The properties of the mind that neuroscientists are deciphering today, were prefigured by Buddha over 2,500 years ago. He arrived at them through the practice of meditation. What he experienced was astonishing ..what he taught was revolutionary. The mind, he discovered, is not a reliable record of events ..it’s more like a second-hand storyteller. He saw impressions arriving, already interpreted by the act of observing ..then disappearing so quickly, all he had left was a feeling that something happened. He realized that he never got to see events as they actually occur ..and this was his great insight. The futher he looked ..the more he realized that nature was composed largely of energy ..and all he ever experienced were the fragments that his senses were tuned to receive ..followed by the re-creation his mind was pre-disposed to perform ..before everything got cleared away and a new cycle of impression-formation began. This doesn’t sound much different than the neuroscientist I hear describing the simple act of perception as a process of ‘active construction’ ..or claiming that concept-integration happens so quickly ..we rarely catch an ‘unaltered glimpse’ of reality.
2 comments:
This is very interesting, thanks for sharing more. So, you're saying that everything we experience is always calculated/interpreted by our conditioning... and that each perception is merely a re-creation? Wow... you keep sharing stuff that I sorta knew, in a certain sense (conditioning) but you word it in such a way that gives added thought, with knew perception to fiddle around with (re-creating). This would lead one to believe that we, then, create everything (create our own realities)... nothing is pure and left unfettered by our busy and harried mind.
That’s right. Neuroscientists would probably say that the pathways of the brain .. in addition to the influence of conditioning ..contribute to conscious experience. It’s hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
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