We take pride in our technological advancements while at the same time holding on to a course of spiritual degeneration, that is, a growing disbelief in the immaterial, including mind or spirit. This is evident from the almost settled theory in neuroscience that mind or consciousness is a product of the brain.
"What we commonly call the mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain. Brain processes underlie not only simple motor behaviors such as walking and eating but also all the complex cognitive acts and behavior that we regard as quintessentially human—thinking, speaking, and creating works of art. As a corollary, all the behavioral disorders that characterize psychiatric illness—disorders of affect (feeling) and cognition (thought)—result from disturbances of brain function” (E.R. Kandel, J.H. Schwartz, T.M. Jessell, S.A. Siegelbaum, & A.J. Hudspeth (Eds.), Principles of Neural Science, 5th ed., p. 5).
All of this is more of a reflection of the powers that be, who believe that mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain all of whom are materialists. Where this puts Buddhism is into a realm of psychology where its meditation is useful, but nothing earth shaking where it flips the world over, so that we find our sensory world of things to be really made of mind or consciousness. This is, in fact, what Dr. Donald Hoffman is proposing with his theory of “conscious realism”:
“Conscious realism is a proposed answer to the question of what the universe is made of. Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents.”
This ties in with Buddhism insofar as the transmigrant from one rebirth to another is always consciousness (vijñāna). But this also helps to explain the mysterious storehouse of consciousness addressed in the Lankavatara Sutra, called the ālaya-vijñāna. Perhaps we can think of it as the storehouse of conscious rebirth agents. Hoffman says about these agents:
“First, a conscious agent is not necessarily a person. All persons are conscious agents, or heterarchies of conscious agents, but not all conscious agents are persons. Second, the experiences of a given conscious agent might be utterly alien to us; they may constitute a modality of experience no human has imagined, much less experienced. Third, the dynamics of conscious agents does not, in general, take place in ordinary four-dimensional space-time. It takes place in state spaces of conscious observers, and for these state spaces the notion of dimension might not even be well-defined.”
Under this light, Buddhism in the Lankavatara Sutra is really aiming past ālaya-vijñāna to the very substance which is Mind. Conscious agents are really a bifurcation (S., vi) of the Mind into countless subject and object heterarchies all of which are in subject object dependence or reflection-correspondence.
This takes us to the warning that the expansion of our conscious life is very important. At least we must not be like insects or animals but rather become like gods holding many lesser conscious agents within us. Our subject and object sides, which make up our consciousness must, eventually, become one, which is Buddhahood. This path is not material but immaterial and spiritual. There is no place in this life for materialism. The materialist is on an evil path which goes contrary to consciousness and Mind.
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