Mind and mutiny

by Hoa Newens
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[This essay was originally published on Awase Newsletter - July 2018 and is posted here to complement the preceding blogpost titled "Zanshin"]

​In martial arts as well as in certain esoteric circles the concept of no-mind (mushin, 無心) generally refers to the desirable mental state in which our consciousness is crystal clear and undisturbed by thoughts or emotions. Most forms of meditation also uses this state as a goal or an intermediate stage for further practice.

On the face of it, the concept of no-mind seems to reject the utility of the mind, and poses a serious contradiction to our western culture which glorifies mental achievement and put mind on some of the highest social pedestals. In this essay we examine the essence of this incongruity and explain the need for no-mind.

People regularly use the term “mind” to mean consciousness, awareness, self, mental state, or thoughts. Consider these idiomatic expressions: make up one’s mind; get something out of your mind; have something in mind; speak your mind; mind your own business.

To clarify the subject matter of this discussion, we make the following distinctions.

Consciousness is the inherent intelligence that animates a sentient being. This intelligence is of a divine source that precedes Existence. It is the aspect of a sentient being that makes it alive. In certain contexts we also refer to consciousness as Spirit or Soul.

Awareness is a cognitive function of Consciousness that recognizes various forms of energy within Existence. Consciousness, which is pure by nature, acquires Awareness as it projects into Existence.

A human being is endowed with pure consciousness at birth, a piece of the omnipresent divine consciousness. The human consciousness gradually recognizes various elements of Existence through awareness. Awareness builds up overtime until it begins to differentiate itself from the rest of Existence. Then a Self emerges as a distinct entity from the original consciousness. The Self continues the cognitive process of consciousness and builds a Mind of its own from the awareness that it accumulates.

As it grows, the Mind recognizes its earthly limitations since it has separated from its infinite source and realizes that its primary motive is to preserve the newly born Self. As soon as the need to preserve and protect arises, threats are perceived, and the Emotion of “fear” is born. As Mind continues to grow by bumping into Existence, other human emotions come to life: anger, jealousy, sadness, etc.

At one point in its growth, Mind becomes aware of the cycles of nature and register these repetitive patterns as it creates the concept of Time. One cycle becomes a unit of time. Temporal awareness slowly grafts itself onto various human activities including daily routines as well as cyclical activities according to the seasons.

With time, Mind further develops the ability to compare and to measure, until the capacity that we call Intellect is born. The intellect is further developed and reinforced through our education process. The intellect accumulates Knowledge and creates its own set of rules that we call Sciences. One such rule dominates all others and is known as Logic. Another key rule that is derived from the coupling of finiteness and time is Efficiency. These two rules build the essential fabric for our modern society.

As it happened, in the West, the Intellect grows rapidly and dominates all other facets of the original Mind, and often usurps its powers and authority to become “the mind”.

In this way, little mind that was a part of big Mind wants to proclaim itself the whole Mind. Consequently, mental ability becomes the highest faculty of human being and takes up residence in the penthouse of the body, the brain (so it thinks).

The evolution of Western society has reduced the original Mind, which is a differentiated part of cosmic consciousness, into the smaller component, the intellectual mind, sometime referred to as the thinking mind.

In our current society, mind has become a dictator who condemns anything and everything that is not its derivative. An autistic savant is a special mental health case. Faith healing, intuition, life force and telepathy are unexplained phenomena relegated to esoteric realms outside of mainstream sciences.

Little mind goes so far as creating its own offspring, labeled artificial intelligence, with the goal of replacing human mental activity, and possibly humans themselves. In other words, it is preparing a coup to take over Divine Creation and create a new form of life.

A number of science fiction writers have already visualized these scenarios and several have already been made into movies (Google artificial intelligence in movies).

Despite this dire futuristic view, fortunately, our universe has a self-correcting mechanism: when life reaches an extreme it begins the reverse flow.

A growing group of frontier scientists have realized the limitations of mind and have initiated exploration beyond the boundaries of sciences. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity toppled the traditional Newtonian model and spawned a new trend. Einstein declares: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction”, and that “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”, and further “A human being is part of a whole called by us the universe.”

