The Surprise of All Humanity (Part 3) | Buddha's Secret

Chapter 4 Consciousness and Self-Concept A person's perception continually ebbs and flows on a daily basis with changes in intelligence, knowledge, and understanding based on the type of emotions one feels and their individual strength, pull, and intensity. This process makes a person happy, sad, excited, hesitant, or anxious about people, objects, and events around them. One may feel angry, greedy, jealous, trusting, lustful, and confused all in one day. More often than not, we are not aware of the influence of our feelings upon how we perceive things and behave, as this process is partly subconscious. Feeling is what drives a person whether it is to seek shelter and food, clothing and medical care, love and sex, career and comfort, etc. According to Buddhist Dharma, desire is a major part of Within the Abhidhamma Pitaka, the last of three parts to the Pali Canon, the scriptures of Theravada Buddhism, are a number of texts concerning psychology, philosophy, and metaphysics. The Abhidhamma Pitaka describes the structure of the human mind and perception with amazing accuracy to the accepted views of modern neuroscience. The mind is described as a continual conscious process or experience in the metaphor of a Buddhism sees mankind living in a deluded reality caused by infatuation, attachment, and clinging to desire for objects and permanence in the world as the source of all suffering. The pathway to wisdom is found through understanding the Four Noble Truths and practice of the Eightfold Path. Many of these practices are being used in Buddhist philosophy combines both consciousness and metaphysics in the concept of Pratityasamutpada or dependent origination. Reality is seen as an interdependent timeless universe of interrelated cause and effect. A human's existence is interwoven with the existence of everything else and the existence of everything else is interwoven with the human's existence in a Because this concept is past, present, and future, everything in the universe is only transient and has no real individual existence. This is a very important concept because it is only our ability to free ourselves from attachment and delusion about our sense of self and values unconsciously placed on others. Will we be able to see the world as it really is rather than what we wish it to be? In fact, our view of self and existence is created through our clinging and craving which blinds us to the reality of dependent origination. As we have seen, Buddhism is about transcending these delusions so human perception is clear and unbiased. This makes Buddhism an ethical philosophy of life rather than a religion in strict terms. Since the beginning of the 20th century, especially after World War II, there has been a growing interest in Eastern philosophy in the West. The teachings of the Abhidhamma Pitaka have inspired and influenced many psychoanalysts and psychologists, including Carl Jung, Eric Fromm, Albert Ellis, John Kabat-Zinn, and Marsha M. Linehan. There has been a great leap forward in humanitarian and transpersonal philosophical influence both in therapy and management theories. Dialogue between philosophy theorists and practitioners of East and West has led to mutually influential relationships between them. This has led to new insights into therapies and new schools of thought on both sides. Aspects of Buddhist Dharma are also incorporated in the works of Western philosophers, including Caroline A.F. Rhys-David and Alan Watts. Buddhist doctrine of dependent origination preempted some of the most recent developments in neuro- and cognitive psychology, particularly in the way we experience ourselves and the effective processes behind how we create our self-identity. Dependent origination explains the forming of our personality, motivations, likes and dislikes, patterning, and biases. It answers the questions, what do we really want, why do we want such things, and why do we act the way we do? None of our wants are actually our own. Our wants and behavior are conditioned within us from our upbringing by parents, schooling, religious upbringing, and exposure to society in general. Our actions come from within the bounds of our socialization, and the choices we make are decisions based upon the stream of conditions surrounding us. Our self-identity is made up of the sum of influences around us. A person is the result of feelings, thoughts, and emotions both inherited and as the result of social factors. These states develop our biases, opinions, likes and dislikes, views, and knowledge, and thus we don't really have any true self-identity. Consequently, our self is really a delusion which we interpret as our desires and intentions, based on our ignorance of I and me, a stream of physical and mental phenomena, constantly arising and ceasing, taking influence over our mind in a constant state of flux and change. Our clinging to the identity of I and me is our greatest defense mechanism we have to cope with change, and this is the basis of our self-delusion. At this point of the discussion, it is important to mention that the concept of cosmic consciousness is sometimes described