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Query on the mind centre
Bunks
Australia Veteran
Hi all
At a recent drop in meditation class I attend, the teacher (a monk in the mahayana tradition) talked about the mind being located in the centre of the chest. Someone asked how he knew this and he said that if you are conscious of it at the very point of falling asleep you'll get a subtle feeling of "everything" going back into this area (sorry, I am sure he said it more eloquently but I am not great with words most of the time!). Also, he said the scriptures said so.
I started thinking about this though. If the mind is in the chest, where do thoughts arise? To me they feel like they're in my head? How do they get there from the chest? And what about people who get hit over the head with a lump of wood and suffer damage to part of their brain? They can begin to behave differently which can only make me conclude that their thoughts have changed from damage to the brain. Surely this confirms the mind is in the brain? Or are thoughts not part of the mind?
Interested to hear others thoughts on this (pardon the pun).
At a recent drop in meditation class I attend, the teacher (a monk in the mahayana tradition) talked about the mind being located in the centre of the chest. Someone asked how he knew this and he said that if you are conscious of it at the very point of falling asleep you'll get a subtle feeling of "everything" going back into this area (sorry, I am sure he said it more eloquently but I am not great with words most of the time!). Also, he said the scriptures said so.
I started thinking about this though. If the mind is in the chest, where do thoughts arise? To me they feel like they're in my head? How do they get there from the chest? And what about people who get hit over the head with a lump of wood and suffer damage to part of their brain? They can begin to behave differently which can only make me conclude that their thoughts have changed from damage to the brain. Surely this confirms the mind is in the brain? Or are thoughts not part of the mind?
Interested to hear others thoughts on this (pardon the pun).
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Comments
That's how I had it explained to me, and I have to say it didn't really help much
The other thing was that thoughts are non-local and come from everywhere. You think they're in your head because you're conditioned to believe so, and the feeling in the head is merely psychosomatic.
Like I said, that's just how it was explained to me, I still feel like thoughts are in my head, too
It's also now a well-established fact that some organs - including the heart - are gifted with 'braincells' of their own....
The head is the body. This is where the six senses operate. So thoughts, smells, sounds, etc. The head is where the wrathful deities rest (movement).
This makes sense if you understand that the body mind split that we assume is a perception that is forced upon us based on karma. And consequently perception shapes how we view ourselves.
When one realizes the nature of the True mind or non dual consciousness then the body and mind are in essence the same. They are the functioning of dependent arising, thus empty of inherent existence.
I have so much to learn - which is very exciting!
Where exactly do thoughts arise from?
Where exactly do thoughts abide?
Where exactly do thoughts go to?
And if we say the head or brain. Where is that?
And we point to the head.
But that doesn't answer anything. That is an assumption based on knowledge we are taught. We should be able to find a thought.
Thats the assumption of this world. Its all in the brain.
But experientially the mind is not locatable. For instance the sound of music from the headphones occupy the same space as the sound of the thoughts which seem to be "in" my head. If you pay attention you will come to that conclusion. Where the hell is in? Where the hell is out? Where are the edges? Where is the center?
You see there are so many assumptions. This in Buddhism is ignorance.
Ignorance is not, not knowing. It is assumption. Beliefs. Beliefs that seem so read and so factual.
But they're not.
Because with careful observation in meditation we can come to completely different conclusions then our perceptions. And one could say that our perceptions in meditation are filtered observations as well.
And that would be correct.
Thus in Buddhism the only valid perception is the perception of emptiness. What do I mean by emptiness? It is the ungraspablity of all things. When we look for something, anything we can't find it.
This is the case because everything arises dependently upon causes and conditions.
So study dependent arising and how that relates to emptiness. Emptiness isn't a void. Emptiness is the lack of something. That something is what we give to experience/reality.
We give inherent, independent existence to experience.
And that is impossible according to Buddhist logic and Buddhists experiential master aka Buddha.
Best wishes!
Somewhat of an analogy, imagine you're listening to a radio. Some one asks you, "Where does that music come from?" If you were a neuroscientist, you'd probably open up the radio and look for it there. This is about where most western Buddhists are at. The belief is, mind comes from the brain. Such people don't want to believe that their brain is more like an amplifier which also serves to localize the 'mind-signal' which is normally non-local.
In a way, we are two places at once. We are fundamentally non-local (and don't know it) and mainly local, fixated on a temporal body subject to death—and a lot of pain. It is only through meditation that we can penetrate through the veil of the local mind with its riot of phenomena and return to the non-local luminous mind which is uncomposed (asamskrita) and unborn (i.e., non-local).
Traditionally heart and mind were seen as connected, but I wouldn't worry about it. IMO it's not important where thoughts arise, but how thoughts arise.
I agree with the comments to the question which point to the fact of arising rather than location. Excellent.
But, to return to the initial question, about the heart, per se :
Have you noticed? 99.9% of reportage about cognitive science is focussed on the brain (often accompanied by photograph of a Tibetan Buddhist wearing a tomography "hairnet") ... As one cognitive science researcher confided to me, "We do not go beyond the brain. That's where our funding is." Meanwhile what about, say, Candace Pert's discovery of peptides? ( Gee, the brain and the stomach do look quite similar... )
Besides "gut knowledge" (the dantien ; hara ) ... how about heartmind? Same character in Chinese: schematic hieroglyph of a heart.
HeartMath research shows heart sending more signals to brain than brain sends to heart. (Studies of brain are based on tomography: where blood flow is activated at what region, generating heat which can be imaged. Question: Does my left prefrontal lobe say to my heart, send me some blood ... Does the heart say, Hey, brain, here's some blood to your prefrontal lobe.)
An earlier study, focussing on the amazing work of Frank Chester find the heart as not so much a pump ... as a brake, for balance
So, to resume the thread about the nonlocality of mind, its emptiness, might we recall here Bodhidharma's koan for Huike :
Thanks for the Alan Wallace lecture. Paradoxically, as Lothar Schäfer points out, "the principles used in establishing factual knowledge cannot establish themselves; induction cannot induce induction; there are no verifiable general statements; and the basis of science is non-scientific."