The revolution to restore mind to its former glory as Mind has begun. A new breed of frontier scientists are more readily accepting the notion that reality might also contain a non-physical dimension that includes consciousness and the human soul, and also the possibility of multiple parallel universes.

We have led the discussion thus far mainly to show that through human history mankind has not been using the Mind properly and has caused a depreciation of the Mind, mostly by focusing excessively on the thinking faculty and while ignoring largely more omnipotent faculties of consciousness.
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Then what is the correct perspective on Mind?

Mind as we see it, is a post-birth transformation of a part of the divine Consciousness that animates an individual human being. Our mind is an allotment of divine consciousness that is focused on our physical world and is dedicated to help us navigate this world, including figuring out what our purpose in this life is and how we can accomplish it with the tools available to us.

If we view Mind in this manner, certain corollaries follow naturally.

The mind is provided to us as a tool to help our physical being adapt to the physical world. As such, it has four uses, which are described here in increasing complexity.

First, mind is used to direct the body, that is, to initiate and control its activities. For example, in a voluntary motion the mind sets a purpose for the body to accomplish, monitors the execution of the motion and gives the body feedback so that it can fine-tune the motion.

Second, mind helps us understand our environment so that we can adapt and thrive. During its daily activity the human being constantly bumps into its environment, and mind helps us to learn about the properties of the environment so that we can find the best way to survive and thrive. Here is where the intellectual faculty comes in most handy. For example, the mind helps the body recognize that fire is hot and that it should not come into direct contact with it, but also that fire can be harnessed to provide warmth and to transform raw fauna and flora into human food.

Third, mind helps our consciousness process the lessons learned in daily life. Most of these lessons are learned through effort and failure during our interaction with our environment including interaction with other human beings. Here is when the capacity of mind to feel emotions plays an important role. Through the education process, mind learns to fear failure. Following a failure, Mind suffers through a temporary downshift then bounces back and searches for cause and effect connection to identify the cause of failure. It uses the results to adjust itself and the body to prepare for the next attempt.

Fourth, at the higher level of functioning, the Mind introspects and questions itself and its own existence then directs the ensuing spiritual quest of the human being. It engages in a search for a deeper meaning of its existence because it senses that it misses the presence of something larger than itself that would bring more comfort, peace and lasting joy.

To aid in furthering the understanding of the proper uses of mind, we describe below instances of inappropriate uses of mind.

Mind should not be used to alter our environment. Existence, including our universe as we know it, has been present for eternity. Human beings came into the picture recently as one small element, and have no right or reason to upset the pre-existing balance. To survive and thrive, there is no need for human beings to cause massive changes to our environment, including sentient beings at all levels, from rocks to humans. We may need to move the soil a little to build shelter and grow food; we may cause some friction with other beings (animal and human) in our hunt for scarce resources; we may need to rearrange or displace certain natural groupings such as move and transport certain things and animals out of their natural habitat due to our need to congregate; we may create mechanisms and systems to facilitate and enhance our life on earth.

But we must not go so far as to upset the balance in our ecosystem to such extent that it becomes detrimental to other life forms, and our own. When our human-manufactured plastic fills the oceans with trash and debris that kill birds and fishes, then we have gone too far. When we generate greenhouse gas and other polluting elements including an abundance of chemicals (some labeled as medicinal drugs) that destroy such essential elements to the food chain as our bio-diverse coral reef ecosystems, we have gone too far.

Similarly, when we have created so much automation that the body and the mind are in lack of work-out and their inborn potential faculties are diminished due to lack of use, we have gone too far. Witness the obesity epidemic, the lack of true artistic creation reminiscent of ages past, and the myriad of social issues arising from lack of meaningful interpersonal communication.

