Sat, 06 Aug 2005
Red Head
This is something I've meant to write for a while, but haven't had the energy to do. One of the standard exercises in mahamudra is to ask where and what the mind is. The problem with most Westerners think they know what the mind is. It's the activity of the brain, which is much like a computer executing a program. Leaving aside whether this view of the mind is correct, (I don't think it is), let's consider a different question from Western philosophy. When you see something red, where or what is the color red? First let's distinguish between the experience of the color red and the scientific understanding of the physical process that gives rise to it. Everyone knows that we experience red when light of a certain wavelength falls on our open eyes, but this understanding is different from the actual experience of red. Someone completely color blind, so that they only see black and white never experiences the color red, no matter how well they understand physics and biology. But if there were some operation that restored their color vision, then they would experience it, even if they were completely ignorant of the physics of color. So the intellectual understanding of color and the actual experience of color are distinct.
So where is the color red? Is the light red? No, light is an electromagnetic wave and is completely described by Maxwell's equations. If an electromagnetic wave had color, there would be a qualitative difference between radio waves and light waves, and there is not. So is the color red in the eye? No, the light waves falling on the receptors causes them to fire. This is an electrochemical process and there's no experience of red in any of this. Similarly you can trace the nerve impulses through the brain and not find the color red in any of this biological process. So where exactly is the color red?
The answer is that we have our understanding of the world completely backwards. We're looking for all the vivid experiences of our minds within the biological processes that science has postulated to explain them. But instead it's the theories of science, including it's understanding of the brain, which are in the mind and not the mind that is in the brain. Theories of biological activity of the brain, and actually any theory, are conceptual thoughts in our minds. Its our sense experiences that are primary and not the conceptual theories we construct to explain them. With this understanding we can begin to appreciate the formulation of mahamudra: all phenomena are mind, the nature of mind is empty, emptiness is mere presence, and this presence is self-liberated.
