Is the Mind a Sixth Sense?

As everybody knows, the five conventional senses are sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Their associated organs–eyes, ears, nose, tongue and the neuronal receptors located in the skin and other parts of the body–provide sensory signals, both from outside and within the body, that are transmitted to the brain where they are perceived and processed, or ignored.

Seeing is what our eyes do, smelling is what our nose does, and so on. “The mind is what our brain does,” says Canadian-American evolutionary scientist Steven Pinker. This sentence needs further qualification: The mind is what our brain does–more precisely, what our prefrontal cortex does–and the brains of other animals do not. Mind is the complex of elements in our brain that feels, perceives, wills, remembers, reasons and is conscious of the self that owns that brain.

Is the mind a sixth sense? The Buddha thinks so. The answer to this question invites controversy since there is no agreement on the number of ‘senses’ we possess. However, the statement that the mind is indeed a sense implies that, as the other five, it is also a biological phenomenon and a product of evolution by natural selection.

Regarding its biological nature, says the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle, “minds are not ghosts harnessed to bodily machines”. There are no separate workings of the mind and workings of the body. Without metaphysical interventions, mind 'occurs’ in the brain, which is a part of the body.

With respect to evolution, the five traditional senses preceded by eons the hypothetical sixth one. Likely smell was first. Millions of years ago, one of the things that rudimentary live entities did, besides copying themselves, was learning to perceive the odors of the molecules they would seize for their organisms; current plants, which lack sensory organs, do smell one another.

In an extremely slow sequence, living beings were able to taste, touch, hear and see. Then, a few moments ago in the 3,500-million-year timeline of life, our hominid ancestors, able to ponder and recognize their existence, made their unexpected appearance. How could this happen?

At some point, as a result of genetic mutations, some distant ancestors developed a rudimentary consciousness the progress of which became an evolutionary reward to a number of qualities that favored survival.

In a thought experiment, Portuguese-American neurobiologist Antonio Damasio compares the potential for survival of two remote anthropoid apes, one with some elementary hints of a mental function, a bit of personal history or a very simple grasp of individuality, and a second one with no trace of mind, memory or sense of identity.

The first ape, when facing a certain threat, not only experienced fear and made instinctive fight-or-flight decisions, as would any mammal, but also he or she could recall previous similar circumstances and reproduce actions that had already proved helpful. The odds of survival of that first anthropoid were certainly higher than those of the second primate; every success of the latter, the ‘oblivious’ one, was exclusively random.

Whether or not a sense, it is clear that mental faculties, including the recognition of the self, are the result of evolution by natural selection; alternatives to this line of thought require metaphysical beliefs.

With no notion of the evolution of species, the Buddha is very specific about the material nature of the sense of identity. The Sage declares that “there is no supernatural expression in the body, the sensory signals, the perceptions, the mental formations (conditionings) or the consciousness of a human being”. Twenty four centuries later, naturalist Charles Darwin, the first person ever to speak about evolution and evolutionary psychology, shows how species transformed to reach modern man, the top bough of the hierarchy of life.

All our mental faculties, including the construction of our identity, are biological phenomena improved through time by natural selection. The acceptance of this fact puts our feet on the ground; this is what is important. The acceptance or rejection of the mind as a sixth sense is a secondary issue.

Atlanta, September 18, 2014

www.harmonypresent.com

Essential Self and Redundant Ego

The sense of identity or self is the union of aggregates (such as body, sensory signals, perceptions…) that constitutes the uniqueness of a person and manifests as continuity and consistency in the individual’s behavior. According to ‘orthodox’ Buddhism, suffering–anxiety and stress in modern terminology–originates in our sense of identity and results from our attachment to the meanings of ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’ and ‘myself’.  These words set excluding boundaries between each individual and the rest of the world.

Do we have to extinguish the self to eliminate suffering? No, ascetic renunciation is not a practical solution to anxiety or stress. Instead we need to get rid of the redundant ego, a more reasonable and viable alternative. What is redundant ego? Let us talk about the neuronal software that creates the self.

Our sense of identity is coded in the prefrontal cortex of our brain as zillions of not-yet-understood neuronal instructions.  A fraction of this huge number contains the basic software code that we need for an effective and serene life; this portion sets rules for what we call essential self.

Somewhere else there also exists a big chunk of instructions that handles all our undesirable conditionings and habits–the harmful formations in Buddhist terminology. Such harmful formations generate the cravings that lead to greed and addictions, the aversions that cause panics and hatred, and the biases that blind our understanding; they make up our redundant ego. If we are to end suffering, we must inhibit all harmful mental formations, that is, we must turn off their associated neural instructions.

The redundant ego grows out of behaviors, originally innocuous but that swell out of control, such as the desire for that extra food we should not eat, the dislike for that person that failed us, or the unconditional support to our doctrinarian affiliations. The essential self, on the other hand, is the reduced, downsized self that remains once the harmful formations have been silenced, that is, what is left out from our inflated self once we suppress the redundant portion.

Once we have eliminated our redundant ego, the essential self takes over our life. Then, effortlessly, without any struggle to complete specific goals or reach certain destinations, we will peacefully flow with our existence.

Michelangelo, the great Italian Renaissance artist, believed that images already existed in the blocks of marble as if they were locked in there. Before the first cut, he thought, the sculptor should discover the idea within and then proceed to remove the excess material. Michelangelo, so easy for him, just chipped away from the marble what was not statue.

In the same manner, our inflated self, jam-packed with harmful formations, is like a huge stone, very, very heavy; our essential self, our own piece of art, lies somewhere within that rock. If we are to find it, as the artist suggests for marble, we also have to remove the excess. We do possess the skills to chip away the portion that is not really us; the endeavor–just ask Michelangelo–does require much perseverance.

When we are done, we will experience our own existence and everything else very differently. Our essential self comes out spontaneously after silencing our harmful mental formations and removing our redundant ego. We do not find our essential self through reasoning dissections or belief systems because these depend upon the mental formations that already make up our inflated self.

Neither can we rely on masters, spiritual teachers or gurus. Some sages might point the right direction but nobody can steer us toward our essential self; we have to find it by ourselves. We do not develop, build or refine our essential self; it is already in there. Neither can we come across it through intellectual gimmicks; the process is about quieting mental noises and unlearning–deprogramming, erasing–harmful mental habits.

Once Michelangelo removed the superfluous fragments in the blocks of marble, the harmony of his Pietà, his David or his Moses was magnificent. When we cut down the surplus material of our inflated self’s big stone, right there, within us, our essential self will manifest, vibrating in inner harmony. We just have to remove the unnecessary.

Adapted from ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation’

Atlanta, September 7, 2014
www.harmonypresent.com