Mind, Defilement, and the Heart

The workings of the mind vary from one being to another. Even between individual humans, mental activity is shaped differently depending on hormones, genetic factors, memory, and much else, and it changes across different phases and situations in a single life. Setting aside questions of self and heart for a moment, this mental process alone can vary greatly from person to person.

From Sensation to Perception

How does seeing or feeling something actually arise within us? When something is sensed through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, or mental faculty, the mind processes it through perception via an editing-like process. Take the physical eye as an example: a healthy eye can only gather light-signals, focus them, and send them via nerves to the brain: it cannot, by itself, construct an image for you. It is the combined process of sensation and perception in the brain that gives rise to the faculty we call sight. From that moment, the message concerning that image begins communicating not only within the brain but throughout the whole body. That image is felt by the entire system. This process happens with such speed that, moment to moment, it occurs without your even noticing. It happens continuously, arising not only from what comes through the eye but from all the other senses, ceaselessly, throughout the whole system that is your body. It is an extraordinarily fast process of data communication and exchange.

So what, then, does "mano" (mental faculty) actually refer to? You cannot really separate it out from eye, ear, and brain and call it a distinct thing called "mano." This entire connected process of data is what is meant by "mano." And what, then, are "dhamma" (mental objects)? What arises as the output of this process is called dhamma. That is what "mano pubbangama dhamma" refers to.

Why Each Mind Differs

This mental process, even concerning the same object, can unfold very differently from one person to another. What that person constructs from it comes out of whatever already exists within them. However new or unfamiliar a piece of sensory information may be, it is still assembled out of what already exists within a person. Past experiences, the shape of one's language, memory, tendencies: many such factors contribute to this variation in processing.

All this information is contained within the mind. But something more, a firm grip on certain matters, can lodge deeply as consciousness beyond the mind. Even when the physical body is gone, such things persist as consciousness.

Feeling, Clinging, and Where Defilement Actually Begins

Whatever is sensed and perceived in this way then becomes a knowing. Take, for example, an occasion where you recognise a flower. The moment you identify it, a knowing that "this is a flower" arises: this can also be called the consciousness of the flower. The process does not stop there. It becomes a kilesa (defilement), that is, a continuity, because the knowing gets converted into a feeling. That feeling can be pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

Through feeling, something gets acquired, retained. It becomes consciousness. The claim of entitlement over that feeling is what we call the sense of self (mamattva). If any harm is sensed to that self in any way, conflict arises. It grows fond of whatever benefits the self, and averse to whatever harms it. Because of this, an expectation forms about each such matter: "let it be this way, let it not be that way."

That is where feeling becomes kilesa. Mere liking or disliking is not, in itself, kilesa. How so? Many people prefer a cold drink on a hot day. On a cold day, many prefer to be somewhere warm. When eating, most people prefer a certain level of saltiness in their food. If it becomes too salty or too bland, they dislike it. These things are not kilesa. Some people like solitude and freedom. Those are not kilesa either. The problem lies in going toward claiming entitlement over the feeling. If one can see it clearly, without going toward claiming entitlement, there is no kilesa there.

Recognition, whether true or false, need not be turned into a problem simply because that's how the mind naturally works. If someone feels they "know" or feel they "don't know" something, they don't yet know the mind itself. Both of these judgements are delusions of the mind. What gets manufactured (the dhamma) depends on the process by which the mind perceives things. Not getting caught by this, not becoming enslaved to it: that is what is needed.

How Karma Enters

Not knowing that the knowing itself ceases at that very moment is what causes it to be seized and held on to. And that is what gives rise to the sense of self, kilesa, and existence, life after life. Where does karma enter into this? It enters together with the sense of self. Each moment, upon gaining some experience, the mind's activity is what divides that experience into "internal" and "external." This is a basic-level division the mind makes, from early childhood, for the sake of self-protection.

Mistaking natural processes that existed externally as one's own, and moving toward claiming them, causes one to become newly, and repeatedly, centred within, and absorbed into, the relative, entangled process of evolution. The sense of self is a natural process, occurring in nature, that one imposes upon oneself. The reaction to this becomes woven into that relative, entangled process of evolution as personal karma.

