fact, cannot act for itself thus it has no real independence. The five skandhas are always being acted upon. It is even so with the aggregate form or rupa since the physical body is always being affected by external and internal forces. With the second aggregate, feeling, it is even more obvious. We can look at a little child, for example, and almost immediately become aroused by tenderness.
Because of the passive nature of the Five Aggregates which consists of physical form, feelings, thoughts, inclinations and sensory awareness, they are always suffering. The first noble truth of suffering is, in fact, the Five Aggregates (S. v. 425). These same aggregates make up the temporal person (satkaya) who is constantly being affected by everything; who is under the doom of suffering.
For one attached to the five skandhas there is no where to run or to hide.
Only mind escapes this doom, although it doesn’t seem like it for the reason that most of us have an untrained mind. Only with the dawn of Bodhicitta or, the same, the awakening of the higher Mind, which is the result of training the mind, do we realize how fully animative, independent and effectual the higher Mind is.
Until our mind is trained, the devastating impact of having an untrained mind is not appreciated until it is almost too late. In truth, we lack the motivation to change. We seem content to live with a sense of helplessness which accompanies the Five Aggregates with which we are in deep sympathy. This only serves to highlight the fact that we prefer an untrained mind to the higher Mind.
It is only during meditation—unbeknownst to us—that the power of the higher Mind makes itself known (I should say barely known). That meditation, first of all calms us down is a combination of two factors. The first is that we have limited our body’s exposure to being affected. We have chosen to meditate in a quiet place, for example. The second factor is that Mind, with the capital ‘m’, which is beyond the pale of the five skandhas, is more easily detected so it can be amplified with the right focus and training.
Shifting in reverse, I want to go back to the untrained mind because I don’t believe modern Buddhists are aware of the untrained mind and, for obvious reasons, the dangers of not training the mind so it becomes the higher Mind with Bodhicitta. From the Dhammapada, this passage conveys the deep sense of anxiety of those who have an untrained mind.
“Like a fish, thrown from all abodes on a dry ground (moves about restlessly),
this mind (citta) trembles in order to leave death’s realm” (34).
The only way to escape such fell anxiety is by training the mind. This is better said than I can say it, again, by the Dhammapada.
“Good is the control of mind, which is difficult to restrain, quick,
jumping at whatever it desires. A controlled mind brings felicity (sukhâ)” (35).
Turning to the payoff of the trained or controlled mind, the Dhammapada then goes on to tell us what happens while, incidentally, giving us a splendid piece of vital information about mind, that it is fundamentally unbodied.
“Those, who can control the mind, which is far going, wandering alone, bodiless (asarîra) and living in the cave (of the heart), those will be freed from the bond of death (mâra)” (37).
Keep in mind it is the Five Aggregates which die, to put it bluntly. But the Mind is never subject to death, and never has been subject to death, except that through craving, it becomes sympathetically bound up with the life and dissolution of the aggregates. This is what is meant by the bond of death in the above passage from the Dhammapada. It is a sympathetic bond. If such a bond were other than sympathetic, how else might mind free itself? If is only by breaking its sympathy with the aggregates through mind training and with the arising of Bodhicitta that Mind is liberated which is nirvana.