Having seen that some scientists take a more expansive view of cognition and life as a whole, says Phil Becque, we are now going to move onto some ideas in Buddhism that may illuminate some of the relationships between mind, cognition, consciousness, perception, brain and matter.

 

We are going to look at an idea known as the 'Ten Worlds' and a concept known as 'The Nine Consciousnesses' along with the previously mentioned 'Oneness of Body and Mind'. With these under our belt we will be able to understand the subtle interplay of the many different aspects of being human.

The basic idea behind the Ten Worlds is that our life state is very dynamic, rapidly changing from moment to moment. For the technically minded a moment is defined in Buddhist writings as '1/65 of a finger snap' or 65 moments in approximately 8 ms (8 one thousandths of a second) see diagram below:

So a moment lasts approximately 123us (123 millionths of a second) – which is equivalent to 8,125 moments per second. As a matter of interest; a frequency of 8,125 Hz is well within the human hearing range which goes from roughly 40Hz to about 16 KHz (16,000 Hz). The idea that our life state can fluctuate that rapidly comes as a bit of a shock to some people, but it is well within reasonable physical bounds. And it is worth bearing in mind that we can be in the same life state for several contiguous moments. However, this does imply that our conscious mind might struggle to keep up with these rapid changes and hence we sometimes lack awareness of how our life state is changing. One of the benefits of our Buddhist practice of chanting Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo is that one can become more aware of ones own life state and particularly the one we have a tendency to return to. More on this later.

The Ten Worlds describe our changing moods and feelings. They comprise the following life states with a few personal attributes :

Hell: Suffering, Pain, Rage bordering on self destruction

Hunger: Wanting, Desire, Longing for, in the extreme case manifest Greed

Anger: Arrogant, Irregular, Truculent, Aggressive

Animality: Condescending, Superior, Inferior, Obsequious

Humanity: Rational, Logical, Balanced, Fair,

Rapture: Irrational exuberance, Pleasure, Ecstatic

Learning: Acquire new information, Understanding grows,

Absorption: A world of my own, partial enlightenment.

Bodhisattva: Concerned about others, to replace suffering with joy

Buddhahood, Courage, Compassion, Wisdom, Energetic, Creative

A great article here on The Ten Worlds:

http://www.sgi-uk.org/index.php/buddhism/tenworlds

Please follow this link for a short video on this topic:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukPEJ3ci4Ys

Because each of the first nine states have a positive and negative aspect Buddhists are generally non judgemental about how people subconsciously choose their life state. Because it is possible to create value from any life state, depending on how it is used, we arrive at the idea that we can become a Buddha as we are; if we re-direct the negative aspects of a particular life state into something far more positive.

From the viewpoint of life as a series moments, we can see that it is plausible that each life state has its' own perception and hence its' own logic. For example if you are in the life state of Hunger you tend towards a high risk/reward ratio to satisfy your acquisitive nature – getting your hits of Rapture – on a regular basis - albeit temporarily . You can see the upside very clearly, because you want to feel close to the object of desire, so you have a tendency to ignore the downside. Even when things go spectacularly wrong, the old habit is lurking in your subconscious, the latent, behaviour patterns just waiting for the right stimulus to set the whole – hunger/rapture cycle off again.

In Hell the perception is that you are trapped and that adds to the feeling of powerlessness which causes yet more grief. The logic of Hell is - that it doesn't matter what you do - because what ever you do - you will continue to suffer. This logic also compels you to adopt strategies of pain relief – to make it more bearable - so that you can stay there longer. Small wonder it has come to be thought of as the land of eternal damnation!

In both of these examples we can see a powerful circularity at work and I want to draw your attention to what Maturana and Varela said previously about living systems: They go to explain that in a living system "the product of its operation is its own organisation." In other words the very same process that sustains life is also responsible for sustaining our perception and logic – or in short - for how we think and why as they say 'we never learn'. As we all have a particular life state that we 'feel most comfortable in', it becomes obvious why we find it so hard to change our behaviour.

At this point it may be instructive to look at another branch of science which is commonly known as 'Chaos' and made famous by the popular science writer James Gleick in a book of the same name. In that book, Gleick describes how, work initially done by weather forecaster, Edward Lorenz showed very odd behaviour. Lorenz was working on mathematical models to predict the weather over large parts of the USA in 1961. He was working with a modest set of equations and did not expect anything out of the ordinary. As was common in those days he would set his computer up with the equations and starting values and then set the machine going to do all the calculations and eventually produce a printout of the results some hours later. One day he decided to duplicate part of a previous run – so he typed in the results obtained roughly half way through, set the machine going and waited for the new run to finish.

Reviewing the results of the new run, he at first thought that he must have made a mistake, but checking his data he had merely rounded the numbers up to one part in one thousand. He had expected that a small difference in input would make a small difference in output. But as it turned out he had discovered a fundamental property of his system of equations: they were highly non linear and small differences in initial conditions make a big difference to the values calculated many iterations later. This became know as 'The Butterfly Effect' because this property implied that something as vanishing small as the deviation caused by a butterfly beating it's wings can result in large scale differences over time periods of several days.

Another unexpected property of these equations was the discovery that graphic visualization of the results lead to similar, but not identical, patterns forming with special properties. This became know firstly as the Lorenz attractor and then in a more general class as a 'Strange Attractor'. See image below:

It is quite fitting that the image formed by plotting a lot of calculated points actually resembles a butterflies wings, though strictly speaking that is somewhat coincidental. However I do want to draw your attention to the two dark areas around which most of the action takes place. Those dark areas act like magnets keeping the values within strict limits, though at no time are any two values the same – there is literally an infinite number of values that this system of equations could generate given time.

Now I would like you to compare the situation we had with life as a series of moments; but where we are trapped as it were, by our dominant state of life, which acts like a strange attractor keeping our behaviour in a similar pattern from one year to the next. The explanation that Buddhism offers for our habitual nature is based on another concept called 'The Nine Consciousnesses' – another great article here for you:

http://www.sgi-uk.org/index.php/buddhism/9thconsciousness

You can see here that the role of our karma – which is the accumulation of millions of actions - effectively forms a cosmic strange attractor that keeps our lives operating within well defined limits, though we never do exactly the same thing with each iteration.

To break free from these limits requires extraordinary power and where to find this power will be the topic of the next article.