The self in the biological machine

It is not too difficult for people to understand that every phenomenal thing is momentary but never permanent for if things were permanent then how could they cease to exist?  We accept that our conditioned world is momentary and in time, all of us will die having no power to stop our death.

Yet many people seem to believe that their self is really to be found in what the Buddhist call the five aggregates, i.e., the psychophysical organism, even though the teachings of the Buddha say that this corporeal aggregation is not the real self even though many believe otherwise.

What has happened to us is that we have wrongly identified with something like a biological robot in the belief that we are this robot which is the cause of our suffering.  It’s like the Buddha is telling us that we are not this biological robot, even though we inhabit it.  It is not our real and eternal self so we have to stop desiring it as if it is who we are.

But can we kick the habit of desiring it and see the real self?  That is  difficult to answer given the Western world appears to deny a ghost (G., Geist) in the machine which is not unlike the invisible radio signal in the radio which amplifies the signal.  Many of us seem to believe there is no ghost—only an evolved biological machine that will one day die and be the end of us. Some, to put it another way, believe the biological machine makes the ghost and when the machine falls apart, we are no more.

At least for Buddhism the machine is not a problem because the idea of matter or biological matter as we understand it doesn’t exist in Buddhism.  The biological machine, in other words, is a construct of Mind and its powers of discrimination.  All phenomena, in fact, are a phenomenalization of Mind (G., Geist)—there is only Mind (cittamatra). Take Mind away and there is nothing there.  Our real self stands, independently, above this for it has found itself, not through the study of phenomena, including the biological machine, but through meditation that reveals self to itself like the sun that reveals itself and everything else.

 

 

Comments

[Aryeh]

You might find this article interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_Gnosticism

[Jung]

"If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?"

George Orwell, 1984.

To the externalist, the temporal skandhic mind is an inescapable trap with the capacity of immeasurable suffering and intermediary states of lesser suffering experienced as brief moments of happiness. It is as the story about the man who found himself hanging from a cliff with an assured death beneath him, should he let go, and wild animals above him, ready to devour him should he choose to climb towards that direction.

Here the only solution is to find the true person of no rank, the very seat, and dominion of the true self.