as a collective consciousness that exists throughout the cosmos and is often associated with Buddhism. Cosmic consciousness has been argued as a state that can be reached through the practice of meditation. Jung described the connection of all nature through the collective unconscious. Jung likens the external world to one of illusion, something similar to the world of Maya in Hindu theology. Our egos, or jivatman, are individual souls which are actually extensions of the one and only Atman, universal energy or God, who allows an independent identity to manifest itself in part of himself. Through this we are all connected, independent but interdependent. When we die, we realize the illusion that we actually existed as we are part of God. However, the concept of dependent origination has no esoteric connections. Dependent origination postulates that we have a common socialization through our culture, family, and professional life, and socialization with others, which cultivates our biases, desires, values, beliefs, and assumptions. There is no known transcendent consciousness, only metaphorically through socialization and genetic inheritance. Our identity is related to the world around us, to others through identity paradoxes like rich-poor, have-have-not, high-status-low-status, lucky-unlucky, and winner-loser, etc. People pursue their daily lives from the framework of their meaning system. We live in a structured world. Our reliance on value systems has more in common with Bourdieu's field and Habetus' theory than cosmic consciousness. We are guided through cultural and social logic and our subjective experiences, not by causality but by co-arising, which makes behavior less predictable. Daily events we participate in and observe don't rely upon the laws of physics, however. They are predictable enough to have rule-of-thumb predictions to guide daily life. The human psyche is the result of millions of repetitions of A person is not really made, he or she becomes and is still becoming predetermined by his or her own choice, thought, and act, which becomes habit. People don't always move towards a single goal or objective, they continually change direction. This is the effect of emotions. Consciousness is a process that emerges from the interactions within our brain, body, and environment, a multi-dimensional process with a rich variety of properties. Consciousness is thus changeable, related to interaction with people, objects, and the environment, reflects our moods and feelings, and is both situational, where we are in the world, and phenomenological, about what we experience. Our emotions are part of our consciousness and also our window and connection to the world. All our experiences are subjective, therefore, entities have a subjective existence that is ambiguous. Consciousness is thus a phenomenological arising due to mutually dependent activities, and without arising conditions, there is no consciousness. According to the teachings of dependent origination, it is the ability of the brain to categorize what we perceive in the environment that gives meaning. Without the ability to categorize we would have no cultural or social realities. And it is the very system of categorization the brain utilizes that gives rise to our desires, wants, and cravings. The paradox here is that our perceptions via our emotions are actually non-existent, but imaginary, however through imagination they exist. This is consistent with Benjamin Hoff's concept of the social construction of identity, relying on our mental maps and stereotyping of people, objects, and events to provide meaning. A man noticed that his axe was missing. Then he saw his neighbor's son pass by. The boy looked like the evil while he walked and behaved like a thief. Later that day the man found the axe where he left it before. The next day the neighbor's boy walked past and walked like a well-behaved and good boy. When we perceive something, our cognitive system identifies it and our emotional system gives it value. Thus, the way one interprets the world will be the way one acts in the world. Humans act towards people, objects, and events based on meanings they assign to people, objects, and events. Our social interactions are based on conditioned responses derived from our beliefs and assumptions. Meaning arises through the interpretation of social actions that we encounter. Therefore, no absolute meaning exists. It is negotiated through interaction with others and perception of events modeled by our thought processes. Our reality is based on social interaction. Buddha's parable of a king who invited a group of blind men to identify an elephant shows that our understanding is based on perspective. One feels the tail and says it is a rope. Another grabs the leg and says it is a pillar. Another feels the side and says it's a wall. Another felt the head and said it was a water jug, and so on. We try and understand the world through the narrow perspectives we have. This leads to our ignorance and habitual behavior that uses up all our attention and energy. Only when one can transcend the influence of their ego is one able to see through the influence of their emotions.