In todayand#8217;s Dharmabyte, we continue to explore the theme of Karma by taking a deeper look into the and#8220;Characteristics of Mind.and#8221; by Dhammadina. What are those five characteristics? Clarity, Cognition, Momentary, Conditioned, Karma. Beautiful and accessible this little Dharma nugget shows us clearly how habitual karma manifest through our mental events. Selected from the popular talk and#8220;What is Mind?and#8220;
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
Characteristics of Mind
[music] Dharma Bites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you and happy listening. [music] So perhaps we should return to our question, what is mind? So mind is the perceiving subject that cannot be known as an object. Perhaps we don't really need to go into whether those objects exist or not as it were, but you can pursue that if you wish. But there are distinguishing characteristics of mind that are traditionally used to help us to know the mind, so I'm going to run through these. So first of all, the characteristic of clarity, now this doesn't mean sharp and focused or crisp. In a way it's the kind of mind described by the shepherd in the shepherd's search for mind. It's mind which is indefinable, ungraspable, lacking in definition, infinitely flexible, non-material, space-like nature of consciousness. So it's devoid of colour, shape, form and dimension. It's transparent, mysterious. It cannot be objectified as this or that. It cannot be measured or weighed or defined by categories. So this is very much like the shepherd coming back and saying, mind is lucid, limpid, ungraspable, illuminating, etc. So it's infinitely malleable, shapeable and fluid. Nothing intrinsically defines it as this or that. There is nothing it cannot be, mind is unbounded. So that's what's called clarity. And I think sometimes in a formless meditation practice when you're not focusing on an object, you have that sense of your mind, don't you? It goes wherever it goes. It's got no limits, it's got no boundaries. And you can do that in a kind of quite ordinary way, just trying to have a sense of your mind as the space-like quality of your mind. This is a meditation practice that Kamla she has led some of us through on the retreat we were on, just to sit and contemplate the spacious nature of one's mind. It's a very interesting practice. One can take that further, of course, and develop it into the sort of blue skylight mind that we begin a visualization with. So it cannot be defined in its essential nature. So the second characteristic of mind is cognition. So mind consists in knowing its object. And we won't analyze at this point whether objects exist or not. You can't have mind without an object. Mind is that which knows and is aware and conscious and always conscious in terms of an object. However subtle that object might be. So it's always relational. Mind is a relational term, relational to an object and vice versa. So we can't experience anything independent of our experience as it were. Sometimes we think of mind as an independent entity, but it really isn't if we pursue our reflections on mind. Subject and object are always in relationship to one another. An object is an object for a subject and a subject is a subject for an object. So clarity and then cognition. The third characteristic is that mind is momentary. So this is true of all Buddhist philosophy. Mind is momentary. Mind is ever-changing. It's never the same as the continuous flux. It's quite hard for us to think about. So we tend to think of it in discrete moments as it were. And in the tradition, a mind moment, a consciousness moment is said to be one sixty-fourth of the snapping of a finger, or one billionth of a flash of lightning. So the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest thing you could possibly think about is a mind moment. And there is a sutra in the parley canning called consciousness of process only, where the Buddha takes the task, the camera of the person's name, but they think that mind is a sort of entity and the Buddha is pointing out that it's a process. So perhaps it's more accurate to talk in terms of minds, minds which arise and pass away. There's a sequence of minds as it were. One mind moment being the occasion for the next mind moment. So I think we tend to think of mind in the West as more like a camera which it presented to it and the camera remains the same. The mind remains the same. I think we have to sort of get into a different mindset as it were to think about mind as a process. And of course the fact that mind is a process, mind is momentary, is connected with the six senses. So it's not that there is one mind, a series of discrete minds having discrete experiences. There's information coming in through all the five senses. Each sense giving rise to its own consciousness, so ear consciousness, eye consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, mind consciousness. So this just gives us a sort of sense of the mind being momentary. And then the mind is conditioned. So each mind or mind moment is dependent on conditions, the conditions of the previous mind moment. So this involves an element of volition of karma and karma of apaka. So mind has the tendency to reproduce itself and keep on the same track. I mean we know this from our own experience, don't we? Mental events tend to cohere and create character and style. So our minds tend to function in accordance with habit. If you're unskillful, we tend to repeat that. And the more repetitions we do, the easier it is to do it again and again. So we dig channels for ourselves. This again is very clearly expressed in the dhamma pada. Should a man once do evil, let him not make a habit of it, let him not set his heart upon it, painful is the heaping up of evil. There is also the opposite verse. I haven't got that written down, but should a man once do good, let him make a habit of it? For doing it says something like, let him set his heart upon it, happy is the heaping up of good. So habit, we tend to think of habit as a negative word, don't we? But you could see it as a neutral word and then if it's unskillful actions, then obviously it becomes unskillful. So at the very least unskillful habits are routine. They're worse, they're compulsive and addictive. So let a man, should a man once do evil, let him not make a habit of it, let him not set his heart upon it, painful is the setting up of evil because that's digging a channel deeper and deeper in our experience and it becomes easier and easier to follow that line of least resistance. But habit can also be seen as positive in terms of a positive momentum of creative discipline. So it's interesting that habitual karma is one of the four main types of karma and I think it's the most important one perhaps, you've got weighty karma, maybe rare in your experience. You've got death proximate karma, which you're only going to have it death. You've got residual karma, which seems to be sort of indeterminate, and you've got habitual karma. So the things you do most often have the greatest effect upon us. The things we do again and again and reflect upon. So it's important to set up positive momentum, positive habits to dig new channels for our behaviour, in line with the ten precepts. And again the dhamma pada expresses this. Irrigators draw off the waters, fletures straighten arrows, carpenters shape wood, righteous men discipline themselves. So we're trying to re-channel our mental events from habitual unskillful channels into creative positive channels. So the mind can be characterised by clarity, cognition, it's momentary, it's involved with the six senses, and it involves karma and karma vipaka. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]