Walking the Wall

Last night I was tired, we have spent the last few days at the hospital with my dad who just got his hip replaced Monday. Thankfully, he came home yesterday and we came home later after getting him settled in for home recovery. While I was cleaning up the kitchen and getting my husband’s lunch ready, my son was whistling loud and cheery back and forth with his birds who had missed him all day and were very happy to see him. I yelled for him to please stop until I could leave the kitchen—but he didn’t understand me and came out to ask what I had said. I caught myself upright and instead shifted and told him he had a beautiful whistle that reminded me of my grandfather, which lead to a conversation with him about my grandfather (who died when I was eight) and how much he would have loved to have met my son.

Understanding how mental states color our reality is so important as they completely create our reality—so if I am tired and edgy and not being mindful and my son is whistling loudly to his birds, the sound is irritating and I snap at him to be quiet, please! If I’m calm and mindful of my son’s beautiful gift, when I hear that same exact whistling it is a beautiful sound that is precious for the very gift of breath he has to whistle. I had read a chapter about this the night before, which is why I caught myself. This was a very good lesson for me in how much our mental state colors how we react to experience and how much being mindful of them and shifting from unhealthy to healthy mental states can change the way we experience life.

This is exactly what Jack Kornfield writes about, very well, in the fourth chapter of his book, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology. I’ve been reading through this book more slowly than normal because it is not a book to skim through, but to read and meditate on and practice. In fact, at the end of each chapter, he offers a suggestion on how to practice what he just talked about. I find this very helpful because it takes the ideology and words into actions. I have the tendency to gain a lot of head knowledge but then struggle to apply those things towards active, mindful living.

Anyway, in this chapter, Kornfield starts out with the basic understanding that in Western culture we tend to think about achieving happiness by “changing our external environment to fit our wishes” (49). This doesn’t work because no matter what we do in our life, pain comes with pleasure, loss comes with gain, and blame comes with praise. He also sets up the the understanding that our experience of life is less about actual experiences than about the “states of mind with which we meet it”. Now this got my attention because this is a big part of my personal ideology—we cannot usually control the things that happen to us, so we are really only responsible for how we react to them.

The gist of it is that we are responsible for becoming aware of what our current mental state is and shifting it away from worry, fear, envy, closed-mindedness and etc. that arise from the unhealthy states to the healthy states of wisdom, love, and generosity. In doing so, we open ourselves up to more honest and real experiences that are easier to deal with than through our buildup of a lifetime of conditioned responses.

Anyway, I wrote this essay as a way to process and really solidify the teachings and if you are interested in the more summary aspects of the chapter–click on the “continue” that follows.

I thought it was funny how the author noted that “the Buddha was a list maker” as he came from an oral tradition and pointed to the Two Truths, the Three Characteristics, the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, the Five Hindrances, the Six Perfections, the Seven Factors of Enlightenment, and the Eightfold Path, and etc. True to form, the issue of consciousness is not without its list, but I was really impressed with Kornfield’s process of explanation—it worked really well (the table was very helpful). It all boiled down to the fourth principle of Buddhist psychology: Recognize the mental states that fill consciousness. Shift from unhealthy states to healthy ones.

To that end, the lists:

Three-part system of colorings of consciousness:
1.     Impressions received through our 6 sense doors: sights, sounds, tastes, smells, touch/bodily perceptions, and thoughts/feelings (sixth sense).
2.     The moments of consciousness that receive each sense experience: eye, ear, tongue, nose, body, and mind consciousness.
These first two parts tie together, obviously, but I found it interesting that Buddhism incorporates the sixth sense of of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions. “With the six senses and their individual consciousnesses we construct our reality” (52).
3.    Qualities of mind called mental states such as worry, pride, and excitement. These mental states come in between the sense doors and the moments of consciousness and color them positive or negative—or rather, healthy or unhealthy. There are 13 mental states. Seven common mental states: memory, stability, pleasant feeling tone, unpleasant feeling tone, will, life force, and recognition. There are 3 unhealthy states: grasping, aversion, and delusion; and there are 3 healthy states: wisdom, love, and generosity. (There are even more listings to be had for the responses that the unhealthy/healthy states give rise to)

So we get impressions or information through our six senses, but as he notes, everything gets impressions, even a corpses is having sound waves bounce off it, wind blowing across the skin, and so on. Consciousness, though, allows us to take those impressions and process them. However, smack in between the experiences and the conscious processing of the experience is a mental state filter that takes clear information at one end and changes its color, its makeup before sending it on. It really is a fascinating process!

Just to reiterate the conclusion: We are responsible for becoming aware of what our current mental state is and shifting it away from worry, fear, envy, closed-mindedness and etc. that arise from the unhealthy states to the healthy states of wisdom, love, and generosity. In doing so, we open ourselves up to more honest and real experiences that are easier to deal with than through our buildup of a lifetime of conditioned responses.