Mind should not be allowed free rein. Mind is a special power granted to us by the Divine for the purpose of navigating the physical realm and making sense of our stay on earth. For this purpose, Mind can function as the intellect and create sciences to accumulate knowledge. However, mind must not be allowed to build multiples layers and structures to sustain itself, aggrandize and perpetuate, to such extent that it usurps the position of its originator, Mind. As explained earlier, humans tend to let Mind degrade into mind, specifically the intellect, when they focus narrowly on their physical activities on earth. Allowing the intellect to rule our life without constraint is like allowing a child to govern a nation; lacking the breadth of an adult perspective, the juvenile ruler will surely focus on its immediate needs at the exclusion of all other beings’. Was it proper scientific application to create nuclear bombs that eliminated two hundred thousand human lives? As philosophers Francois Montaigne and Rene Descartes have pointed out, science without conscience is but the ruin of the soul. Science has its limited utility and it must be kept under leash by Mind, which in this context, represents Spirit.

Presently, little mind is taking humans deep into a world that it created with our blessing, called the digital world. Our youth spends untold hours living with digital friends, communicating through digital media, and toggling back and forth between this digital world and the physical world without distinction. Should we let this trend ride unchecked into the future, we can foresee the atrophy of the physical body and the thinking mind, and the eventual disappearance of our physical world.

Mind must not be allowed to denigrate or disavow big Mind. As we pointed out earlier, little mind is a constituent of Awareness, which itself comes from the Consciousness that is allotted to each of us at birth. Little mind is the tiny tip of the Mind iceberg in the ocean of Consciousness. The huge part of consciousness that is submerged and often ignored and referred to as sub-conscious is the part that carries our divine heritage and links us to the ocean. This submerged part contains our true human potential and stays submerged so that we can float in the ocean of life. Were it not for the submerged part, the tip would not float. To navigate to its true destination, little mind should constantly dig deep into the submerged Mind to find guidance. The way to do that is to go deep, that is, to dive into meditation, and not to build more towers on the tiny surface above water.
When mind does not reach inward to its roots for support, and instead permanently point outward it will run out of motherly sustenance and head toward self-annihilation, with the eventual demise of the individual.

Mind should not be fed incessantly. By its nature, mind needs constant stimulation. Mind is a form of subtle energy, and energy constantly flows. Therefore, mind is always in need of objects that it can hook on to propel itself and will grab any stimuli that is recognized by our senses: a sight, a sound, an odor, a taste, a tactile sensation. Especially in our digital age, there is no lack of stimulation, thanks to texting, Facebook,  e-books, podcast, electronic games, 24/7 radio and TV broadcast, and the ubiquitous smart phone. If we do not consciously exercise restraint, the mind beast will avail itself to this massive feeding, and consequently gobble up all sorts of useless data which are absorbed into our mental make-up and covertly affect all of our decisions.

Photos and videos on Facebook and YouTube captivate our consciousness and drain our energy. In its early years, the Internet might have proven to be a useful invention, but nowadays it is beginning to become the scourge of mankind and the black hole of consciousness. Only information that serves our goals becomes useful knowledge to the mind. Information that exists to be devoured by the mind just to satisfy itself is clutter. An overly active mind will squander its energy into useless spins which will cause such ailments as attention deficit disorder, nervousness and anxiety. When mind cannot find an anchor and is not actively forming thoughts or feelings, its energy is dissolved and re-absorbed into the next more refined level, which in this case is awareness. When the mind is stilled, its energy is recycled into consciousness.

Now more than ever, there is an urgent need to shake free of the shackles of mind and find the true meaning of life by turning inward and listening to that little inner voice that has undoubtedly sounded the alarm of our mental excesses. If going inward proves too difficult, we should at least slow down and watch and listen to Nature, and realize the changes that are taking place as a consequence of our misdirected mental activity.
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For those of us involved in the practice of Aikido, we should make it a part of our practice to still the body, the breath and the mind. Only when the mind is still, will the layers of mundane dust that it has acquired drop off to gradually reveal our true Mind. Then we discover the real meaning of Aikido. This is the direction that we should take, rather than projecting outward and entertaining ourselves with new forms, or make comparisons to form useless opinions.
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In summary, each of us is a soul born out of universal consciousness. A physical body and a mind are given to the soul so that it can adapt to living environment on earth and learn lessons. We should always remember that the body is controlled and animated by the mind, and that the mind serves, and is guided by, the soul. Lessons are harder to learn when this order is not respected and we allow the part to separate from, and control, the whole.
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Hoa Newens