Through this, separate, self-centred processes of relative, entangled evolution begin to arise. What we call personal karmic results is exactly this phenomenon. But it remains part of the overall flow of the universe's entangled process. Through this, a being becomes subject to both the collective and personal outcomes of that relative, entangled process of evolution. Because of these reactions, gaining and losing arise. This is also called becoming caught within the law of karma. This overall process, occurring without one's knowing, is what appears to you as "heart" (hitha/citta). What appears to you as "the world" is really your own heart. This is precisely why the heart is said to be delusion. Sometimes what's called "the mind racing" refers to exactly this nature.

Thoughts as a Different Matter

Thoughts refer to something else entirely. They arise and pass away. Thoughts are how the activity of citta-force becomes noticeable to us, surfacing in a way we can sense. Even though thoughts arise constantly, whether we notice them depends on the workings of the mind. Sometimes it feels to us that we have no thoughts: that's not because thoughts are absent, but because the mind's activity has not turned to notice them.

For someone with a sense of self, mind and heart never appear as distinct. Put plainly, one perceives forms externally as separate from oneself only relative to one's own self. Without the sense of self, mental activity does not appear at all. If a person understood that whatever they hear, see, understand, and grasp is understood the way it is because of the nature of the mind, many problems would resolve. It's like this: a person wearing green-tinted glasses sees things in green. A person wearing red-tinted glasses sees things in red. If both know that what they're seeing is coloured by the glasses they're wearing, conflicts and disagreements between them lessen. The "glasses" we see through were shaped by how our minds developed since childhood. With effort, one can change those glasses.

There can be people whose sense of self is entirely gone, yet who lack this kind of understanding of the mind. There can equally be people who, because of their sense of self, cannot grasp this at all.

Consider those who have travelled the wholesome path and been freed from samsara: for stream-enterers and once-returners, this difference is felt fairly clearly, because that range is still within reach of the mind. But for a non-returner or an arahant, the spiritual transformations occurring are almost beyond what the mind can perceive at all.

The Danger of a Convenient Label

Having understood the underlying processes of mind, sense-bases, karma, consciousness, and the sense of self, one could, purely for convenience, use the word "heart" as a summary label for the whole of this. But if, without knowing any of this, one simply treats all of it as a mental concept, there is no Dhamma at all in that: no dhamma-quality guiding one to see the underlying truth for oneself. It becomes merely a convenient covering imposed within the mind. And within that, the path to understanding truth gets closed off.

Whatever you understand within the mind is, in the end, a conclusion. Looking at this openly, one can see this truth. Without a genuine spiritual transformation, everything you feel as "understanding" is simply a mentally constructed conclusion. Even having constructed such conclusions, whether or how each person acts on them depends on their own cognitive abilities. Among these, those with higher-order cognitive abilities bring these matters into extended discussions and various exercises through analysis, evaluation, synthesis, and creation. But even sophisticated mental philosophies produced this way do not amount to Buddha's teaching: because Buddha's teaching refers specifically to what has been made manifest to Buddha-wisdom.

Because of a lack of understanding of mind, heart, karma, and self, and because these underlying laws are not known, all of this can appear to someone either as "heart" or as mere concept. But that is a conclusion imposed within the mind. The mind now begins operating according to a program constructed on that basis.

You might now ask: isn't it possible, though, that things actually do function exactly as the mind's own conclusions suggest? But theoretical inquiry is concerned with how a thing comes to be the way it is. Suppose you don't know the theory and technology behind computers: what you'd perceive would just be a small, surface-level portion and a handful of uses. To such a person, a computer might appear to be nothing more than a monitor. But that isn't true. A separate mechanism operates to produce images on the monitor and sound from speakers. You can now see the significant shortfall in describing computers and the internet purely by their monitor, without understanding the underlying technology and theory. Understanding a being's total mechanism, and instead treating the whole thing merely as "heart," or "concept," or "view": that is much like describing the entire workings of the internet and computers, ignoring everything else, by calling it "the monitor."

This misunderstanding can close off the possibility of someone's genuine spiritual transformation. A problem in your computer or internet connection cannot be solved by looking only at the monitor. Only a wisdom that knows the entire mechanism can see the way to a solution regarding it. Buddha-wisdom is exactly this kind of wisdom, applied to a being as a whole. The guidance that comes through it is not mere mental reasoning or philosophy. Within it, guidance is constructed out of the underlying laws governing the entire universe and being. This is something a fully self-enlightened Buddha does, by drawing on Buddha-wisdom and the wisdom gained through cultivating the bases of psychic power. Within seekers of liberation on that path, the qualities of Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha are present, and those qualities grow.

If you frame everything as merely heart, concept, or view, the mind may find temporary relief...