There was a distinct moment in my early Abhidharma research when I perceived a detailed correspondence between a Buddhist and a materialistic neuropsychological description of minute steps of human perceptual processes. Specifically, 17 steps of a full visual perception in Abhidharma commentary lined up almost exactly …
The importance of understanding memory includes investigating the flipside of the process, or ways the mind creates and utilizes amnesia. Both are active processes of consciousness that move in directions that are useful given different states and different situations. In the Western world, memory has come to mean the retention …
The perspective of perspective reminds us that our consciousness is framed as the living beings that we are, and as Shodo Harada said, we cannot get around that fact, but we can sometimes, in our best and most vivid moments, feel that an unbounded capacity is contained here …
Papañca evolves from the smallest moments of sensory experience, but acquires a life of its own and then takes over sensory experience as a tool of its own perpetuation. When a sense impression impinges on consciousness, a minute binary emotional reaction occurs, which leads to some bit of perceptual construction, then reasoning. Without some awareness …
The Abhidharma is vital in this way because it explains everything we can experience without needing to refer to a self or personal agent at all. Complex emotions and other psychological experiences that we knit into a self are composed of mental factors that surround the quick, basic action of consciousness touching on an object. …
The Abhidharma Helps The Self-Concept Feel Useless Read More »
Because the early Buddhists could see psychological processes with such finesse, they could see time processes microscopically and astronomically compared to us. Our scale of psychological and time perception is conveyed in our language. We describe thoughts and feelings and moods that are usually on the scale of minutes. We can take this down by …